CHAPTER 10: RETURN

Chapter Nine War

"and it's 1,2,3 what are we fightin' for? don't ask me i don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam, and it's 5,6,7 open up the pearly gates. Well there ain't no time to wonder why...WHOOPEE we're all gunna die." (Country Joe McDonald - Woodstock, July 1969)

Between 1961 and 1975, ten percent of the population of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos died. Of the three million American soldiers who went to war there, 153,329 came home seriously wounded and 58,869 did not come home at all. The history of this war should be so deeply carved into my country's conscience that it would never take this course again - and yet, as I write now in 2005, it has.

In 1969, as I turned 30, the war lay at the halfway mark like a scarlet backdrop to all our lives. The resistance movement was steadily growing and each day brought roller coaster news. In the same month as the high of Woodstock came the low of the Manson murders in California. The Chicago conspiracy trial of Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and others for inciting anti-war protests began that September.

With my two babies, I made a brief visit to my parents in Oregon, returning in time to feel the Santa Rosa earthquakes shake the Bay Area in October. We were still living in San Anselmo with our little rock band household and I was having a harder time dealing with being a lonely single parent. Jane turned four that fall just as Jack Kerouac bled to death of alcoholism in a Florida hospital. In November, dozens of American Indian students symbolically occupied Alcatraz in the same week as 250,000 war protestors marched on Washington, and the following month the Altamont rock festival signified the violent opposite of what Woodstock had been less than half a year before.

Finally, as paying bills and getting along became unmanageable, our little community disintegrated and somehow the three of us parachuted into a tiny house up the road in the little community of Fairfax by ourselves. It was here that I began to stumble back to work, taking a job as a home extension agent, visiting poor families and helping them plan nutritious meals. I had to take some training, of course, and then I was on my own. It was so stressful to be trying to rejoin the work force while keeping my children on track that I developed a massive muscle spasm in my neck for which I was prescribed valium, becoming immediately addicted to the euphoria that came with the relief from pain.

That spring the National Guard mowed down four students at Kent State. We celebrated Josh's second birthday in May and my parents flew down from Oregon for a visit when a few months later I arrived at age 31 with hope that things were going to improve. It was exciting and scary to live alone with my kids again. I waded through grieving both their fathers that summer. To this day, something in me has never recovered from not being able to keep either one of them. It was a shining yellow summer mixed with a lot of crying and a little bit of shouting. There were men who came and went quickly in my life, like comets. Out in the world the war killed more Americans and conscientious objector status was legally created. The Equal Rights Amendment passed the Senate and House of Representatives (but in all these years has never had the ratification necessary to become a formal amendment to the Constitution). Women were gathering strength side by side with civil rights and the anti-war movement - and on Hill 805 in the mountains west of Hue, 11 young members of Delta Company died forever.

Somehow during those hot months I made the transition from nutrition worker to volunteer at the Marin County Economic Opportunity Council Multi-Service Center and by fall its only paid worker. I was kind of like a lab experiment. If I could make it out of poverty, it would symbolize everything they were trying to do. So we had this building in the middle of San Anselmo where we had meetings and free clothes and manned a resource phone line. We even had a big town meeting to organize the community. Behind the scenes, I had a boyfriend named Nation who wore lavender-tinted sunglasses, drove a Jaguar, had the same long blond hair I did, and dealt cocaine (which neither he nor I used) out of a very nice apartment. I met him when he came to check out the community center one day. And I began to drink more.

Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin overdosed that winter (Jim Morrison would follow by July), while I agonized in my personal life over where it was heading. I attended group therapy at the Marin County Hospital, which got me nowhere except a crush on the male therapist. While I was busy crashing and burning, my mother in Oregon was receiving honors and awards for being a "woman of achievement" and "citizen of the year" in her community where she was the children's librarian. As for the war,18-year-olds who were dying in Vietnam were finally given the right to vote in the spring of 1971. And within a few miles of me, the ferocious and beautiful Angela Davis was being held in the county jail as a civil rights political prisoner.

We made a final Marin County move that summer, when I was 32, to San Rafael where we inhabited the bottom floor of a big house with a large front yard space and a small back yard. Our first upstairs neighbors were a couple of guys, one of whom was the photographer who took this photo by a front window and used our pantry space for a darkroom. I got a job at a rehab center helping clients find employment as they left treatment. For a short time, two of them rented our front room and through them I began to take amphetamines, eventually going alone to a dealer's house for the first and only time in my life to buy some.

And I fell in love. This time he was a flaxen-haired, slender, Minnesotan Scandinavian Lutheran, Saab-driving, conscientious objector who had a job as janitor custodian for the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music right there in San Rafael and who played the sarod to top it all off and lived at the school.

It was a time of longing, shattering losses, and a slide towards the dark. John Lennon released Imagine that fall, and I imagined too much. This last California love affair was cruel. It took only six months to run its course. The Indian music was always woven through it, the walks in Deer Park, the poems he became. And in the end, when I was too sick from addiction for him to watch, he walked away up the little path from my front door to the street and out of my life. The distress was incurable, unbearable, electrocuting. Hope was getting shorter in duration.

My mother retired that winter after 12 years as children's librarian at the Corvallis, Oregon Library. Though I didn't know it, my father had begun his long journey through Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease that would eventually kill him and was busy with the many beautiful little wood carvings he would leave behind. And my 90-year-old grandfather was given a huge birthday party at his retirement home nearby. In an effort to rise from my ashes, I turned away from drugs and back to drinking and was prescribed antidepressants for the first time in my life. I began to attend classes at the College of Marin, in one of which I found out I still had an IQ of 140, the same as when my father tested it in my childhood. A month before I turned 33, the Watergate Hotel was broken into, setting the stage for a national drama that would last two years and result in the only presidential resignation in the history of our country. Coincidentally, only this year, 33 years later, was the identity of Deep Throat (the informant who helped break the story) revealed.

That fall of 1972, as Jane started second grade in San Rafael, we had to take in a succession of roommates to make ends meet. We watched mesmerized by the events of the Munich Olympics when Arab commandos killed 11 Israeli athletes. At last, in January 1973, there was an official ceasefire in the Vietnam war, but it would be another two years before the last Americans pulled out and the last American soldier died.

I have so few records from this time. It kind of all blurs together - school, the children, near poverty, drinking. Besides going to school, I must have been still working at some kind of job, because a letter mentions earning $375/month. In the summer of 1973 that I turned 34, Jane spent her first of two summers in Oregon with my parents who were overjoyed to have her, something I can now totally understand as a grandmother myself. It must have also been a sign of my gradual decline in coping.

That fall Jane began her third year of grade school and Josh began kindergarten. So we were all in school. I have no memory of how I paid for it. And it was some time during that winter that I fell into a brief romance with one of the musicians we had lived with in that big house in San Anselmo when we first moved to Marin. For the third and last time in my life, I became pregnant. Consulting a counselor at the College, I was encouraged to have a therapeutic abortion, which had just become legal in California late the year before (Roe vs. Wade had passed a few months later in January 1973). I went to the local hospital alone and came home alone the same day. I told almost no one, not even the father, who was soon gone from my life. I carried this secret for the next 11 years until it became the main item in a recovery fifh step with a sponsor in a sunny back yard in Oregon in early 1985. It was a great sadness and that is all I have to say.

We struggled on through another winter in that house in San Rafael. Out in the world Vice-President Agnew resigned amidst scandal to be replaced by Gerald Ford, and Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), a tiny group of terrorists bent on extracting $6 million worth of food for the poor from her wealthy father and exchanging her for SLA members who were in jail. By the time I turned 35, Jane had been gone for a month of her second summer visit to Oregon, and I was beginning to plan a daring attempt to ramp up my life. My country's involvement in the Vietnam War had officially ended, and my own battle was about to shift gears.

fall, fall

to the bottom of grief

at the end of weeping

there is sleep

sleep with the hand of god

beneath your head

and wake to know it is

your own

    

CHAPTER 10: RETURN