The Amargosa River is one of the world’s most remarkable water courses. . . . You may cross and re-cross it many times totally unaware of its existence, but in the cloudburst season it can and does become a terrible agent of destruction.
—William Caruthers, Loafing Along Death Valley Trails: A Personal Narrative of People and Places
The Amargosa River begins as rare rain on the proving grounds, Pahute Mesa, not far from the made-up place where California becomes Nevada. The rain braids in washes down the alluvial slopes of Frenchman Flat and Yucca Mountain and seeps into the rock, flows south underground for about ten thousand years and sixty miles under a desert basin splashed with turquoise, aquamarine, smears of amethyst, rose quartz, folds of charcoal and onyx sparkling above dry lake beds of bleached bone dust. The river is ephemeral, sometimes there but mostly not, its few oases guarded by impenetrable thickets of thorny, black-barked mesquite.
However, near the town of Tecopa, the Amargosa surfaces to a surprise party of riparian wonders. Mesquite, as ever, but also endangered pupfish and voles, bobcat, coyote, cattails, mint, aspirin bark and other medicinal plants. Here the river turns, wends west then north in what my biologist calls the J curve, and in its wending digs a canyon. All along this canyon there are springs, water rising hot from the rock year-round. The jade mud at the springs is bentonite, good for the soul, skin, upset stomach or snakebite. A mask of it sucks the poison out. The water itself is said to heal. Fossil water, my biologist calls it.
We considered this place ours, my family and I, its names hints we did not take. Amargosa is Spanish. Tecopa is Paiute, after a Paiute chief. A mining company’s way of asking to dig. Yucca Mountain, the site of the would-be Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, genus Yucca, subfamily Agavoideae: agave, yucca and Joshua tree. Joshua comes from the Old Testament by way of the Mormons, as in leading whoever needs leading out of the desert. The Amargosa River never gets out. It dies below sea level somewhere beyond Tecopa, baked into the sky above Death Valley. Death as in death as in no one gets out alive.
The summer of 1967, the summer called the Summer of Love. My father turned seventeen and hitchhiked from his parents’ house in Thousand Oaks up to Haight-Ashbury and from there to a commune in Taos. In September he went home to LA to start his senior year. But he couldn’t handle school anymore. So says his 1979 memoir, My Life with Charles Manson by Paul Watkins, cowritten with Guillermo Soledad, the pen name of a member of the faculty at University of California at Santa Barbara. Paul dropped out, forfeiting his position as class president, and once again fled back to the Haight, only to find the weather had turned and the scene soured. By March of ’68 he was back in LA, living in a pup tent in Topanga Canyon, hiking, smoking pot, jamming all day on his flute and French horn.
One day, Paul was tooting his heart out amongst the butterflies, bees and mustard weed when two blue jays joined in. That’s how he likes to tell it. The jays reminded Paul of his friend Jay, who had a house up the canyon. Paul followed the creek up the canyon to Jay’s, where he discovered Jay’s car gone and in its place a school bus painted completely black.
Paul knocked on Jay’s front door. Two naked, wispy-legged teenage girls with waist-length hair stood in the doorway. Jay doesn’t live here anymore, said Brenda and Snake, welcoming Paul inside. Ten or twelve people—most of them girls, and those mostly naked—sat on the floor around a low table topped with candles. A fire in the fireplace. At the head of the table, a shirtless man holding a guitar.
Brenda introduced Paul. Charlie said, Won’t you stay and make music with us?
They played, Charlie talked, and then the rap session gave way to an orgy—we moved together in a kind of harmonious, inventive slither.
As harmonious and inventive as the slither may have been, Paul woke at dawn the next morning, slipped on his moccasins and split. He hitchhiked up to Big Sur and camped alone on the beach for three months, did some housesitting, then once again gravitated back to Los Angeles. Thinking he’d hitch to his camping spot, Paul stood with his thumb out on the corner of Topanga Canyon and Ventura for mere minutes before a battered green Plymouth pulled over. Snake and Brenda, fresh off a dumpster dive, invited Paul to come see their new digs.
Want to smoke a number? he asked from the backseat of the Plymouth.
No thanks. We’d rather make love.
Snake drove the Plymouth up Santa Susana Pass to Spahn Ranch. Paul unloaded his stuff and joined a group playing music in the woods. After, Paul and Snake—fifteen years old and dispatched by Charlie for this purpose—spent the rest of the afternoon balling in a eucalyptus grove. That night Charlie drove the Family to Bel Air to play music with Dennis Wilson. This reads like easily the best day of Paul’s short life.
Everything at Spahn’s was seen through a veil of dust, Paul writes of the movie-set ranch where he lived with the Family. The very next day they knocked out the wall dividing the jail from the saloon. The girls brought in mattresses and tapestries and turned the space into a giant bedroom. The boys installed a toilet in the corner, as no one was to leave during the evening ritual of music, lecture and orgy—the heaviest psychosexual therapy imaginable—which for the most part my dad makes sound like a lot of fun.
Charlie’s rap in those early days urged egolessness, surrender and other Eastern precepts cribbed from the Beatles. Plenty of acid that first summer, and group sex where casual rape was disguised as radical body positivity, but no talk of violence. Not even as much talk about the revolution as Paul would have liked. He’d been busted in Big Sur the summer before, tripped on acid all through a roadside beating from the cops, did some time in jail. Some time. That’s how he put it to Charlie, eliding the specifics of his two-day incarceration. Charlie had done time, real time, and it was this time that made him brilliant, more serious, more committed than the burnouts Paul had lived with in the Haight and Taos.
Which is not to say the scene at Spahn’s was no fun. The girls cooked and cleaned and embarked on thieving expeditions to keep everyone in zuzus, Charlie’s word for junk food. The boys smoked dope, played music, took Dennis Wilson’s Ferrari on a joyride on Santa Susana Pass and totaled it. Sadie had a baby. Minus a few bad trips—freak-outs, choking, confusing requests (Paul come over here and show this girl how to give head)—this was a beautiful time.
But the friction between the Family and Spahn’s wranglers, once easily lubricated by alcohol and dope, began to chafe. Charlie and Paul tried and failed to infiltrate Fountain of the World, the tantric monastery over the hill. Three new girls joined the Family: Juanita, Leslie and seventeen-year-old Catherine “Cappy” Gillies, whose grandmother owned a ranch in Death Valley. That’s when Charlie began rapping in earnest about moving to the desert.
The family spent October rebuilding the engine of their fifty-six-passenger International school bus and remodeling its interior, adding plush carpets, satin tasseled curtains, a refrigerator and a stove. On Halloween they loaded the black bus with mattresses, blankets, clothes, musical instruments, food supplies, five cases of zuzus, a kilo of grass, and fifty tabs of acid and lit out for the Mojave. They camped comfortably in the bus the first night, candy and drugs for dinner and sex for dessert. By dawn the next morning the bus was northbound, their magical mystery tour headed into the Panamint Mountains.
They found Goler Canyon, the only route to Cappy’s family’s ranch, treacherously steep, too narrow for the bus, strewn by flash floods with immovable boulders. Forced to ditch the bus, they loaded their backs with all the supplies they could carry plus two infants (another baby had joined) and hiked for miles up the canyon.
The Family tried to settle into the bunkhouse of Cappy’s family’s ranch, known locally as the Myers place, but Charlie grew increasingly paranoid. Cappy had told her grandma it would be only girls camping up there. Charlie and Paul scouted for other homesteads and soon found one farther up Goler Canyon, seemingly abandoned. Paul and Charlie tracked down its owner, Ma Barker, in Ballarat, the nearby ghost town. Together they convinced Ma Barker to trade them the Barker Ranch for one of the Beach Boys’ gold records.
Death Valley marked a turning point for the Manson Family, my father “wrote.” Our family lore credits this desert with saving his life, but first it tried very hard to kill him. The cosmic vacuum of the desert was a perfect place to program young minds. The vastness of scale offered by the stars, the treeless mountain ranges and plunging valleys urged surrender. With infinity so close at hand it was easier to give yourself . . . Ideas that would have seemed utterly inconceivable to me in West Los Angeles were perfectly understandable on a crystal clear morning from the peaks of the Panamint Mountains.
Death Valley inspired the particulars of Charlie’s apocalyptic thinking, particularly its ghost river, the Amargosa, here flowing, here raging, here dried to nothing. He became obsessed with one spring in particular, Devil’s Hole, bottomless, waves in its waters from earthquakes on the other side of the world.
This phenomenon always perplexed Charlie, who, from the time we arrived began speaking of “a hole” in the desert which would lead us to water, perhaps even a lake and a place to live. Charlie’s mythic hydrogeology sent him and Paul on grueling night hikes in search of a subterranean world, a cave, a place where we might take the Family and make our home when the shit came down. They hiked, smoked, Charlie rapped. Paul collected rocks and gaped unscientifically at the shock of stars overhead. Had they been there this whole time?
Nights got colder. Supply runs to LA and Vegas demanded hours of hiking down and then back up the canyon lugging plunder. Gas was scarce. Isolation invited madness. Paul watched the deterioration of his friend Brooks Poston, who took to chopping wood from sunup to sundown to avoid Charlie. Charlie himself struggled to adapt to the desert, hanging comatose in a hammock all day and raving like a demon after dusk. The flower child in Charlie Manson was dying, wilting away in Death Valley day by day, freezing by night.
Then, all at once, things changed dramatically. Charlie went to LA for a meeting with Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher and returned euphoric, having heard The White Album and found in it a name for his doomed prophecy: Helter Skelter. Race hate was palpable in the city, Charlie said, perfect conditions for the Family’s album. They would lure young love to the desert while the rest of the world burned. The Beatles had put the revolution down to music.
Later, after, Charlie said, Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.
He summoned the Family minus Brooks and Juanita back to LA, to the Yellow Submarine, a yellow two-story house on Gresham Street in Canoga Park. Suburbia . . . mellow enough when compared to L.A. proper but hectic after living in the desert. With his Family submerged in the Yellow Submarine, Charlie kept on with his grisly raps and tests. Paul enrolled in Birmingham High School to recruit teenage girls. The macho brigade moved in: mechanics, bikers and ex-cons, Vietnam vets, men tutored by the state as Charlie had been, men content to do what they were told in exchange for sexual gratification and good weed. Charlie sent Sadie, Ella, Stephanie, Katie and Mary to work as topless dancers in clubs in the valley. To buy vehicles and outfit them properly, we needed money. The girls went to work willingly.
On Gresham Street the Family focused on their music. Recording sessions at Brian Wilson’s studio went poorly. Charlie arranged for Terry Melcher to come hear them play in the Yellow Submarine. The girls cleaned the house, set up the instruments and made dinner: vegetables, lasagna, green salad, French bread and freshly baked cookies. Then they rolled some good weed. Melcher didn’t show. That motherfucker’s word isn’t worth a plugged nickel, said Charlie.
Preparations for Helter Skelter accelerated. The Family moved back to Spahn’s, hoarded dune buggies and Harleys, listened to The White Album nonstop. Charlie rapped on the Book of Revelation, chapter 9, locusts and scorpions, electric guitars and the coming holocaust the Family would ride out in their hole. “When all the fightin’s over,” Charlie said, “the Muslims will come in and clean up the mess . . . cause blackie has always cleaned up whitey’s mess. But blackie won’t be able to handle it and he’ll come over and say, ‘You know, I did my number, man . . . I killed them all and I’m tired of killing. The fightin’ is over.’ And that’s when we’ll scratch blackie’s fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton.”
Around this time Charlie instructed Paul to steal a big heavy duty Dodge ambulance-weapons-carrier and take it on a supply run to the Panamints. Paul thought of Brooks, zombied-out and withdrawn last Paul had seen him. He hesitated only a moment before hot-wiring the Dodge. By four a.m. he’d loaded the stolen truck with supplies and several girls . . . still in their nighties and T-shirts. By dawn this band was back in the desert, thinking themselves free.
Instead they were busted, the stolen truck pulled over outside the town of Mojave, the group thrown in jail. The next morning, Paul was bussed to the Los Angeles county jail. He was booked for car theft and, after a couple of days, released.
Returning to Spahn’s so suddenly, after anticipating a stay in the desert, made me even more aware of how denigrated things had become. Guns and Buck knives and bad vibes from the wranglers. Charlie, too. Gotta get a goddamn truck up there man. Something’s stopping us. One afternoon in late June, Paul and Charlie walked to the corral. Charlie climbed the fence and sat watching the horses. Paul asked how much longer. Charlie winked down from the top rail. “Helter Skelter is coming down,” he said, “but it looks like we’re going to have to show blackie how to do it.”
Another Panamint run—another bust. Released again, and newly appreciative of Charlie’s rule that only the girls carried dope, Paul ached for the desert. What was the barrier keeping him away? He felt it hitchhiking out of his city, felt it all the way to Ballarat. It was with him hiking up Goler Canyon, until the moment he saw Brooks bounding down the hill like a frisky goat.
Been climbing mountains, Brooks said. Met this far-out old prospector dude.
Paul Crockett, Big Paul, the man my father credits with deprogramming him. The three men wandered the desert for three days. Crockett showed Paul and Brooks the velvety texture of bentonite clay, how to find opal, lapis, gold. He showed them how the desert is an organism. At a mine called Gold Dollar he taught them that everything was by agreement.
Paul said, Charlie says everything is in your imagination.
Yeah, that’s kind of how it is . . . but it’s there because we agree to it . . .
The Panamints had agreed to Paul, offered clean air and water, sobriety, meditation, dark skies and deep sleep. His mornings passed billygoating up and down the mountain with a backpack full of that same mountain, his afternoons helping Juanita in the garden, making food from the mountain or grinding the mountain with mortar and pestle to pry gold from the quartz base. Evening meant dinner and making music.
