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Because my father was always working, and my mother didn’t drive, we rode the bus everywhere. We took it to Panorama City, to go shopping, we took it to The Fox Theater to see The Jungle Book and we once took it to Los Angeles International Airport to see the Apollo 11 astronauts when they came back from the moon. In our family, we were woken up for every single space launch out of respect for Jack Kennedy— and in truth, you didn't even have to be awake. We were just taken out of bed, propped up in a chair, they launched the rocket and then we were thrown back in bed...in Camelot! Camelot! But the night they walked on the moon, like most everyone else on earth, we all were crowded around the television set, about to “turn blue” when the Eagle finally landed. We heard our apartment complex explode with the sound of cheering and my engineer father took me outside in his high waisted khakis and white t-shirt, and in the heat of the night, he pointed at a bright crescent in the sky, and said: “Men are walking on that tonight.” So our mother took us on the bus for half a day to LAX to see Neil, Buzz and Michael and we were running late so everyone was already lined up when we got there. The astronauts were just coming off of the plane. I’m sure the worldwide tour was far more physically demanding than the actual voyage to the moon, as they were forced to land at airports, get out, walk around, wave, get driven around, wave more, then get back on a plane and take off for another airport...but we were late, and we were standing behind the row of people pushed up against the cyclone fencing, and I was a little seven year old and suddenly, I was lifted up under my arms by a complete stranger, who saw that I couldn't see, and he floated me weightless, high above the astronauts, and held me over his head, slowly angling me toward them as they walked by waving and I remember waving back, as I looked down on their blue suits, freshly shaved faces and tight NASA crew cuts.
The year prior, we had taken the bus to downtown Los Angeles and we were stopped in traffic, and Mom pointed up to The Hall of Justice, and she said, “You see that little window on the corner up there, honey? The real small window at the top, with the bars in it? You know who they keep up there?” she asked. “Sirhan Sirhan. He's the son of a bitch that shot, Bobby. Thank God for Rosey Grier,” she said, “Broke his thumb, so he couldn't get another shot off”
But mostly, my sister Sheila and I took the bus. We took the bus to school. Not the school bus, but the city bus. The R.T.D. The Rapid Transit District, because we were going to a school out of our zip code, because my mother said: “You two are going to Saint Genevieve's or you’re not going to school at all” I was in 2nd grade. Sheila was in 5th grade and Lisa, probably because she was thrown out of her catholic school for flamboyant handwriting, had her own thing going at a public school. We would leave the house dressed in our uniforms, and Sheila, sporting short and severe wet hair held in place with a stern barrette, would hold my hand with such savage determination, that it left a dent that you can still see to this day and we would walk right up Valerio Street to the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard where the bus stop was, but first, in the mornings, we had an errand to run, and so a no nonsense ten year old girl with a little seven year old boy in tow, crossed six lanes of rush hour traffic to the liquor store, with a note, and we put the note up on the counter every morning, and it read: Please give my children two packages of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Thank you. Maureen Kearin. 786-7305. And it was the 60's, so they would sell Lucky Strike cigarettes to a 5th grader, and a 2nd grader, in their uniforms on their way to Catholic School. Lucky Strike, if you remember, was so packed with tar and nicotine, that it was widely understood to be the brand Death smoked and we would dutifully deliver the cigarettes back home to our mother and then we would walk back up to the corner, and the bus would come, and we would get on that bus, and we would march right down the middle, because my big sister Shelia was all business and people would smile at how cute we were and I would wave like an astronaut and smile back but the steely blue eyed girl wearing the game face in the plaid skirt who was crushing my tiny hand was unimpressed and got us both seated, facing forward.
Sometimes that bus would get us to school on time, and sometimes it wouldn't and sometimes it didn't show up at all— and our mother would throw us into the back of a taxi cab, by ourselves with a little wad of cash, and sometimes when we’d missed the bus, she'd say, “You know what? Forget it. Stay home. Watch my stories with me.” We were homeschooled by Mike Douglas, and the Edge of Night.
One day, the nun in my class had had enough of my erratic attendance, and so she called me to the front of the room and had me stand at attention next to her desk facing the other students, and for maximum shame, one by one she read all of my tardies and absences. When I went home from school that day, I told my mom what happened, and she listened, and then she said, “Go turn down Mike Douglas…” and so I did, and then she said, “…now go get me a Sego Diet Drink out of the refrigerator…Very Vanilla please” and I did. And finally she said, “…now, go get me the phone.” so I brought her the telephone, and my mother called Saint Genevieve's Catholic School, and she didn't get my nun on the phone, she got the nun on the phone…The Mother Superior, Sister Mary Benedict, and my mother told Sister Mary Benedict, what happened, and then I watched as my mother leaned in, listening to The Reverend Mother, and then she leaned in a little closer, and said, “You go straight to Hell, Sister…and don't stop on the way, honey” Clang! “You kids are going to Public School” …and we did.
For the record, when you refer to the Mother Superior as honey…well, it just doesn’t get much Jersey-er than that. (flick cigarette)
Later that year, on Christmas morning, there was a knock at our door, and when my father opened it, there were two L.A.P.D. officers standing there in their dressed blacks, with their long sleeves, and their hats tucked under their arms on the same side. They came inside and sat at the dining room table, and told my parents that earlier that morning, my mother's mother had been found in her car in San Diego. She had overdosed on pills and cut her wrists. Nanny had tried to take her life a number of times in the past, but she always called my father and he had gotten to her in time, like it was a game—but this time, she never called, and somehow, a note that she left behind, got back to my mother, and the note read: “Maureen, this is because of YOU.” And what the note didn’t say but said most of all was “P.S. Merry Ravaged Christmas for the rest of your life.” So we believe that for this reason, our parents felt they needed a new start for the whole family, and so, it was decided that we were going to move.
It was 1971, and we were going to move fifty miles south, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, to the suburbs, to a brand-new planned community, to a place they named: Mission Viejo, and at the time, there was nothing down there, and some could still make that argument today, but at that time, our lonely housing tract was surrounded by golden rolling hills, vast expanses of Savannah grass, and an actual lion preserve…for real, because it looked exactly like where lions lived. Mission Viejo was hailed as: The California Promise, and looking back, it's as if California put its big golden arm around my family, pulled us in close and said, “Some really crazy shit's about to happen to you all…I promise” and California kept its word.
Now, everybody moves into a home with no furniture—ours just stayed that way, because my mother said, she would rather live in a new tract home with no furniture than live in a home with furniture from Sears, but my father said that's all we could afford, but Mom was having none of it, and consequently, neither were we. Which isn't totally true. We had a piece of a sectional couch, but not one of the broad, grand, sweeping, majestic segments, but rather the connecting piece, sort of an ottoman, with a back on it, and my mother would lie across it with her lower legs dangling off the edge, wearing tennis socks with little pom poms on the back, watching The Guiding Light, on a television, about a quarter mile that way. Both pieces, floating like flotsam on an ocean of brand new, thick, shag, royal blue carpeting.
My father now was working around the clock, commuting to Los Angeles during the day and moonlighting in San Diego at night. My mother would watch her shows all day and at dusk, she would do some light cleaning, until it was time for us to go to bed, but the cleaning, really, was but a prelude, if you will, to the main event. As I would lie in my rollaway bed, the kind with a bar across your back that you might see a paint chipped plaster boy lying on in a lower east side tenement museum, I would start to hear it, far away, in another part of the house. Waaaahhhv. Vweeeee-aaaaahhhhh. The vacuuming had started. Can you imagine a house better suited for raw, untamed, almost feral vacuum cleaning? Vast expanses of dense, factory fresh carpeting with nary a stick of furniture to hamper your headway; it was akin to plowing a suburban lawnmower through open pastureland, and our mother, with her lit cigarette, her housecoat and her white Keds tennis shoes, would start night after night—Vooooooom—covering acres and acres, Groooooove, of carpet—beeerrrooooom leaving behind those beautiful lines and patterns—and she wasn't crazy, it was night time, the kids were asleep, so best to shut all the lights off—Brooooove! and just use the headlight-Braaggggghhhh! -on the front of the vacuum—after all, that’s what it’s there for apparently…for night vacuuming. Brrooooooooze! You would lie in bed, hearing it come Closer! to your room. You would see the Liiiiiight! coming eventually...and sometimes it would come up and Rattle! your door, and then go past your room Down! the hall, towards your sister's rooms. (power down sound effect) and come the morning…we would have to rake it. Anyone? Any Carpet Farmers out there? Anyone else have to harvest loose synthetic fibers? We did.
We had drapes in the one front window of our house, but tin foil and newspaper on the sides and back facing windows, fooling absolutely no one and the weeds in our backyard grew so high, it was like wandering into a corn maze, without the fun.
One Sunday, a complete stranger walked into our house. It was our father, and he said, “Come on, come here…I want to show you kids something” and he took Sheila, Lisa, and me, and he walked us through the kitchen, onto the service porch that led into the garage, and then our father just went Chik-eee! and opened the door, and there, sitting in the middle of our garage was a brand-new car. We had never seen a brand-new car that close before, let alone one that belonged to us. The garage door was closed, and there was a single light bulb overhead, and he just walked over and leaned his arm on the roof of the car. It was a Datsun 1200, Amazon parrot green with cream white interior, and Dad just stood there, nodding at it and it was then that we smelled smoke, as we were slowly pushed aside by our mother, and she stepped through us and stopped at the edge of the doorway and looked into the garage at the car, and she said to us, under her breath, “Stay here, I'll be right back” and we didn't know what that meant, but we did stay there, and pretty soon, Mom did came back, and we were pushed aside again, and we watched as our mother set herself at the edge of the doorway, raised her arm and tomahawked a claw hammer—Fwhoo whoo whoo whoo! across the garage, impacting the shiny green hood of the new car, BONK! caroming off the windshield and then Bing Bong bom bom balalalalala! -onto the concrete floor and she said to my father, “That's what you get. That's what you get for not asking me what kind of car I wanted.” And then she disappeared through us and back into the house. My father picked up the hammer without saying a word, walked over, shut off the light, shut the door, and that we thought, was that.
But a short time later, in our kitchen, my mother went to a drawer, pulled out a carving knife and ran at my father. He grabbed her wrist just in time to stop the knife, and I ran over and helped him keep it from going into his heart, which is where you stab someone, if you want to kill them. Our father, like I said, always kept a lot of pens in his breast pocket, but we wondered if for occasions such as this, he might also have kept several layers of stainless-steel erasing shields in there, for you civil engineering historians in the house. I remember hanging on to both of their wrists until the attempted stabbing stopped. It wasn't long after that that our mother suffered a massive heart attack. A myocardial infarction to be exact. I told my friends at school…It wasn't a heart attack, it was a myocardial infarction...and our mother went into the hospital for about three weeks, and while she was in the hospital, Mom’s aunt came to take care of us, Aunt Kitty. Kitty Peacock, from Las Vegas, who was a mix between a Great Horned Owl and Mrs. Naugatuck, from the show Maude. Aunt Kitty was famous for being clairvoyant and also for being present when people suddenly died. Like the priest who dropped dead after high mass and crumpled down the stairs in front of the altar, sliding to a stop in front of Aunt Kitty seated in the first pew. Or the time she was standing on a high bridge and a man walked up, mentioned how beautiful the bay was, climbed atop the railing and jumped, hitting a police boat below, and because it was Aunt Kitty watching, probably killed not only himself, but all officers on deck. She watched over us kids while my dad worked his eighteen-hour days and eventually, my mother came home from the hospital and promptly smoked 3 weeks- worth of cigarettes in the bathroom, behind the wall of sound, while she popped her new mysterious nitroglycerin tablets for her heart, which were tiny little white pills kept in a thick glass vial. At age 10, I had watched enough cartoons to know that nitroglycerin was as dangerous as dynamite, and I was obsessed with the idea that if that glass vial were ever to be dropped on the floor at just the right angle, there would only be a crater where our neighborhood used to be. Whenever my mom asked me to “go get me my Nitro,” in the back of my mind, I knew there was a small chance I wasn’t coming back, and possibly neither were the Atchinsons or the Loutensocks, who lived on either side of us.
Now, before her myocardial infarction, my mother and Lisa were not getting along all that well, and when my mother came home from the hospital, almost immediately, they got into it again. One day, my mother’s love of common household weapons took the form of a long wooden spoon that she used to thwack Lisa with. On the bright side, the fact that she took an improvised kitchen hickory switch to my sister, instead of reaching for a knife, showed my mother was at least teachable, open to learning, willing to grow.
I was off visiting some family friends in Los Angeles at the time…The Valdez family. Marguerita The Matriarch and Arturo the Bricklayer had a lot of kids, an oddly narrow swimming pool and furniture. Marguerita cooked big Mexican meals and Arturo would sometimes discipline their children by whipping them with Hot Wheel tracks. When the Valdez family drove me back home, I walked in and it was as if my sister Lisa had never been born.
Her walls were bare, her bed was stripped and her closet was empty; she had run away from home at seventeen years old. Lisa ran away up the street to the Schneider's house, where she was a babysitter, and my father marched up the street to get our sister back, and he came home without our sister, looking strangely disoriented because Mr. Schneider was a psychiatrist. I don't know what he said to my father, but he must have played him like an Irish fiddle.
For some impossible reason, in the suburbs, the Schneider's owned a Bentley, an old school English Bentley, like with running boards and giant fenders and the oversized steering wheel on the right, and they would let our seventeen-year-old sister drive this Colossus, and we would see her coming slowly up the street because it was impossible to miss what appeared to be the Queen of England visiting Mission Viejo. And Lisa knew to keep our house on the left and when she got close, Sheila and I would dart out of the Sullivan’s bushes on the right and then jump up on the running board, and say to her, “We miss you. We love you. We're not allowed to mention your name in the hooouuuussssse” and we would drop off as she drove away, like some super sad Grey Poupon commercial.
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