Quitting, Part Two
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most people dread it.” –George Bernard Shaw
“Why don’t you go to graduate school?”
My mother was chopping garlic. Catherine was in the PhD program at Rutgers. She had always been brilliant, her mind capable of analyzing the complexities of literature while still able to appreciate celebrity gossip in People Magazine. I wasn’t like her. As a child, I loved to write and found it easy to spin poetry or short stories. In college, my creative writing instructor told me I should send out my work to literary magazines, but that was my father’s territory. He was, like my oldest sister, a literary genius. I was merely clever. My stuff was whiny and self-centered. I couldn’t imagine calling myself a writer any more than I could imagine happiness.
“I don’t want a PhD.”
“What’s in California?”
“Gabrielle’s there with the other Irish girls. I can stay with them.”
“Hmph.” My mother felt Gabrielle was unreliable and prone to ridiculous food fetishes. She’d also gone off with my ex-boyfriend. “That girl isn’t strong,” she said. “She’s very thin.”
Weight was a constant topic in my family; spoken or unspoken, your value was adjusted according to how fat you were. There was a sizing up that occurred after a separation and a pronouncement made about your worth that sounded deep but was based on whether you had lost or gained weight. Fat was bad, too thin was bad. I never really understood what constituted good. My mother’s approach to diet was absolutely perfect. She fed us a Mediterranean diet, olive oil, light on meat, lots of salads and vegetables, whole grains, nothing processed or deep-fried. Like our handmade clothes constructed from Marimekko and Liberty’s of London fabrics, our diet was exotic and marked us as aliens to the American way of enjoying life.
I rebelled by eating junk food, sugar, and things that were fattening and had no health benefits. Deep down, I preferred eating the way I was raised, but her self-satisfaction was hard to accept. Anytime I gained weight she would tell me how she’d helped my father’s sister Anne, the one who never spoke to us, lose thirty pounds by having three healthy meals a day, no snacks. This story made me want to eat things like doughnuts, Twinkies, and deep-fried Mars bars. Also, she never explained why our aunt never wanted to meet her nieces. Her mother had been a fat nazi, patting you down while pretending affection but really checking for weight gain. Other people’s grandmothers seemed to encourage cookie eating, while mine was priest-ridden and critical.
“How did you leave things at your job?” my mother asked. My father ignored me.
“I quit.”
“Can you go back?”
My father spoke from behind the newspaper. “Of course, she can’t. Molly burns bridges. It’s scorched earth.”
“I hated being a boss! I was sexually harassed every day.”
“You could transfer.” My mother muttered.
“I tried. I interviewed with marketing, but they didn’t want me.”
“You’re very impatient. Sometimes life isn’t easy.” My father.
He had to support my mother. He owed her loyalty for his bad behavior.
“They hated me. I had to fire this woman who ended up telling me to take care of myself. I’d just fired her!” I could feel tears, but they were tears of anger.
Why didn’t my parents simply cut me off? Clearly, they weren’t happy I’d quit my job, but why did they care so much? Why did I feel so ashamed of myself? Unless I was pursuing a PhD in English, I was failing to make them happy. And why was their happiness my burden? Maybe driving cross-country to become an unemployed cocktail waitress was a bad idea, but at the time, it seemed like a solution. I advertised for a companion on the drive, but she bailed at the last moment, so I went alone.
photo by Genny Dimitrakopoulou
Leaving the East behind, I drove for eight hours in my yellow VW Beetle, staying at cheaper and cheaper motels until I spent the night at one outside of New Mexico with no adult visible, just a ten-year-old on roller skates with an eerie resemblance to Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. As I followed her down the concrete strip in front of the motel rooms, I decided she’d murdered her parents and buried them in the yard out back. In the middle of the night, I woke up certain a tractor-trailer was coming through the window, and when I stepped outside, I realized the motel was actually in the center of the highway, so the truck’s lights swept across the bed and as the brakes squealed it felt as if you were about to be crushed.
I looked up at the enormous blue-black sky, the sun visible towards the horizon. Streaks of pink and yellow began to appear, and I took a deep breath and felt free. My yellow VW was hardly the best vehicle for a cross-country trek. Semi-trucks would often sandwich me between them, enjoying scaring the hippie chick in the tiny car. However, I was also helped by any number of truck drivers who pulled over when they saw me stranded, trying to suck the air from my gas line. What I remember is the car would start sputtering and the only way to get it back to full throttle was to somehow remove the trapped air. I had the book How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir, but just like I had struggled to make the phones ring, I struggled to do anything mechanical with the car. Technically I understood how to change a tire but mostly I specialized in standing next to the side of the road looking fetching and confused.
My parents’ reaction to my quitting Ma Bell and moving to California didn’t surprise me. I never knew what either of them wanted for me unless it was something they wanted me to want, and then I ended up doing what they wanted with the implied threat that love was the currency that would disappear if I failed to obey their wishes. When I was in love with Jeffrey and wanted to transfer to the University of Wisconsin I was again told this would break my father’s heart and also, I would be permanently cut off, not just financially but emotionally. In addition, my father said love didn’t exist and I was a loser.