This was the scene when Little Paul embarked on a mystical scavenging expedition to Las Vegas that would eventually cleave him from Charlie. In Vegas he stole a motorcycle and three live chickens, a rooster, two watermelons and two dozen eggs. Struggling to carry his loot up Goler Canyon on the motorcycle, he wrecked deep in the canyon. It was 125 degrees.
When at last Paul limped back up to Barker Ranch, dehydrated and deranged, the surviving poultry squawking under his arms, something strange happened. Big Paul healed Little Paul. Crockett laid his hands on Little Paul’s busted body and talked the pain away. My father felt his hurt evaporate into the dry air, a mist of agonies that belonged, he saw plainly now, in the past.
He was in Death Valley during the murders. He returned to Spahn’s soon after, unaware, and asked to be released from his agreements. Charlie said, Sure, Paul.
Snake crawled into his sleeping bag that night to say goodbye. I knew Charlie had sent her but it didn’t matter.
The Family followed Paul into the Panamints. Little Paul, Big Paul, Brooks and Juanita could hear them coming all night, war whoops and the engine screams of dune buggies echoing up the canyon walls. The Family moved into the Barker Ranch while Crockett and his apostates stayed a quarter mile down in the Myer bunkhouse.
Charlie started in on his creepy crawlies, saying, You ain’t released from nothing.
Saying, we cut him up real good.
Saying, had they heard about Bobby and Mary? They’re in jail, man . . . for murdering Gary Hinman.
Did they do it?
Sure they did it . . . you did it, I did it . . . we all did it.
Juanita split. Brooks wanted to. Crockett wouldn’t be run off his claim. Charlie sent Snake to Paul again. It was August in Death Valley, 120 degrees by eight a.m. Someone brought the mail from a forgotten post office box. The U.S. Army had summoned Paul to Los Angeles for a physical.
After a well-thought-out spiel on the virtues of drugs in expanding consciousness and his arrest record got him classified as unfit for service, Paul hitched a ride back to the desert with Brenda and Clem. Brenda sat in the middle. Clem drove. He drove and he talked. All night driving into the desert Clem talked about killing Shorty Shea. Yeah, it was a trip, you know. I never seen so much blood.
So when Charlie told me, I took the machete and chopped his head off so he’d stop talking . . . and it just rolled off the trail, bloop . . . bloop . . . bloop . . . into the weeds.
Paul did not tell Crockett or anyone what he’d heard from Clem. If he told it he would have to hear it again, would have to know it and live it. The Crockett camp feuded with Charlie through the summer of 1969 and into the fall, when leads on Tate–LaBianca ran dry. Charlie and Tex took to bringing their guns down to the Myers place for target practice. Nights, Brooks or Paul would open the door of the bunkhouse to find Tex and Charlie crouched in the darkness with knives between their teeth.
At last, the apostates decide to scoot. They hike fifty cold miles through the night to Shoshone, population thirty. Gas station and post office on one side of Highway 127, a bar, restaurant and an Inyo County sheriff’s substation on the other. Paul and Brooks tell the deputy everything they know. The deputy tells them to stay put. He asks the patriarch of Shoshone for a favor. Find these boys a place to live—somewhere secret. The man’s wife leads the boys out to the tufa caves at Dublin Gulch, a place still mistakenly called the Manson caves. (Manson himself never set foot there.)
Dug originally by itinerant miners, prospectors, and other vagabonds, who, over the years, found the town a convenient oasis in the scorching lowlands of the Amargosa Valley, the caves were for a long time the site of a thriving hobo jungle. The patriarch puts them to work. They are not particularly useful, wracked as they are by shock and withdrawal. When the Amargosa jumps its banks, Paul is ordered to hose mud away from the gas pumps. He stands catatonic, hose running, staring at nothing in awe and terror. Periodically someone takes Little Paul by the shoulders and turns him a bit, so the water from the hose might wash away more mud.
Eventually Charlie was arrested, charged with murder and indicted. Sadie and Leslie too. More bodies surfaced.
Sometime around Christmas, shortly after Charlie had been granted the right to defend himself, I felt the urge to go to LA and see the Family.
When I told Crockett, he said it didn’t surprise him. He said it would take a long time to get free of Charlie’s programs and my ties to the Family, and I wouldn’t ever do it by avoiding the issue.
I wanted to see Charlie. I wanted to see the others. At a deeper level perhaps, I wanted to extricate some meaning from all the horror and carnage, to step back into the nightmare and find something worth salvaging.
Once in LA, Paul tried to reach Snake at the Patton State Hospital. They said Diane Lake was there but that I couldn’t see her.
Next he went to the LA county jail. I’m just here for Christmas, Charlie told him. I always come for Christmas. Charlie wanted to talk about Crockett and the album. He wanted Paul to come back. “We’re getting the album out. You got to help them out, keep things together.”
Paul had already made full statements to the Inyo County sheriff and the DA. Yet he went back to the Family. He met with Charlie, discussed strategy, helped the girls secure new lawyers; I spoke to Sadie and Leslie and conveyed Charlie’s messages. Meanwhile, . . . I reinstituted therapy sessions and love therapy and began indoctrinating the new guys in the arts of sex. For a time I did become Charlie . . .
Paul moved the Family back to Spahn’s. They had an acid trip and orgy to celebrate their return. The next day Paul went to court to help Clem change attorneys. The day after that, unaware that documents including his statements had been delivered to Charlie per his motion for discovery, Paul himself went to court for a traffic violation. Brenda and Squeaky went with him. After receiving his sentence—sixty-five dollars or five days in jail—Paul sent the girls outside to get the cash from his stash under the dashboard. The girls left and never came back.
Paul went to jail for five days. Charles Manson had spent 23 years in prison. To me, five days seemed an eternity, particularly since I knew I’d pushed my own games to their limit. Released, delirious and exhausted from five nights of insomnia and searching, Paul hitchhiked back to Spahn’s, where the girls waited with copies of his statements. They threw him out, calling him Judas.
I had reached the end and the beginning at the same time, Judas said.
Exiled from the ranch, Paul slept up the canyon in a van that night. More accurately, he lit a joint, lay down on the bed in the back of the van, and I guess that’s when I fell asleep. When he woke the van was full of white smoke, flames melting the seats like wax.
Paul threw himself from the burning van and called for help. Someone drove him down the mountain to the emergency room. Before the hospital did anything they wanted to be certain I had medical insurance.
Blisters swelled his throat closed, more pain than I could ever remember having felt. Pop the bubbles! he begged, but his vocal cords were charred. No one could understand him. At last he grabbed a surgical instrument from a tray and jammed the handle down his throat, bursting the blisters.
Three days later, he woke in Santa Monica Hospital, without a voice. His mother, my grandma Vaye, was beside him, cutting his hair.
She said everything was going to be okay and for me to rest.
