Читать книгу Criminal of Poverty - Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia - Страница 15

My father was the descendent of colonial politicians, son of a frustrated Hemingway-wannabe entrepreneur and an intellectual suffragette. His was a life of extreme privilege and extreme insanity, one common to wealthy American bohemians living out their eccentricities in beachfront mansions. Into this strange American family walked my mother, a sexy, mixed-race “exotic,” the embodiment of all that was other. They dated while she was still in high school, living out her newfound sorority mythos, and while my father was between high school and college, spending his time surfing and contemplating his array of college choices. She was happy with him because he seemed brilliant, as well as “three inches taller and three years older,” the edict set down by her appropriated Pasadena sorority standards. He was happy with her because she was everything his pseudo-rebellion demanded, an unfamiliar exotic whom his family would never want him to know or accept. After a summer courtship that included watching my dad surf for hours and then listening to his arguments and essays on capitalism and art, with a hefty dose of English literature and poetry thrown in for romantic juice, they were separated for the next few years—my dad going off to Reed College in Oregon and my mother left behind to finish high school, where she would ultimately end up in a sad spiral downward into punctured mythologies and smashed illusions.

Desperate to believe her own lie of an appropriated identity of race and class privilege, my mother blindly followed the lead of her wealthy, white Pasadena friends. At the end of her senior year, a series of dismal SAT scores and failed sorority rushes at UCLA was capped by a rare incident of drunkenness at an end-of-summer party, and the rich and beautiful girls decided that my mother was a bad seed, someone who never should have been allowed into their clique in the first place. She was summarily excised from her “friends’” lives, their privilege and their plans, and was set adrift without an authentic idea of her own about who she might be or what she might do. Life post-high school had abruptly become a vista of endless days of confusion and solitude.

At this point my mother floundered, sitting immobilized in front of the TV on the shredded couch of her last foster home deep in the City of Industry, a smog-infested suburb of Los Angeles. For hours upon hours, my mom and her last foster father watched WWF wrestling, but though the very poor, very kind Alfred Rodriguez and his Hawaiian wife Minnie loved my mom’s company, they knew that an 18-year-old girl needed to be out of the house doing “something.”

So after a year of my mom’s WWF watching, her worsening smog-induced asthma and too many potato chips, Minnie Rodriguez “found” my mother’s mother, who was working as a live-in maid in the Berkeley hills in Northern California, and she sent my mom up to stay with her. In later years, whenever my mom would tell the story of the Rodriguezes her eyes would cloud and her voice would become soft. That was the last time she ever saw them, because as she would tell it, Alfred got cancer and, as a working poor man with no health insurance, he fell into horrible debt, and to save his wife from further poverty he committed suicide by driving his broken-down painting truck onto the train tracks that ran across his little street.

The cold mist and constant breeze in Northern California made for clean air that my mother could actually breathe, and it flooded her confused mind and filled her with a renewed energy. Within weeks of her arrival in the Bay Area she had become a part of it all. Donning a black beret, with her long hair in a thick braid she soaked up the rain and fog and the hipster attitude of the Berkeley streets, spending her days working as a manicurist in the financial district and taking night classes at a community college in Oakland, hanging out late to attend rallys sponsored by the Black Panthers.

She had been corresponding with my father the whole time he was away, and two years into her life in the Bay Area he began to plead with her to join him. At this point he was struggling with the hell of medical school, discouraged and on the verge of dropping out. Still unsure of what to do with her life, she eventually agreed. My grandmother, in her one act of motherly concern, insisted that they actually marry rather than just live together, and so they were married in a civil ceremony with no friends or family present, after which they immediately moved to St. Louis where my father was attending the University of Missouri.

They lived in St. Louis for four years, surviving on literally pennies a day—a meal could be made of fried soy beans, though there could be no heat in a Missouri winter. This extreme austerity plan was instituted because my dad didn’t want to ask his parents for financial help, and it took a severe toll on my mother and on their relationship. When my father’s schooling was finished, they moved back to California, where my father would become an intern at Camarillo State Mental Hospital and where my mother would work as a volunteer and a lay counselor.

I was born in the hospital on the grounds at Camarillo, and though the birth had been difficult and draining and my mother pleaded for some recovery time, three days later we all boarded a plane and flew to Hawaii where my father would proceed with his psychiatric residency at a hospital on the island of Oahu. It worked out well, since my father could surf in his free time and my mother was adopted by a large native Hawaiian/Phillipino family—she finally had found a community and was making some close friends. For the first time in her life she was putting down roots, and she was heartbroken and resentful when my father insisted upon moving back to California at the end of his residency.

By the time they landed in Redondo Beach, things between them had deteriorated to the point where our home was a place of anger—both repressed and expressed, sometimes violently. I was only a toddler then, but I remember the fear and sadness, the fighting and the tense silences. It was from this home that my father finally ventured out one night to abandon us for good, and the end of their marriage ushered in the beginning of our years of poverty and isolation, my mother and I alone with no family or friends to help us.