I couldn’t break my father’s heart because his father had done that already by disappearing, and the nuns in the orphanage did that by beating a six-year-old child, and the army did even more that was never discussed. I wasn’t Cordelia, and he wasn’t King Lear. I could never hurt him as much as he had hurt me, so I gave up and drank and slept with people I shouldn’t have, including my first love’s best friend, who told him, and then he didn’t love me anymore. I wanted to stay in Dublin after my junior year, but I had to come home because, well, I didn’t really know why, I just had to, and so I moved back into the house they had bought, my cozy birdcage and I drank and wandered around in an angry black-out, went to all my classes and graduated with a four-point-0.
My parents never seemed very interested in what I did. I played soccer, I was in plays, and I directed a play in high school; sometimes, my mother would remark that someone had mentioned my skill on the soccer field, and she would act guilty. To act guilty about something that could have been so easily remedied was the method by which my parents, my mother especially, made you the one who had to apologize.
When my best friend was killed in a car crash, she was angry with me for my grief, and my father was silent when I was clearly a teenage drunk; no one suggested help or even spoke the truth about the dangers of an adolescent poisoning herself with alcohol. There was bewilderment, guilt, and anger, and then t covering up amnesia, and denial. My father nicknamed me “The Bolter” after a character in a novel by Maria Edgeworth, one of his favorite Anglo-Irish novelists. I was flattered by the distinction, but it implied I ran away like a wild, unbroken horse, and that should probably have raised some alarm, some thought of why is she running away, why is she so wild and angry? But then again, although we three seemed to think about my parents constantly, they almost never seemed to think about us, to wonder whether we were safe or happy. I wasn’t happy or safe for too long. I wasn’t happy or safe until so many bad things happened, I was sure they would never stop.
I had arranged to stay with a friend of a friend in Lamy, New Mexico. He needed a ride to Hollywood, and it broke the trip up at a good time. Walking into the evening just after sunset, the sky that stretched across New Mexico was an uninterrupted expanse of midnight blue, stabbed with diamond sparkle stars and a huge, silver three-quarters moon that cast light and shadows across the desert. My parents loved New Mexico. When I was two, they parked Brigid and me with alternate grandmothers and took Catherine to New Mexico for a month. D.H. Lawrence haunted those mountains, and my father was a Lawrence scholar. My father introduced me to poetry and William Butler Yeats when I was eleven. I’m not sure how it happened, but he brought me to a poetry reading, just the two of us, and I heard The Song of Wandering Aengus. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my life.
“And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.”
Of course, the trout turns into a beautiful woman and runs away, and the fisherman spends the rest of his life searching for her. The final lines seemed like something only heard in a dream. I was dazzled and seduced, flattened by poetry.
“And pluck till times and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.”
My vision of love was unrequited, doomed, and perverse. I devoured Poe’s Annabel Lee, The Phantom comics, Dracula, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (she loved a terrorist), Return of the Native, Wuthering Heights, and Endless Love; I was captivated by the dysfunctional, tragic, and ruthless passion. For the first time in years, I felt hopeful. We left Lamy early in the morning, my passenger adding his movie camera to the load in the back. As we were nearing the highway, I saw a wall of water suddenly appear. This was something I had no reference for, a flash flood, common in the desert but rare in New Jersey.
“Roll up your window!” my passenger yelled.
I rolled it up before the wave hit, and then we were floating, moving fast with the flow of the water. I thought we were going to drown, and then just as quickly, the water evaporated, leaving behind piles of debris, dead snakes, fence parts, other drowned little moles, voles, chipmunks and baby birds, and my water-tight Beetle. Although we had been carried several miles in the wrong direction, it was easy to turn around and enter the highway as planned. The experience felt like a hallucination, but the water line on my car told me it was real. I liked the fact that nature had assumed authority rather than the corporate behemoth I had obeyed for the past several years. Nature might be ruthless and unpredictable, but I could wear my hair down and exhale without feeling endangered.
After I dropped my passenger off in Hollywood, I headed north to Berkeley, where the Irish girls were living in absolute squalor in a small one-bedroom sublet to them by a student. There were six of them living there; three more had materialized from Dublin and found themselves temporarily homeless but never actually left. Luckily, I had a sleeping bag, but I was determined to locate my own space. Communal life had never seemed attractive. I associated disparate roommates with people marking cereal boxes, labeling eggs, listening to other people having sex, or constantly whinging about who should wash the dishes. I would drink myself to sleep in my own space, but nevertheless, I needed privacy. These girls, aside from Alex, had few boundaries. They borrowed one another’s toothbrushes, food, men, shoes, and anything else that could be purloined or repurposed. I was a person who needed quiet, preferably silence in the morning, but this gaggle of Irish geese preferred endless chat, constant squabbling, and the cooking of things like mushrooms, tomatoes, rashers, and eggs.
I didn’t know Alex. Because she was involved with the theater, she became friends with most of the people I knew from my year at Trinity. I trusted and liked her but was also envious of her grace and dignity. Although it had been a joke when I told people I was leaving my telephone job to become a cocktail waitress, that was exactly what happened. Alex had been hired at a bar on Fisherman’s Wharf called Alioto’s Hofbraus House. She recommended me, and I was hired. The bar had been given to the youngest son of the Alioto clan, a drug-addled, frequently absent young man who liked to believe the cocktail waitresses were his private harem. While given a choice, which we were, not a single one of us would go near Jeff Alioto with a ten-foot pole. Having survived two solid years of unwanted advances from my colleagues at Ma Bell, I was able to crush his feeble attempt at flirtation, which then transmuted into a constant curiosity about my romantic life.
Somehow, maybe because her accent was posh and her demeanor so dignified, Jeff never hit on Alex, who was, unlike me, a competent waitress. Alioto’s Hofbraus House’s greatest draw was Johann, a Holocaust survivor, master musician, and according to Edwardo, the bartender, owned by the Alioto family because of his bar tab and mortgage. Johan played popular, mostly German music, on his accordion all day long, sitting on a raised stage at one end of the bar. He wore lederhosen and a hat with a feather, and he sang, or if drunk enough, shouted in German, or, if really drunk, he sobbed. He often sobbed about being in love with me, but that wasn’t true. His son, Johan Jr., all of eighteen, did love me and would eventually save my life by twelve-stepping me into AA despite my determination to continue drinking. One afternoon, Johan put his head down on the bar after his usual Spaten and a shot of Jägermeister, but he didn’t wake up again.
The following day, Johan Jr. took his place on the raised platform singing Lady of Spain while Johan’s oldest friends raised a glass to his memory but did not attend his funeral despite their long acquaintance. Jeff Alioto, Eduardo, and I were the only attendees from the bar. Apparently, you burst into flames if you left the dark and cozy confines of the Hofbraus House.
I had met a boy, a wharf rat who crushed pennies for tourists and supplied me with a constant source of acid, coke, mushrooms, speed, pot, and other drugs. I had decided to date someone who contradicted every value I had been brought up with: education, a work ethic, an awareness of one’s health, and social responsibility. The penny crusher didn’t read, had no interest in the world at large, took drugs every day, and basically was someone who gave me acid and fucked me. He wasn’t mean, he was handsome, could make conversation when necessary, was generous with his drugs and asked very little of me. With the end of summer came the exodus of the Irish girls. All my life autumn had signified a renewal of life, my father returned to teach, I began school with resolve and anticipation. More than New Year’s Eve, the start of the academic year was a time to review past failures, commit to new goals, and start afresh.
That summer, the summer of San Francisco provided an opportunity to do things like trip on mushrooms and other drugs, have a stupid, demeaning job, sleep all day, watch bad daytime television, eat chocolate cake for breakfast like my delinquent Uncle Brendan, breaking all the rules, going with the flow like all the other drifters who gravitated towards Berkeley.
But after the Irish girls departed, I was no longer part of their hedonistic summer break. They had school to begin back in Dublin, flats to reclaim, and family to see. I was adrift. I took over Alex’s shifts at the Hofbraus House and moved into San Francisco, finding a room in a gorgeous Pacific Heights apartment belonging to a sex therapist named Orlof. He wore caftans, liked to hug, and had a secret life I refrained from exploring. Possibly, it was his age, at least forty, but I think it was also this idea I had about boundaries. I might ingest LSD five days in a row, but I wouldn’t have sex with middle-aged people in caftans. On the other hand, I visited the Sutra Bath House, always under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs and tequila, where people were naked and fucking although I clung to the penny-crusher and refused to join any orgies.
I did spend one wild evening with several members of the Los Angeles Lakers, very tall African American men, not having sex but sitting in a hot tub, seriously cranked on cocaine, telling them stories about traveling in Europe with my family. They seemed to find me amusing, but who knows? Maybe they wondered what set of circumstances had dropped this talkative, highly educated, lost young woman into their wild night of partying, her pupils dilated, her jaw clenched so tightly several molars would crack under pressure, hands trembling, a silent boy with empty eyes next to her.
There was an air of desperation in San Francisco during the early eighties. Although AIDS was not yet the plague it would become, there was a feeling that the Summer of Love had stranded a population of runaways, criminals, Vietnam Vets, and drug addicts in the shining city on the bay. It seemed like almost everyone drank to excess and snorted “nonaddictive” cocaine. At three o’clock in the morning, the fern bars, bars decorated with Tiffany lamps, inhabited by yuppies, professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, and city workers, were full to bursting. No one, it seemed, had a family or any fear of death. But the jackals and the vultures were circling just outside the light, waiting patiently for the first to weaken and fall. My decision was clear: break away from the web of love, guilt, hope, disappointment, and good art and be free of it all.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach