The Manson Women and Me

chapter fifty-seven

I left El Cholo and returned to my parents’ house in Santa Monica where I told them what happened with Craig’s parents. They were as shocked as I had been. We talked and talked and talked until we couldn’t talk anymore. Since there wasn’t much we could do, eventually talking seemed pointless.

I got up early to take a walk. My first stop was at Pacific Ocean Park, the amusement pier. When I was in high school my dream was to have a summer job there. I applied many times, and on every application I wrote that I’d be willing to take any assignment—even work at the cotton candy counter in spite of the fact that you got spun sugar in your hair, on your eyebrows, and on the fine hairs of your arm. I was never hired.

When I got to the Senior Center on the Venice Beach walk, I felt a rush of affection for the old Jews clustered around the benches and picnic tables playing chess and mah-jongg even at that early hour. The women all looked like versions of my grandmother—leathery faces, wispy gray hair, and babushkas. No matter the season, they all wore threadbare wool coats and carried around shopping bags, and they all looked as though they’d just walked off the steerage compartment of the boat, chicken feathers from the shtetl still in their hair.

They had come in waves, the first in the late 1800s fleeing the sadistic boots of the Cossacks; in the second wave, fleeing the sadistic boots of the Nazis. It was agonizing that they were being forced to flee again, this time by work boots of the construction companies hired by developers who were beginning to tear down the single-occupancy hotels, the only places they could afford to live. The vision the developers had—high-end, high-rise apartment buildings—prevailed and destroyed that community.

When I was younger and walked there with my mother, she always stopped to speak Yiddish to the women, and invariably one or more of them would pinch my cheek until it hurt. Shayna maidel (pretty girl) one would say as my mother looked on admiringly. As a kid, I didn’t like those pinches on my cheek but today I felt affection for this ragtag remnant of my grandmother’s tribe. I also felt a flash of anger. I thought about Craig’s parents. How dare they? Maybe they were too young to know about pogroms, or Cossacks, but surely they knew what came later. They knew about Hitler. Craig’s father served in the military in World War II. Why would I want to have anything to do with them? Why would I want to attend those goddamn weddings? Why would I want to be involved with their perfect specimen of an Aryan son?

I cut over to the beach. My eyes fixed on a schooner with a billowing red spinnaker tacking close to shore. The horizon was without the usual ribbon of tawny haze—it was so clear I could see the tip of Catalina Island. I followed the shore’s scalloped edge to a small jetty, and then I turned back to the beach walk where I stopped at the storefront synagogue. The first summer my parents lived at the beach (they bought the house when I was in junior high and used it as a summer cottage until they retired and moved there permanently), my father was jogging on a Saturday morning when an old rabbi motioned him to stop.

“Please,” he said in a thick Yiddish accent and motioned for him to follow. He pointed to the light switch. “Would you turn it on for me?” My father looked at the rabbi’s hands to see if they were wet, or dirty, injured or in some condition that would preclude such a straightforward task. My father shrugged, flipped the switch, and was on his way. When he got home and told my mother about the incident, she laughed. “You were his Shabbos goy,” she said, explaining that it’s a gentile who performs work that Jews are forbidden to do on the Sabbath, such as turning on electricity. She kissed him. “You did your part for my people.” This story became part of our family lore.

I stopped at a hamburger stand, bought a bad cup of coffee (no Starbucks in those days) and headed back to our house. When I got there I discovered that my parents had a guest for breakfast: Craig. I was worried that this was one of my mother’s interfering maneuvers. “What are you doing here?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to get the accusation out of my voice.

He said he had called to talk to me, and my parents had invited him to come for breakfast. Clearly I couldn’t rule out my mother’s intrusion. After breakfast, I helped my mother clear the dishes, and in the kitchen I asked her what they talked about before I got there.

“Not much. He said he loves you and he wanted us to know that he hated what his parents are doing. It did make me feel better that he wanted to distance himself from them,” she said. She came a little closer to me and swept my bangs away from my forehead.

“Don’t,” I said, recoiling. This bob-and-weave maneuver between us had been going on my whole life.

“But you’re so pretty. I want people to see your face.”

“But I don’t,” I said, pushing my bangs back across my forehead. “Mom, I’m not a baby,” sounding very much like one. “I’m in college. I’m allowed to wear my hair the way I want.”

Craig brought some dishes into the kitchen and asked if I would take a walk with him on the beach.

As we walked toward the water, he put his arm around me. I pointed out Catalina. The wind was up and there were white caps and several sailboats tacking parallel to the shore. When we got to the water, we turned north toward the Santa Monica Pier. We turned back when we got to the pier. When we got to lifeguard station 25, the one that marks the place where we turn to go to my house, he asked me if I minded if we sat for a bit. We climbed up to the platform and watched the sailboats.

“I didn’t tell you this last night. I couldn’t bear to. But the situation is even worse than I said.”

“What could be worse? They want to hire someone named Carmine to kill me?”

He smiled, but only faintly. “Well, that would be worse. As it is, what they said is pretty shitty for me, for us.” His voice wobbled when he said this.

“My mother said they had raised me to have good values and they expected me to honor their wishes. My father was there but he let my mom do the dirty work. She said, ‘What happens is completely up to you. You know we love you, but you can’t be with that girl.’

“And I said, ‘what are you threatening? That you’ll disinherit me?’ It was mean for me to say it. God knows they don’t have much to leave . . . especially divided three ways.”

Then I remembered my own family’s history. My mother told me that when my grandmother got romantically involved with my gentile, anarchist biological grandfather, her family said they would declare her dead if she married him. The joke was on them. She had no intention of marrying anyone.

“My mother said it was very simple. ‘You choose her or you choose us. If you choose her, you will no longer be our son.’”