When he was well enough, he went to Big Sur. I wanted to sit on the edge of the cosmos and watch the sea in silence. From Big Sur he went back to the desert to look for gold and grow his voice back. Brooks and Big Paul took him for a steak dinner in Vegas his first night back. The Gold Dollar was off-limits, the whole of Goler Canyon now state’s evidence. The men lived in the Manson caves and did whatever work they could find, bussing tables, maintenance, fixing roads, construction, mining talc. They laid pipelines, played music, wrote songs and scripts and poems, cooperated with the prosecution, told and sold their stories in various ways over the years. Crockett met a woman and moved on down the road. Brooks, too. That’s the lay of the land when Paul finds an abandoned shack in Tecopa.
1980, the beginning of the end. See my father naked in a hot spring, mask of bentonite mud tightening on his face. He has followed the Amargosa from China Ranch—formerly “The Chinaman’s Ranch,” after Quon Sing, according to Loafing Along Death Valley Trails: A Personal Narrative of People and Places by William Caruthers, originally published in 1951 by Death Valley Publishing Co. My mother had a copy. She left it to me. Well, she left it and I took it. It was not really an inheritance scene.
The land was in the raw stage, with nothing to appeal to a white man except water. . . . The industrious Chinaman converted it into a profitable ranch. He planted figs and dates and knowing, as only a Chinaman does, the value and use of water the place was soon transformed into a garden with shade trees spreading over a green meadow—a cooling, restful little haven hidden away in the heart of the hills. He had cows and raised chickens and hogs. He planted grapes, dates, and vegetables and soon was selling his produce to the settlers scattered about the desert. From a wayfaring guest he would accept no money for food or lodging.
After the Chinaman had brought the ranch to a high state of production a white man came along and since there was no law in the country, he made one of his own—his model the ancient one that “He shall take who has the might and he shall keep who can.” He chased the Chinaman off with a shot gun and sat down to enjoy himself, secure in the knowledge that nobody cared enough for a Chinaman to do anything about it.
The Chinaman was never again heard of.
Having pilfered Quon Sing’s dates and figs, Paul filled his canteen at an irrigation pump and pressed on to this secret spring. Now, his mud mask dries to cracking. He scrubs the crust from his face, emerges, dresses. He wets his handkerchief and ties it around his neck. Rivulets of water stream between his shoulders and evaporate as he picks his way into a slot canyon, where the trail disappears. Paul pauses to eat a gooey date in the canyon shade, spits the velveteen pit into the dirt and doubles back, finding the tracks of the old railroad. He follows these deeper into the canyon.
Cliffs of calving sand rise on either side of him. Soon he can no longer see even the tallest date palms at China Ranch, their seeds ordered from a catalog by a pioneer daughter and mailed from Iran. He scurries up the canyon and emerges onto a treeless plain. Before him rises a hill of crenulated ore of a curious burnt-orange color, where the other hills are dun, pungent green-gray after rain, pink at sunset, splashed with yellow verbena in spring. At the base of this peculiar mountain a hole opens into darkness—a mine.
Paul ducks inside, in search of opal, lapis, gold. The mine is cool, not deep enough for him to stand. Yet, stooped there in the darkness, he sees a thousand promising glints. He emerges sometime later, his knapsack heavy with finds. Giddy, he continues until stopped by an unambiguous omen: black volcanic boulders arranged in a somber ring, a cross made of scarce timber blackened by the sun, an untended grave shimmering in the heat. The mine’s previous owner, presumably.
Did my father kneel? Did he pray?
Let’s say he prayed. Say he said sorry to the body, sorry that it did not get more time on this rock. Say he whispered, “God keep him,” though he does not right then know God. That’s another thing he’s looking for out here.
Lapis is the original blue. When I am in the emotional place my mother called no-man’s-land I wear a pendant of lapis from this mine, a specimen rutilated with an oxbow of mica, the stone pulled from the earth by my father, ground and polished by him, set by his hands in ropy gold cooled by his breath. That’s how I like to tell it.
It is the hottest part of the day now, Paul’s canteen light. He takes leave of the grave and hikes up the sandy wash toward shade. A clump of salt cedars. (Tamarisk, says my biologist, invasive.) Around the trees Paul discovers a broiling boneyard of heavy equipment: broken-down mining rigs, water tanks, rusted oil drums, gutted cars and a shot-to-shit dump truck with tires crumbling like old cake. At the heart of the junkyard he finds an abandoned shack. He cups his hands at the shack’s one window, spies a sink, a shitter, the springs of a burned mattress.
Another thatch of green beckons Paul up the hill, which he finds bristling with technicolor stones splotched with lichen, barrel cacti, sage, horny toads and Gilas. Canyon views at the summit, a wink from the river. China Ranch is to the southeast, a mile as the crow flies, and if that crow kept flying it would cross a mountain range and a Joshua tree forest, the site of a future solar array, and then a larger mountain range on its way to Las Vegas, the meadows.
As I’ve said, it’s the eighties. There is not yet an industrial solar array in the valley between Tecopa and Las Vegas. No surveying bird will mistake the array for water only to combust upon descent and streak flaming to the ground like a daytime comet. We have not yet whizzed gasping through certain deadly thresholds. The cane grass has not yet overtaken the spring at the top of the hill, the tamarisk has not yet brined the earth below.
For now, a desert miracle: a spring. Paul does not yet know this is Tecopa’s old stamp mill, only that someone has installed an iron catchment pool and it is full of clean-enough water. He fills his canteen, drinks, rewets his handkerchief and lays it across his burned neck, envisioning the pipe he’ll run from the pool down the hill to the shack beneath the salt cedars, the place he already thinks of as mine.
The tamarisk is a racist tree, a well-documented instrument of redlining. Lines of the shaggy, deep-barked trees were planted to cut off Black neighborhoods from golf courses, mountain views and other desirable features of desert living in Palm Springs and without a doubt beyond, thereby redistributing wealth to whites, says my biologist.
Paul moves nine miles down the road from the Manson caves to Tecopa. He works the mine and expands the house with whatever he can find, adding a bedroom of scrap plywood and railroad ties from the Tonopah and Tidewater, a greenhouse of chicken wire windows from the old borax mill. He masons a fireplace from rocks he finds on the long walks he takes in the canyon when he’s trying not to drink. He installs plumbing of sorts—scorpions come up through the drains and soon there is a soft, stinky depression behind the house.
The house, the stars, the astonished earth’s absorbing. Tecopa becomes his salvation, the love of his life. In one version it remains so for a decade, until a girl walks into a bar.
The Crowbar in Shoshone. Paul has worked his way up to bartender. The girl is leggy, freckly, a redhead. Bright coppery hair feathered out from brown, wide-open eyes. Huge glasses, huge boobs, beige smock top with puffy sleeves, no bra. Younger than him but not at all a girl. She is wearing a ring but not acting married. Paul asks where she’s from.
“Vegas. My ma and stepdad took a ride out here yesterday. Said the bartender was a good-looking hippie with no friends.”
Paul remembers them immediately, the old bikers who came in on a hog and dry-humped on the pool table until last call. He nearly had to pry them apart with a cue. The man’s white belly bulging from beneath the snug leather vest, the parting insults as the hog peeled out, spitting rocks, the other barflies grunting in admiration from the parking lot.
“It’s true I’ve got no friends,” Paul says. “Half the locals don’t like hippies and the other half don’t like narcs.” He studies her face, wondering how much she knows.
She smiles, says, “Sorry Joe called you—what was it?—‘Pinko flower power pussy’?”
He shrugs. “I’m not even all that pinko.”
“Fuck him,” she says, burning suddenly. “He’s a bad man. I know a thing or two about bad men.”
She gets up, plays Carole King on the jukebox. Joni Mitchell. Elton John. He asks what she does for work.
“Camera girl at the Sands,” she says. “Where you from?”
“LA.”
“I got a cousin in LA.” She shrugs and ashes her cigarette on the floor. “Used to be real apeshit about the place. Now I’d rather be out here.”
Paul pours himself a beer and Martha another. There is definitely an orb forming between them. She says, unprompted, “I’ll be a friend to you.”
He can’t think how to respond. She’s suddenly very pretty. “What’s a camera girl?”
“Vegas for photographer. Souvenir photos. Skeezeballs and their mistresses get dressed up to see a show on the Strip, we take their picture before curtain, run downstairs and develop them in the darkroom in the basement, rush our asses back upstairs and sell them at intermission. All in heels and basically underwear.” Makeup too, lots of it. She’s always getting written up for not having enough on. That’s why on her days off she wears none, no bra, no socks. She slips off her Keds and rubs her bare feet on the barstool—pretty loaded all of a sudden. “. . . then I lived with my sister in the Haight for a while.” By “lived with” she means “visited.” How did she get on this?
“You weren’t a hippie,” he says. “You’re too young.”
He notes the freckles across her collarbones, splashed down her shoulders, neck and breasts. She notes him noting and smiles. Maybe she doesn’t care about Manson. Maybe she just likes coming out here. A city girl but a sympathizer, a new convert to the Old Testament scene. An honorary desert rat, like him. Paul reaches across the bar and rubs her bare arm, smooth and sparkling with minerals.
She crushes her cigarette into the ashtray he’s fetched for her and raises her jaw. “I’m not a hippie,” she says, “but I would ball a hippie.”
They don’t ball, not that night. The camera girl does not even get his name.
Her mother is a change girl at Caesars Palace. When Martha was a child, some feminists printed the names of the casinos that didn’t promote women in the newspaper. Caesars Palace, the ads said, was the worst of the worst. NOW and the unions marched on the Strip, shut it down for a day. At last Caesars capitulated, promoted a few of the white change girls from the floor into the cage, including Martha’s mother, Mary Lou. With this raise and what she managed to steal, Mary Lou bought a ranch house walled with breeze-block on Fairway Drive, the sewer side of the public golf course. Martha’s older sister, Monica, lived in San Francisco with her husband. Her older brother, Jack, was a valet at The Sands. Her stepdad, Joe, sat at the bar at Caesars through Mary Lou’s whole shift, watching. They fought, then Jack and Joe fought. Someone in that house was always beating the living hell out of someone else, and the moment the hell started spilling out, Martha rode her ten-speed to a ditch that would one day be the Meadows Mall, to her friends’ houses, to school or work, to Harry’s, good enough reason to marry him.
Harry is in New York, working. He doesn’t write and he doesn’t call and he doesn’t send money like he said he would, and Martha does not mind a bit, drunk-driving her VW Bug back to Vegas beneath a smear of stars pointing west. The hot springs have melted the work from her muscles. On Harry’s mattress like a raft on a sea of dirty clothes she sleeps the deepest sleep of her life. She dreams a black orb and wakes knowing its message. She packs her shit, loads it into the Bug and drives to her mom’s house, to the bedroom she and Monica once shared, where all her favorite things are still, things she has never brought to Harry’s. Her perfect reading chair made out of raw wood and hide, the garage sale mirror, the full bookshelf and two big, thirsty ferns. Her acoustic guitar from Sears on a carved wood stand, a rug almost half the size of the room, an aloe plant in a macramé sling, a maroon and gold tapestry.
Behind the tapestry is a hole punched in the wall some time ago by some man. Inside the hole, waiting down in the darkness in a Crown Royal pouch hung on a nail, are all of her earthly treasures: ticket stubs to Jesus Christ Superstar, Bob Dylan, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Joni Mitchell, and Elton John, a fat ounce, and some whites. She adds her tips, rehangs the velvet pouch on the nail, replaces the tapestry and waits.
She lives again in this room in her mother’s house on Fairway Drive for two weeks. Mary Lou doesn’t come home, or if she does, she comes while Martha is at work. Martha listens to the radio and tends her plants and practices guitar with the chords she’d long ago drawn on the wall of the bedroom near a yellow submarine and Kilroy and Charlie Brown and Snoopy. She goes to the laundromat and into her mother’s bathroom (silver Marilyn Monroe print wallpaper) to smell Mary Lou’s cold cream. She rides her old ten-speed to her ditch, reads there and writes in her diary. She types a letter to Harry and another to her cousin Denise, buzzing with clarity. Obeying an arbitrary but nonetheless rigid timetable she’s assigned herself, on the second Saturday Martha loads the Bug with her now-clean clothes, her toiletries, her best books, her guitar, Denise’s typewriter, her cameras and equipment, her portfolio, her plants and her sack of treasures. After work, aloe and ferns buckled into the passenger seat, Martha drives back to the Crowbar.
There he is, her nameless love, polishing a glass at the bar.
He looks up. “What took you so long?”
Things are complicated, then they aren’t.
She moves to Tecopa.
They raise a parachute on a telephone pole for shade, grow grapevines, dates, figs, palms, bamboo. Martha grows mint from cuttings taken from Quon Sing’s patch. She feeds the soil coffee grounds, eggshells, bonemeal and menstrual blood. Ice plant and carrots, onions, corn, tomatoes, hollyhocks and honeysuckle. Her darkroom had been Paul’s workshop, and her chemicals and equipment share space with blades and bits and cracked five-gallon buckets of rocks until they open a rock shop in town, next door to the post office. Visitor’s Center—Rocks Maps Gemstones, the sign says. They sell postcards, maps, Paul’s rocks and jewelry, Martha’s photographs—landscapes, Paul in the mine, the dogs—and copies of The Amargosa News and Views, the newspaper they make with their friends.
Lise and I are born less than a year apart, Irish twins. Me in 1984 at the hospital in Bishop near the lake LA drank, Lise in 1985 in the back of Mary Lou’s Datsun 280Z on the side of the road in Death Valley. Around this time we whiz unknowingly through various deadly thresholds.
Well, Exxon knew.
Mom would open our front and back doors so randy tarantulas could migrate through. Don’t bother them, she said, they were here first. Lise practiced shaving with our dad’s razor. I remember them holding her down in the kitchen, lots of red-black blood on the green linoleum. She remembers me walking on a cinder-block wall in front of the post office. Calif. had just become CA but lif. was still sunstamped on the block wall. I slip and catch my chin on the cinder block, my blood lit red-orange in the late-day sun. Lise watches them sew me up, nine black stitches ants along my jaw. The scar still pulls a little, making my smile look sarcastic.
One planter box in the garden is surrendered to any tortoises we catch. We feed them iceberg lettuce until they tunnel out. Horny toads we tag with nail polish, cataloging them in a locking diary, until Mom says they breathe through their skin. “You’re killing them,” she clarifies.
A lump on my father’s neck. He goes for rides in airplanes. Lise and I sleep together beneath Raggedy Ann and Andy bedding bought on layaway. We lie before the swamp cooler, splayed naked in the sun with Dad cross-legged beside us, coated in mud.
We become the leaders of a small pack of dogs—Barry, Spike and Garfield. A pack of coyotes on the far ridge yipping, cackling, waiting. They get Garfield, then Barry, but not Spike and not us, not yet. Rattlesnakes at dawn and dusk. We never see but at times can feel the bobcat up at the spring, watching.
I’ve seen the footage and the reenactments. I’ve seen a video of my father on Larry King Live wearing a tan button-up shirt and a bolo tie. I’ve watched him fiddle with his malfunctioning earpiece and talk about his friends in the Family. They were sick. They thought they were righteous angels on a wave of revolution that was cleaning up the world.
In another video he is in Malibu, propped up with pillows in the bed where he will die of leukemia. He looks into the camera. He says, Here I am, my girls. I want you to know how much I loved you. I want you to know who I was.
Did he know then that he was asking too much? I was six years old when he died. Lise was five. We have none of the memories he so hoped we would have. We have CNN, Helter Skelter. My Life with Charles Manson. I look for him there. I play his interviews over and over, listening to his voice rasp and tremble in all the familiar places. I listen, listen like I listen to nothing and no one else, especially myself. But he never says what I need him to say.
Malibu had flowers that looked like birds and had the names of birds. Slugs and snails and dew, everything glistening. One neighbor’s house was a giant barrel, another’s a geodesic dome. The drained swimming pool behind the guesthouse we rented throbbed with frogs. Paper dolls on Lise’s birthday. The zoo, the tar pits, the beach, Disneyland.
Malibu. The place our father came to die and did, while I was doing somersaults in a busted hot tub and my sister was beside me, counting.
After, Mom ran the rock shop and sent us both to kindergarten at the trailer school—a dozen students in a single-wide trailer, grades K through six in one room, seven through twelve in the other, two bathrooms in between. It was early for Lise and she clung to me until we twinned. Our classmates, white boys and a husky Indian named Winston, liked to catalog our likenesses: same hair, same eyes, same laugh, same voice. Only our sizes were different. Was Lise a little little or was it me a little fat?
Winston was not good at reading. Something had happened to him as a baby and it made him slow, his voice hoarse. Sometimes our teacher would hit him across the face with his reading textbook. This was 1990. I had a bad singing voice too. For this reason Winston and I were put together in a closet at music time, the door cracked so we could hear the others sing. The crack let a little light in. It caught Winston’s top teeth, four silver ingots gleaming. I wanted them.
Sisters in the back of the rock shop after school, coloring with highlighters, making happy birthday banners from dot matrix printer paper, bird’s nest crowns with the shred bin. Mom is nicer to kids in the shop than she is to us, gives them TV rock or pyrite she never calls fool’s gold. Outside we pick pomegranates and split them open on mining equipment or glaciers of talc with holes bored in from a long-ago drilling race. We build forts in the salt cedars, venture deeper into the mesquite groves and then, bravely and at the urging of an older girl, into the grasses, the alkali soil crunch underfoot. We watch out for rattlesnakes—for that river that is sometimes there and sometimes not.
Little twin, fat twin. Mom says we’re sturdy stock, black Irish on our dad’s side, crazy fairy folk, jockeys and alcoholics. From Mom’s side came our freckles, bad vision, more alcoholism, more crazy.
It seemed we three were alone a long time, but it also felt immediate that we girls were no longer allowed to sleep in Mom’s bed, not allowed the Mountain Dew or the Kraft singles not ours in the fridge, a hard hat and an Igloo lunch box on top. Her boyfriend Ron was sober, recently released from prison, an apprentice in the carpenters’ union. They met at an AA meeting. He built parking garages for casinos in Vegas and needed to be closer to his jobsites. We moved to Trout Canyon, a wrinkle on the west-facing slopes of the Spring Mountains (“Las Vegas’s sleeping porch,” Caruthers called them), where my father’s parents owned a one-bedroom cabin.
Trout Canyon was a spooky, sensual place, the plot steep, rocky and alive with wild juniper, cherry and apricot trees, blackberry brambles climbing the chain-link. At the bottom of the property, near the dirt road that came up the mountain, sat a slimy pond ringed by weeping willows. Ponderosa pines sticky with sap, a patch of lamb’s ear I liked to walk on with bare feet. Inside the cabin, between two stones in the fireplace, was a secret door. When we opened it a tiny animal skull peered out at us, something with teeth. In Trout Canyon I told my mother that all I wanted was for us to be normal, a normal family.
She said, Oh honey, there’s no such thing.
I would have liked to stay in Trout Canyon forever, but it didn’t belong to us. We moved again, down the mountains to the valley floor to Pahrump, an unincorporated smattering of innumerable Libertarian retirees who refused the census, its northern boundary Yucca Mountain, its southernmost point a dry lake bed rimmed with two legal brothels and a commercial military-grade artillery range where you could shoot bazookas. On a clear night, from the front door of our wood-paneled double-wide on the north end of the valley, we could see the lights of Vegas over the range, our neon aurora borealis.
At the bus stop on the first day of second grade, Lise and I met our first best friends, Ty and Kevin Chen, real twins who looked nothing alike. If they were twins, we were twins, we all agreed. The Chens’ dad was dead too. The four of us made an elaborate fort near the bus stop, a tumbleweed midden surrounded by a labyrinth of trails through the sagebrush. Me and Lise and Ty and Kevin were in the fort early mornings well before the school bus came and after school until dark. We were in the fort all weekend, unless we were breaking into houses with Mom.
She’d read the real estate listings in the newspaper, copy down the addresses of the listings that interested her, and we’d head out. These were boom times in southern Nevada, so many houses being built, stucco and drywall on bare desert lots off unpaved roads, no trees or sidewalks or city water. And best of all: no neighbors. Mom liked her space. There was no worse slur she could sling at a house than “too close to the road.” She was not quite a hermit but easily a misanthrope. She liked to see people coming a mile away, alerted by a dust plume billowing across the valley.
If a house was not too close to the road, we entered in various ways. The front door was sometimes unlocked, or the garage door. We rolled it open and ducked under. More often Lise, runty and cunning, slid through the doggie door and let us in. Mom could pop a screen in seconds, so sometimes Lise went in through a window. Or we came through the front door: one of the local realtors used the same code for the digital locks on all her listings and never changed it, so that was worth a try. We walked around the house, picking out our rooms, enjoying the way our voices bounced.
Mom went to the kitchen sink and held her fingers under the water, sensing the pressure, timing how long it took to warm up, feeling how hard it was, looking through the window for the mountains.
She discussed with us the carpet decisions, the tile decisions, the drywall job, the foundation. We shut ourselves in the walk-in closets, opened and closed all cabinets, fridges, sliding glass doors and blinds. Lise and I fantasized aloud about what colors we’d paint our rooms. Mom fantasized about central air and skylights. Once, we all three lay in a dry Jacuzzi tub and sang. Then we left everything more or less as we had found it and drove home across the desert, briefly invigorated by the lives we might live.
It was around this time that Mom took Lise and me to Outback Steakhouse and announced she was going to have another baby. We ate a Bloomin’ Onion and watched her cry.
My mother lived by her own code, something like: you won’t see it all if you don’t trespass a little. She had little regard for the concept of private property, but after her third baby was born—and with help from G-ma Mary Lou, who tapped her pension from Caesars—Mom and Ron bought land in Pahrump: three and a half acres shaped like Nevada, mostly mesquite with a beautiful big cottonwood shuddering at the tip. Mom customized a double-wide for the property and we were there the day its two halves were trucked in.
My mother’s career was a bit of a con. She didn’t graduate from high school and had no formal education in museum studies, yet she expanded the rock shop into the Shoshone Museum. She was a self-taught historian—meaning she read a lot—and learned photography in the basement darkrooms of the Strip. My father had taught her a little about mining and lapidary work, and she taught herself a lot more. She began to make her own jewelry and sell it at the museum and at gem shows. She was an artist, a naturalist, a writer, though she never used those words.
At some point she stopped taking pictures. I know she did not always love being a mother. She loved her garden and smoking and work. When she got home we were not to ask her any questions for an hour. She wanted, more than anything, to be left alone in her garden on unpaved Lola Lane, bordered by open desert and alfalfa fields. She cultivated the property with a technique known by the family euphemism “view it at night,” a specific subset of theft, typically the stealing of landscaping elements from a corporation by cover of darkness. She might say, “They just put century plants in in Summerlin. Perhaps we should view them at night,” and in no time we’d uproot a few ornamental agaves from the freshly landscaped median and take them home. She might back up her Bronco over a new curb and load it with baby date trees waiting to be plugged into the sod lawns of an unfinished subdivision. She might, with Ron’s help, roll expensive decorative boulders from the outer banks of the parking lot of a union-busting casino and into my dad’s old truck. She might persuade Ron to spend his weekend digging her a pond then stock it with lily pads and koi skimmed from a golf course water feature. In this manner the Lola property bloomed. Frogs moved into the pond with an elusive turtle we got from the fair and never saw again, only heard plopping himself into the water when we opened the front door first thing in the morning.
Other wonders appeared. A bench swing in a grove of screwbean mesquite, their curly-fry seedpods falling silently into a bed of mint. A fence, a deck, a patio off the master bedroom shaded by climbing roses. Dogs from the pound to keep Spike company: a Rottweiler we named Vash after Captain Picard’s girlfriend and a lunkhead golden retriever I got to name Oberon because I was just back from Shakespeare camp and Mom had missed me.
One day, driving on the ribbon of highway between Tecopa and Shoshone, we passed a house that Mom knew to be vacant. We stopped to take a look. Behind the house we saw a pen, and in it two donkeys, one iconic brown with a black cross of Bethlehem on its back and a bristly Mohawk mane, the other entirely white, an albino.
I didn’t even notice the animals’ ribs or the empty trough turned over in their pen, but as we drove away, Lise began to howl. She didn’t stop until Mom borrowed her sponsor’s horse trailer and we took the donkeys home. Around this time and in a similar manner our household came into a gigantic potbellied pig. Lise named him Wilbur and almost as quickly came home from school to find him killed and partly eaten by Vash. It was not Vash’s fault, Mom said. She was made that way.
The donkeys fared better than Wilbur. Ron built them a corral and we fed them sheafs of alfalfa from the farm at the end of the road. Not long after their arrival Lise and I took the brown one—mine, Buckwheat—out into the desert for a ride, playing Mormons. Her donkey, the albino, was skittish and mistrustful and would not tolerate mounting. As we circled back, a strange sound echoed into Deseret, a keening. The white donkey, braying for her brother. The moment she caught sight of him, she tried to jump the corral. But she was tired, malnourished, afraid. We could see all this in her eyes as she writhed on the corral, stuck, her hooves screeching on the iron bars and sending up sparks. That’s how Spark got her name.
You must remember that this was real. Real hooves, real sparks.
Mom and Ron got married in the garden of the Lola house on Super Bowl Sunday. They served sub sandwiches from the Blimpie inside Terrible’s Town. The men watched the game during the reception. Lise and I jumped on the trampoline with our cousin Darren, sailing high over the garden, our sunflowers, ice plant, water lilies, roses, much of it viewed at night, though some of Mom’s acquisitions had occurred in broad daylight. I leapt into the air, spying on my mother in her garden. Her shoulders were wrapped in creamy lace—a curtain she’d transformed for the day into a gauzy shawl—and her hair shone in the sun like some new metal. She was surrounded by women she loved and who loved her. She was holding her baby. When the vows came she had assented to every word save one.
Obey.
My mother never got to make everything she wanted to make, to build even a fraction of what she wanted to build. Still, she built a lot. When she learned that a fantastically preserved skeleton of a woolly mammoth had been dug up from the bed of the Amargosa near Tecopa and taken north, she convinced Sonoma State to give it back. She built—well, Ron and some of his AA buddies built but Mom fundraised, lobbied, agitated into existence—a one-room wing on the back of the Shoshone Museum to house the mammoth. Then she took us to Sonoma to get him.
He was on display in the sunny atrium of some sciences building, presented as he’d been found, lying on his side with his ribs arched skyward, his spectacular tusks unfurled in the mud. Mom and Ron dismantled the display, wrapping the mammoth bones in moving blankets and sleeping bags we’d brought from home. It was not unlike viewing things at night, except for the graduate students helping under the direction of Kathy, a geology professor my mother had gotten to know during the repatriation negotiations. Kathy was boyish, not married. She and Mom had something between them, something I wanted the way I’d wanted Winston’s silver ingot teeth. But my job was to look after baby Lyn, just learning to walk. I spent mammoth moving day with baby fingers in mine, watching Lyn bumble back and forth across the lawns of Sonoma State in bare feet, the grass’s giving softness a magic to me, as well the wide fronds offering shade in a courtyard, the ancient trees and the birdsong everywhere—all of it became on that day the smooth cool lush shelter I would ever after attach to the word campus.
Mom wanted a real house. She said so on our early morning runs down Lola Lane. Past the cottonwood where the gravel road went dirt, then right on the ranch road, irrigation ditch and alfalfa fields on one side, wild desert on the other. I held a knob of silvery cottonwood as a marker and dropped it when we slowed to a walk, so that each morning we ran a little farther, deeper into the alfalfa fields, toward the dairy.
She was done living in trailers, she huffed, even a trailer called a manufactured home, even a double-wide on acreage with an apron of cinder blocks obscuring its wheels, even a trailer with a pond.
We moved into a house on Navajo Road, in the Indian streets on the southernmost end of the valley. Navajo, Paiute, Savoy, Comanche, Pawnee, Cheyenne branching off Homestead Road with two brothels down on the end of Homestead, the Chicken Ranch and Sheri’s. I learned to parallel park at Sheri’s, which boasted one of the few curbs in town. The other option was the Mormon church, but my mom refused to set foot there. My school bus had passed the brothels every morning and afternoon, turning around in the Sheri’s parking lot. It was a moment I waited for, that slow view of the Chicken Ranch—stick-built, painted hot pink and baby blue, gingerbread embellishments and dormer windows, a white picket fence. I wanted to live there.
But I lived with Mom and Ron and Lise and Lyn in Pahrump in the Navajo house, stick-built, two stories in the style Mom called Cape Cod. Cape Cod was not a place any of us knew or wanted to know. Whatever the Navajo house was supposed to be it was clearly not. Something was badly off in the proportions. Everything seemed to change for the worse the day we moved in. In fact I came to consider the Navajo house cursed. It had no insulation, it had a pigeon infestation. Pigeons fucking day and night, Mom’s words. Evenings she sat outside in a lawn chair with a pellet gun, smoking cigarettes and picking them off. Spike got the carcasses and did his thing with them.
Spike died of old age in the Navajo house with his head in my lap on the floor in front of the bookcase, an institutional metal rig my mother had coated in FlexStone, a mainstay of her decor repertoire. The bookcase was crammed with what seemed like every kind of book, one whole glorious wall arranged in no order and by no rule except to keep the encyclopedia sets together. Encyclopedia of Rocks and Minerals, Encyclopedia of the Supernatural, Encyclopedia of Greek Myth. I ransacked this shelf one summer when all I did was work and read and tan. Out on the blazing trampoline I read Zane Grey, field guides to rocks, addiction memoirs, second-wave feminist manifestos, N. Scott Momaday and Tony Hillerman. Orwell’s essays plus 1984 and Animal Farm, which I thought was about an animal farm. I reread my old Goosebumps and Boxcar Children and Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. I read Cadillac Desert and Silent Spring and several anthologies of local color and Manifest Destiny propaganda. I read the Pahrump Valley Times every day starting with Sports, looking for pictures of hot boys playing anything. I read the clippings from the Amargosa News and Views in my mother’s dusty portfolio, her short-lived column of plainspoken Caruthers-style pieces about zany desert folk, half of them dogs. I read her letters to the editor about chemtrails and Yucca Mountain and domestic violence.
We buried Spike in the backyard.
We watched a lot of VH1.
G-ma Mary Lou bought Lise a porcelain doll and Lise was too gracious about it so G-ma kept buying them, collector’s items she said of what even we knew was daytime TV junk, Kewpies and Precious Moments and a themed doll for every holiday. Lise’s room filled with smooth glass heads with curls painted on, drowsy eyelashes and deathless plastic eyeballs. She stopped sleeping, got into feng shui, broke the bad news. Our front and back doors were perfectly aligned, inviting the worst kind of energy. The stairs were positioned in such a way that they shot all our blessings right out the front door.
Too hot upstairs, too cold down. Old pink-gray carpet downstairs with a threadbare trench leading to the bathroom. One morning Mom woke me before dawn. She was watering the downstairs carpet, that smoker’s-lung color against the green garden hose. “Get dressed,” she said, “I’m scamming the insurance company and I need your help.”
The scam worked! We got new carpet. But the trench came back. Nicotine stained the walls, stamps of white when you took a picture down. Off acoustics. High ceilings paneled in pine so sound couldn’t find a clear path. No one could hear anyone, ever, nor the phone ringing, so by the time you got someone’s attention you were already screaming.
Bad vibes indeed and these confirmed for me that we’d always be two families, two houses. The Tecopa house and the Navajo house. One family of four, one family of five. We—my mother, Lise and I—missed the Tecopa house as we missed my dad. Grief was a river running under the three of us, all but invisible to Ron and Lyn. We couldn’t help it. We longed for Tecopa, each in our own way, my mother’s mostly private. I only ever saw it out the corner of my eye. Between Pahrump, Tecopa and Malibu I tried to triangulate who my father had been. I developed various small, secret fantasies about him meeting boys I liked or walking me down the aisle. At night he might speak to me through my stomach gurgles. If I prayed, I prayed to him.
I said, Dad, I wish you were here. I need you.
Or, later, Dad, I wish you were here. Mom needs you.
Darkness descended on the Navajo house. One by one, we each became deeply unhappy there. Mom had lost Spike and a bunch of other people. Cancer, mostly, and suicide. She was sick all the time. I became an angry, overachieving teenager completely obsessed with one cruel boy after the other—the worse he treated me, the better. Lise and her born-again boyfriend lost their virginity to each other and then the boyfriend asked Jesus to give his back. Lyn had lava dreams, wrote a report on Martin Luther King Jr. winning the Nobel Peas Prize. Ron left the house at four each morning to drive to jobsites in Vegas. For breakfast Lise made him horchata rice cooked mushy with butter, sugar and cinnamon. He got home a few minutes before dinner, sat speckled with concrete at the table and nodded off while we ate Mom’s Marie Callender’s or Hamburger Help Me. After dinner Ron showered then collapsed in his recliner upstairs in the den and we all watched TV. Some nights he stayed downstairs on the computer. He got deep into Age of Empires. We all got deep into X-Files and Coast to Coast AM. Art Bell lived and broadcast from a few dirt lots away. Our desktop computer helped NASA look for UFOs. Mom monitored the Test Site and Yucca Mountain and Area 51. Aliens, lunatics with guns, cancer clusters. What was crazy about any of it? Lise and I were taught to identify chemtrails by the distinct pattern and pacing of their dispersing tail. Sometimes we were not allowed to play outside because, Mom whispered, They’re spraying. Her belief was blinding, too bright to behold. We started looking at her only through the big picture window. There, she stalked across the front yard in her nightgown, camera raised to the midday sky.
The Navajo house had a few rules. We could not say shut up. We could not call someone stupid. We could not say I can’t. We could not answer the phone during dinner and never if the caller ID said UNKNOWN. All mail went unopened into a drawer by the back door and that drawer was never otherwise opened. If someone came to the door we were to sic the dogs on them.
Her hands began to shake there. One Christmas I waited downstairs at the picture window for a boyfriend to pick me up. While I waited, Mom’s reflection said nonsense things to me, silly things she seemed to know were funny though not why. She amused and frightened me.
I suppose she must have been in a great deal of pain—even now I struggle to simply say: she was hurting. Struggle to say: she was sick.
Many evenings of my childhood were spent in the common areas of twelve-step clubs; many weekends passed at AA picnics or roundups. I have sat in open meetings and eavesdropped on closed ones. