Lies My Mother Never Told Me (12 page)

“I gotcha, man,” he told Ron. They started talking in some kind of Vietnam veteran patois we could hardly understand—something about where they'd been and what division they'd fought with. I heard Ron say something about two tours, and the cabdriver muttered a response that included the words “Khe San,” and shook his head. Ron allowed the man to push his wheelchair and lift him into the cab, which I'd never seen him let anybody do. Then the man expertly folded up the chair and put it in the trunk, and they sped off together into the night.

I went to see
Born on the Fourth of July
on opening day in December 1989, with my Russian friend Natasha, a makeup artist in film and television who had emigrated from Leningrad. I was hungover and shaky from a Christmas party at the
Paris Review
the night before. The film of Ron's book practically knocked me out of my seat. Tom Cruise so perfectly embodied Ron that I felt I was watching my friend's life flash before my eyes. In the beginning of the movie, there's a Fourth of July parade, and the child Ron watches as the old World War II veterans are brought out and marched before the town. The real Ron was in that scene, in a World War II dress uniform, bemedaled, a broken veteran in a wheelchair who salutes the crowd. Then, a firecracker pops, and he cringes into himself in his chair. I started crying and couldn't stop.

At the end of the movie, I walked out of the Ziegfeld Theatre still weeping, with Natasha holding my arm and guiding the way.

“
Da
, but you know,” said Natasha, in an attempt to calm me down, “our war was much worse….”

“You Russians and your goddamn war.” Now I was laughing and crying at once.

I found myself surrounded by concerned Vietnam veterans,
members of an organization called Veterans for Peace, who were handing out pamphlets. I blurted to one of them, whose name was Mike, that my father had been a veteran of World War II and had fought at Guadalcanal, and had since died and how lonely I felt; I told him Ron Kovic was a friend of mine but he'd gone back to Los Angeles and disappeared and I couldn't find him and how war was such a goddamn fucking waste. This veteran, Mike, told me that Ron had been in the mountains in northern California but was back in Redondo Beach and he could get me Ron's new phone number tomorrow.

Ron and I have not lost touch since. As a veteran's daughter, I'm proud to say, Mike gave me a special dispensation to join Veterans for Peace.

When I was studying at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow during the winter of 1987, my mother wrote to me frequently, but she was convinced the Soviet Authorities monitored her letters. This is from a letter I received in late February, when the thermostat reached minus fifteen degrees Celsius:

 

I
N
J
UNE
1983, I
GOT
my first (and only) full-time job, at Poets & Writers, giving away small grants to writers for public readings and workshops. Poets & Writers is a nonprofit organization funded by government grants and private donations, whose sole directive is to help writers. I behaved myself for the first week of work, drinking only a reasonable amount and going to bed at a reasonable hour. But then my mother called and asked me to meet her for dinner at Elaine's. My roommate Carol, who was still working at a bank, pointed out that I never came home early, or sober, when I went out with my mother. I knew I was in trouble. If I told my mother I couldn't go, she'd be angry; so I went. And I was late for work the next morning, stinking of booze and not a little hungover.

“What's wrong with you?” my boss asked.

“I went out with my mother last night,” I mumbled.

“Oh,” he responded with a knowing smile. My mother was friends with the founder of Poets & Writers, and her partying habits were legendary.

As I sat at my desk, trying to make sense of some paperwork, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps this nine-to-five life was not going to work out too well for me.

I finally handed in my Columbia MFA thesis in October, 150 pages of my first novel, which I intended to continue writing in
my free time. But free time was scarce, what with the drinking and the full-time job. In fact, I lasted six months. I quit two days after Doubleday offered me an advance for my first novel,
As Soon As It Rains,
about a teenage girl overcoming her father's death.

 

I have to point out that there was a good deal of nepotism at work in getting my first novel published by Doubleday. Without telling me, my mother gave her copy of my MFA thesis to Carolyn Blakemore, her friend and colleague. Carolyn was an editor of the old school whose authors included such best-selling stars as Barbara Taylor Bradford and James Dickey.

I didn't know Carolyn had the manuscript until she called me in November to tell me that Doubleday was offering me a $6,500 advance. I was furious at my mother for having done this without telling me—it was a complete breach of trust; at the same time I was overwhelmed that Carolyn Blakemore wanted my book. But I was also fairly certain that I didn't deserve this chance—at least, no more than any of the other writers in my MFA program—and that I'd been given it only because I was James and Gloria Jones's daughter.

After I hung up with Carolyn, I immediately called my mother and asked her why in hell she hadn't
asked
me first if she could give my book to Carolyn.

“Because I knew you'd say no,” she said.

“I'm not ready for this,” I told her. “People are going to say I got published because of who I am.”

“Oh, bullshit,” she said. “You think the world doesn't work this way? You think there's
justice
? You're an idiot if you think other people don't take advantage of who they know. Just write the goddamn book and shut up.”

Now, twenty-five years later, I'm starting to see her point.

But back then, if I'd felt before that I'd been harshly judged for being the overprivileged daughter of James Jones, that feel
ing was now magnified tenfold. Even if I wrote the absolute best book I could write, my classmates from Columbia and probably everyone else who gave a shit would think I'd gotten published because of who I was.

It would be five years and a whole novel later before I finally began to feel I was earning my own place.

 

Just before Memorial Day weekend 1988, I turned in my second novel,
Quite the Other Way
, to Carolyn Blakemore. The next morning, almost all of my mother's Doubleday allies were fired, including Carolyn. My mother, unsure of whether or not she'd been sacked, simply never went back to work. When someone called to ask her when she would be returning, she was reported to have said, “I'll come back when the new boss kisses my ass on Fifth Avenue.”

My novel was passed on to a young editor, Shaye Areheart, who was a hands-on, nurturing, old-fashioned editor. This novel, which was quite a bit better than my first, included a good deal of Soviet history, specifically of World War II and the Stalinist purges. It received few, but excellent, reviews and little attention otherwise. The daughter of James Jones writing a first novel was news; the daughter of James Jones writing a second novel, about the Soviet Union no less, was of no interest to anyone except people who had an interest in the Soviet Union, and they were few and far between during those monstrous Reagan years.

 

From 1983 to 1989, I was embroiled in a relationship with Dennis, who was one of my closest friends and drinking buddies at Columbia. Dennis, five years my senior, was short and slight, with a devilish grin, blue eyes, and blond hair straight as rain. He couldn't have been less threatening, but beneath his boyish exterior and hilarious sense of humor lay a barely contained mean
streak. He said my mother's boyfriend Walker was “so vain he's varicose.” Dennis worked irregular hours for a moving company so that he could pursue his writing. His hands were bruised and sore, and he despised the rich people he helped move. He liked to make fun of successful writers. When Joyce Carol Oates came out with yet another novel, Dennis made up the moniker Joyce Carol Granola; Susan Cheever's biography of her father, John, one of his favorite writers, pissed him off too, and he took to calling the book
Daddy Queerest
.

Over those years, we broke up once every two or three months, and I would take off on a serious bender that usually involved payback with a third party, then waking up horribly hungover and shaking, assailed by dread.

 

In December 1986, Dennis moved to New Orleans to get out of the tug-of-war that our relationship had become. In February, I went back to Russia for six months and drank myself into a blind stupor. I started a relationship in Moscow, with an Iowan in my program who also liked to drink Stolichnaya vodka right from the bottle. Upon my return, I spent a week in Iowa with him in August. It was 104 degrees in the shade. We stayed in a house in the middle of wheat fields that stretched like a sea in every direction, no end in sight. At night, for entertainment we ate psilocybin mushrooms and watched eighteen-wheelers speed across the distant landscape, the ghosts of their lights trailing behind them for miles like party streamers. I felt squashed between the earth and sky and was terrified and thought, This is definitely not the place for me. I realized I wanted to be in New Orleans with Dennis, and I tried to send him telepathic messages and felt him thinking about me at that exact moment.

In September, I called Dennis from New York and asked him if he'd been getting my telepathic messages. He chuckled, said
he'd felt something, but his drinking was kind of befuddling his mind. He was trying to finish his first novel. He invited me to come down to New Orleans.

“What's the matter with you?” my mother said when I told her Dennis and I were going to give it another try. “Why can't you find a guy that has a normal job? A grown-up who makes money? You have no goddamn common sense.”

New Orleans had an end-of-the-road feel, even though miles and miles of bayou stood between the city and the Gulf of Mexico. The French Quarter bars that lined Bourbon Street on both sides were filled to bursting every night, and open all day. You could walk around with booze in open plastic containers. While I was in Russia, Dennis had gotten involved with a twenty-two-year-old bartender, and every time the doorbell rang, he turned pale and froze, refusing to open the door.

I couldn't really get angry at him; after all, I was on the run from my Iowan. I thought perhaps the problem was Stolichnaya vodka. So I turned to cognac—after all, wasn't that close to wine? But soon I was drinking almost a fifth of Courvoisier a night. After a month of living in New Orleans, my incipient ulcer was no longer incipient, and I took to gulping down Pepto-Bismol from the bottle as I walked back from the store. People passing me would cheer. In New Orleans, getting so blotto you had to chug Pepto in the street the next morning was apparently considered an honorable and brave pursuit.

I made several trips back and forth, finally returning to New York for good after Mardi Gras, because Jason Shinder, the founder of the Writer's Voice writing workshops at the West Side YMCA, offered me my first teaching job.

At the New Orleans airport, as Dennis and I sat in a row of cracked plastic chairs bolted to the floor, I set him free. He cried, and I cried, and then I got on the plane.

As the plane banked low over Lake Pontchartrain, I remem
bered how just a few days ago we'd gone sailing there with a couple Dennis and I had met in a bar, and how his eyes had been hollowed out by grief and confusion, and I'd realized something drastic would have to happen for us to sever our ties. Now, we would have almost half the landmass of the United States between us, but earthly distance had not in the past been efficacious in keeping us from tearing each other apart.

 

Teaching at the Writer's Voice opened a door onto a whole new world of hope for me. By helping other writers, I found a new direction. I've never stopped teaching since the day I walked into that first workshop. Jason Shinder had created the program by marshaling writers and using the classroom space in the West Side Y, and applying for funding from the New York State Council on the Arts. By 1988, when I started, the program had developed a stellar reputation, and the classes were filled almost entirely by word of mouth.

The Writer's Voice students were extremely serious and the talent level very high. Most everyone had a daytime job and other obligations, yet they showed up without fail. The age range went from recent college graduates, to young professionals, to octogenarian retirees. I found that several of my students were writing stories of publishable quality, and just needed direction and encouragement. I realized I was good at getting right to the technical problems, and explaining them clearly and succinctly.

 

At a pro-choice consciousness raising seminar at Gail Sheehy's house in East Hampton in 1988, I met a woman from the New York City Board of Education who agreed to let me volunteer as a creative writing teacher once a week in a public middle school in Morningside Heights. The students in this particular class were “at risk” eighth graders who were being held back an extra year before going on to high school. Their teacher, Anne Puddu, was
trained as a gifted-and-talented teacher but chose to take on this class instead, for she felt she could do the most good here. Anne Puddu was the best teacher of children I've ever known.

Every week I had to find interesting subjects for the students to write about. I brought in
Life
magazine photographs of sad-looking dogs in cages; war-torn landscapes; refugees; people behind bars; kids smoking dope in alleyways; addicts shooting up; couples kissing. I played music, and sometimes tapes of sounds, like an Amazon rain forest, or a Sahara desert windstorm, and let them write whatever passed through their minds. I took no points off for spelling or punctuation. I never wrote on their papers in red but commented at length in green or blue ink. I read the best of their work aloud in class, week after week. They tried to shock me, but that wasn't easy, and this amused them no end.

When I taught them to write modified haikus, three lines with three words in the first line, five in the second, and three in the last, one boy wrote:

I thought this was so funny and so smart that I wrote it on the board, while Anne Puddu sat there making a face and shaking her head, but I could see she was trying not to smile. The whole class started to crack up and then hoot and howl with laughter. The boy may have meant to shock me, but I told the class it was the smartest and funniest modified haiku I'd ever read.

Their stories and poems lacked all restraint and form; they just told things as they saw them. Once, I brought in a photo of Greta Garbo gazing adoringly at herself in a mirror, her face almost
touching her reflection as it gazed adoringly back. One tough nut to crack wrote:

When I read this aloud, the class cheered and the boy sat back proudly, arms crossed, taking in the applause.

I never drank on Tuesday nights, because I knew I had to be up at the school at eight on Wednesday morning, and those kids could see right through me. I had to be strong, I had to be awake, I had to be on my toes.

Recently I'd started having total blackouts, waking up in the morning uncertain of what had happened the night before, and shaking with fear. I couldn't determine what caused them and decided to stop drinking cognac. I switched to wine. My fear was not totally unfounded; I was running out of money faster than I could write. My advances and my now part-time job at Poets & Writers hardly covered my expenses. One day I broke down crying in front of my mother and admitted I was terrified. She rescued me with a $20,000 check. I didn't want to take it. She pushed it toward me, shrugging it off. “It's found money, anyway,” she said. I don't know where she found it. I started blubbering, grateful and ashamed. Now I was no longer in a state of panic, but I still had no idea what the future would hold.

We all had read that horrifying 1986
Newsweek
cover article which stated unequivocally that according to a recent Yale and Harvard survey, a forty-year-old, single, white, college-educated woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to marry. All of my unattached girlfriends who were fast approaching thirty were freaking out. I thought it was some kind of right-wing con
spiracy; yet, living in a crappy little apartment with cinder block and pine board shelves was not how I had envisioned my future, when I'd given my future any thought at all.