Caravan of No Despair Read online

  “Come on, slow poke!” I yelled at the limping pirate lagging behind me. I looked both ways and then sped across the cul-de-sac, swinging my plastic pumpkin basket.

  Suddenly I heard Mom calling from the doorway, her voice uncharacteristically shrill: “No running!” I stopped in my tracks as if struck by a stun gun. Something was very wrong here. Soon afterward, Matty took his last ride to the hospital.

  “Can we have the siren on?” he asked our mother, who sat with him in the back, stroking his hair. Mom leaned forward and whispered in the ear of the EMT, who had been trying to keep things quiet so they wouldn’t scare their young patient. He tapped the driver on the shoulder, who smiled and flipped the switch. The siren wailed as they careened down the Long Island Expressway.

  It has taken my mother forty-five years to fill us in on the details of Matty’s dying: the day of the diagnosis; my grandfather’s consultations with the specialists; the names of each doctor on Matty’s team and what their role was in his care; how Mom was in a phone booth talking to the babysitter when she saw one young physician come outside after being with Matty and lean against a wall and weep; how my parents brought in Matty’s record player toward the end and played Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band—Matty’s favorite music—at full volume so it would penetrate his muffled hearing, and a nurse came in and snapped at them to turn it down; how when he could no longer speak they improvised a means of communication so that he could spell out what he wanted through a series of weak squeezes of their hands and what he wanted was Jell-O and this made them very happy.

  “It was as if there was a jagged precipice around my memory of that time,” my mother says. “I couldn’t get too close. I couldn’t stand it.”

  For Mom, each telling seems to soften that edge, and she grows bolder. And with every story, a little more of her pain slips into that abyss and is absorbed. It turns out the void is not empty after all. It is filled with love.

  When Matty died, I got his stuffed dog, whom I named Cuddles. By the time Matty had received this particular toy in the hospital, he was too sick to play with it, so when I inherited Cuddles, he was nearly new. His fur was tan, he had floppy ears and big brown eyes, and he smelled like grass after a rain shower. Cuddles became my message in a bottle. My personal interpreter of the secret language of death. A window to the Other Side. I had him until I was twenty-eight and adopted my first child, and then adopted a husky puppy to keep her company. The live dog tore apart the stuffed dog, and I could not save him.

  3

  ODYSSEY

  For a few years after my brother’s death, my parents tried to hold their balance as the world shifted beneath their feet. My dad started and lost several businesses and increased his alcohol consumption in proportion to his fiscal failures. Even as my father folded in on himself, my mother hurled herself into activity. She started a gallery in our basement, representing a series of emerging artists determined to defy accepted conceptions of beauty. I had to admit, they defied mine.

  At age thirty-three, Mom decided to go back to school, racing through an associate’s degree at the local community college and then enrolling in the newly established Stonybrook campus of the State University of New York, where she studied philosophy, focusing on alternative lifestyles. We began to take family vacations to some of the communes that were proliferating along the Eastern Seaboard, ostensibly to do research for a book my mom was planning to write about communal living. But my parents were getting ideas.

  One of those ideas caught fire on a summer day at the beach and burned down what was left of the landscape of our old life.

  We had won a family membership to the Long Island Beach Club in a raffle for our local library. My parents were big supporters of the library. We all had library cards before we had even learned to read, and three years in a row I had won the library-sponsored contest for the elementary school student who read the most books over summer vacation. With the money donated to memorialize my brother, my parents commissioned my mother’s brilliantly talented art teacher, an alcoholic Holocaust survivor named Vivian, to create an abstract bronze sculpture of the Pieta in front of the Wantagh Public Library.

  “Mary was a Jewish mother, too!” Vivian had once shouted, always ready for a fight. “And Jesus was a Jewish boy!”

  As we sat on the beach that day, taking advantage of our free pass, surrounded by middle-class families with their shiny new beach stuff and appropriate attire, I was struck by how out of place we were.

  For one thing, our food was weird. While regular families withdrew bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread from their Igloo ice chests, we ate Deaf Smith peanut butter and honey on slabs of homemade whole wheat bread, and carried our food from the car in hand-woven baskets. Other mothers wore one-piece gingham bathing suits with demure skirts. Ours wore a red bandana as a halter top and a bikini bottom she must have had since high school; it was apparently once white and now blended in with the clamshells scattered around us. Dad used an old necktie as a headband around his long black hair, and one leg of his blue-jean shorts was cut longer than the other. While other families reclined on beach chairs with matching umbrellas, we sprawled upon an Indian bedspread.

  Amy and Roy could almost pass for ordinary children as they played in the sand, as long as you didn’t know that Roy, with his oversized t-shirt, long brown hair, enormous green eyes, and thick black lashes, was actually Amy’s brother, not her sister. Their beach pail was cracked, and they dug with a wooden spoon instead of a plastic shovel. Every time Amy filled her bucket and turned it over, pressing the molded sand carefully onto the beach at her feet, Roy knocked it down. Amy would groan and Roy would cheer. They found this game inexplicably entertaining.

  I shook my head in contempt and went back to my book: Harriet the Spy. Did I ever get on my big brother’s nerves as much as these two annoyed me? I doubted it. I began glossing over all the times Matty stormed into his room and slammed the door to get away from me. I recast us as replicas of Jem and Scout Finch, united against racism and injustice, determined to liberate the enslaved and embrace the Boo Radleys of this world. Until cancer struck down my hero and left me to fend for myself.

  It was a perfect East Coast summer day. My parents lay on the beach as if in a trance, lulled by the high sun and low tide. Suddenly my mother sat up, turned to my father, and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Okay.” My father shrugged and began to gather up the towels.

  “No, I mean New York. Suburbia. This.” She swept the crowded beach with her hand, bangles jingling.

  “Far fucking out,” Dad said. And a light that had gone out in his eyes sometime between Matty’s diagnosis and death began to glow again and spread across his face.

  By New Year’s Day of the following year, 1973, we were gone.

  My parents sold the house and, in keeping with their newfound Zen sensibilities, gave away almost everything we owned—heirloom jewelry and silver, an extensive art collection, toys and games, clothing, linens, and kitchenware—and dropped off the last of Matty’s things at the Salvation Army. They bought a four-door red GMC pickup truck with a cab-over camper and a “Good Sam Club” sticker on the back window that I desperately wanted to remove because I thought it made us look like Republicans, but that my father insisted would prevent too much scrutiny from the authorities. Apparently my father anticipated some potentially illegal activity.

  We piled in and set out on a road trip that would take us from Miami Beach through the Texas heartland, from the Gulf of Mexico to the jungles of the Yucatan, from the counterculture communities of Aspen and Mendocino to the art colony of Taos, where we settled at the foot of the sacred and temperamental Taos Mountain, who welcomed us home and also, like any good goddess, demanded her blood sacrifices.

  It was late January when we pulled onto the single-track sand road off the highway to Belize and headed toward the coast. We had been traveling for three weeks and were ready to get off the road. In her lap my mother ha
d a hand-sketched map that some fellow vagabonds had made for us at the Mayan Trailer Paradise in Mérida.

  “You can’t tell anyone else about this place,” Verna had said, handing Mom the directions to the secret beach in the state of Quintana Roo, where she and her husband, Rob, had been camping all winter.

  “Top secret,” Rob agreed. “The others made us swear we wouldn’t divulge the location.”

  “But you guys are an exception,” Verna hastened to add. “Who wants another scoop of ice cream?”

  We three kids held out our plastic bowls like Oliver.

  Earlier that day, after running into our family at the swimming pool and being invited to smoke a joint with my parents, the Canadian couple had reciprocated by bringing us all over to their campsite for fresh coconut ice cream after dinner, which Verna made in a hand-cranked ice cream maker under the awning outside their RV. We had never tasted anything so beautiful.

  The minute we turned onto the tiny jungle lane a few days later, we wondered if we had made a mistake. Our giant camper lumbered along, swaying precariously in the soft sand, enclosed on every side by thick foliage that ripped and fell as we passed. But there was nowhere to turn around, and the Canadians had warned us that it would seem like it took forever to get there and was worth the wait.

  We entered a dream. Time melted around the edges, our monkey chatter stilled, and the only sounds were the squeaking of the truck’s shocks and the trilling of a dozen varieties of tropical birds. And then, all of a sudden, the jungle broke open onto an expanse of luminous white beach, with the pale turquoise hues of the Caribbean just beyond. My father hit the brakes, jammed the clutch, and we stared in awe. He turned off the ignition, and we sat for a moment in stunned silence, then tumbled out of the truck from all sides like bees released from their hive. We were sighing, squealing, and silent, each according to their temperament.

  Roy ran straight for the water, and Amy followed. I ran after them to boss them around and make sure they didn’t get eaten by sea monsters, since we seemed to have entered a mythic realm where the inhabitants could not be merely human and the rules were unpredictable.

  We lived on that isolated Caribbean beach on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula for nearly six months, and we remained in a magical world the entire time. Looking back, I cannot distinguish what happened from what I imagined. Amy and I took long walks on the empty beach that led us into fairylands where driftwood logs turned into goddesses, and when we entered the sea, we became mermaids and swam with our long-lost mermaid sisters. Established quotidian rhythms gave way to a more spontaneous schedule: we slept when we were tired, woke when we were rested, and ate when we were hungry. My parents cooked over a campfire, and we wore little or no clothing. We pooped in a pit nestled in a jungle clearing, over which one of the few hippie travelers that passed through our personal paradise had built a tall toilet open-air seat we called “the throne.”

  We listened to the same albums over and over on the portable eight-track tape player: the Beatles’s Abbey Road, the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, the Moody Blues’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Amy and I painted Roy’s face with watercolors. I read to them from The Brown Fairy Book and The Purple Fairy Book and The Yellow Fairy Book, which carried us through our entire stay. And I sat alone on the beach for hours at a time, writing poetry in my sketchbook, which I illuminated with Magic Marker borders.

  We were almost, but not quite, the only gringos on the beach. Around a hundred yards up from our campsite was a thatched palapa inhabited by a young couple from Georgia. Ramón (well, his name was Ray, but everyone seemed to take on the Spanish version of their name down here) and Willie (easy to pronounce in any language) were both high-powered journalists working for a big-city paper in their old life, but had dropped out by their late twenties. They had already traveled around the world. They were in Turkey and Morocco before they came to Mexico. Whenever the weather was cool, Ramón wore his hand-woven jalaba from North Africa, which made him look like a Bedouin shaman. Willie was a sweetheart, but Ramón was a curmudgeon. Willie made us hushpuppies from the Bisquick she brought back from her last trip home to the States, fried to a golden crisp on the outside and fluffy white within, studded with tiny jewels of chopped onions. She also made banana cream pie with Nilla wafers and instant pudding mix. Food had become our big entertainment.

  Ramón didn’t speak much, and when he did, it was usually a sarcastic remark. He didn’t try to hide how pissed off he was that Rob and Verna had violated the pilgrims’ code and drawn a treasure map to his personal Shangri-La. His dislike of children was equally obvious. And four-year-old Roy, who seemed to have internalized all of that in utero trauma and become an uncontrollable bundle of fury, reinforced Ramón’s prejudice every chance he got.

  Each member of our family seemed to have a different response to our neighbor’s negative attitude. My mom pursed her lips in a kind of flirtatious pout and locked his gaze with hers. Dad turned away and lit another cigarette. Roy tried to smack him. Amy ignored him altogether. And my own eyes would fill with tears as I wondered why he had to be so mean. Mom thought it was because Ramón had polio when he was six and spent much of his childhood in an iron lung, and now one of his legs was thick and muscular and the other dangled from his hip like a rope he dragged along behind him.

  I was pretty sure that unless he was criticizing some insipid thing I accidentally said when I was nervous, Ramón did not even notice my existence. But on the morning of my twelfth birthday he surprised me with a gift. It was not wrapped, and it was not new. But it was clearly cherished: a well-worn copy of A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Inside the front cover Ramón had inscribed (in the artless scrawl of a preadolescent boy), “It’s possible that sometime you’ll be walking along beside a dike. If you have this book, you can roll it up and stick it in the hole and save the multitudes.”

  I read that collection of poems from beginning to end, and then from the end back to the beginning. Each piece felt like it had been written just for me, even when I didn’t understand the nuances of the Beat Generation. The only other birthday present I had received that day was an abalone bracelet from my parents. But after everyone took turns trying to clasp it around my wrist, it became clear that it was not going to fit. It was a child’s bracelet, and I was becoming a woman. The single person who seemed to notice this fact was a man I thought didn’t even know or care that I was alive. Instead, he recognized me as a serious poet.

  Which is what I became. A poet. And very, very serious.

  4

  DA NAHAZLI

  Although my parents’ parenting skills were disintegrating by the minute, they still placed a high priority on our education. So they chose to settle in the high desert village of Taos, New Mexico, primarily because it was home to Da Nahazli School, where children between the ages of four and fourteen did pretty much whatever they felt like. The philosophy here was that if you allow a child to go where their inner guidance directs them, they will know exactly what they need. Which didn’t always work out. My best friend, Tot, and I, for instance, loved to draw and paint and produce plays and write short stories (actually Tot, at age eleven, was hard at work on a novel), but we weren’t guided to balance fractions or learn about the different powers of the three branches of government.

  Our math teacher (who happened to have been sleeping with one of his thirteen-year-old students) hypothesized that the reason Tot and I were rebelling against the standard sixth-grade mathematics curriculum was because we were too brilliant for mere numerical calculations and cheesy word problems involving cans of soup and pockets of change. So he devised a tutorial in trigonometry especially for Tot and me. It took around three days before we all surrendered to reality (which in our case meant returning to practicing Serbo-Croatian folk dances with our favorite teacher, Jean). The truth is, Tot probably was capable of grasping the most complex and abstract mathematical concepts—including their philosophical
implications—but I could not balance a fraction to save my life, because numbers simply confounded me.

  Da Nahazli was the hub of the alternative Taos community. We filled the eleven rooms of a crumbling hacienda in the center of town, where distinctions between student and teacher, children and parents, members and visitors were fluid, almost irrelevant. Taos Pueblo elders taught us that the earth is our mother while East Indian yogis modeled the power of silence. Our social studies teacher, Deirdre, brought a Tibetan holy man named Trungpa Rinpoche down from Boulder, Colorado, and he read us Escape from Tibet around the kiva fireplace in the Great Room. Deirdre left us the next year to be with Trungpa full-time; she eventually became the well-known American Buddhist master Pema Chödrön. Ram Dass came through between trips to India where his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, had catapulted to the top of the American Spiritual Seekers Hit Parade because of Be Here Now, the book Ram Dass wrote about him at the nearby Lama Foundation.

  Natalie Goldberg, fresh from a master’s program at Saint John’s College across the Rio Grande Gorge in Santa Fe, was our English teacher and developed “writing practice” among our circle of pre-teens. Georgia O’Keefe was the judge of a children’s art contest, and R. C. Gorman drank with our fathers. Peter Fonda and his sister, Jane, showed up to visit fellow Easy Rider cast member Ellie Walker, grand-niece of Isadora Duncan and mother of my other best friend, Michelle. We babysat for the children of Dennis, David, and Duane Hopper during crazed parties at the historic Mabel Dodge Luhan House.

  One weekend toward the end of my first year at Da Nahazli, a group of us hitchhiked up to a spring equinox gathering at the Magic Tortoise, a commune in the mountains north of Taos. I caught a ride with Hunter, my new boyfriend (we had twirled together in the tire swing on the Da Nahazli playground and decided we would make a good couple), and Phillip, his best friend. Hunter was a drummer and Phillip was a guitar player, and they spent most of each school day jamming in the music room.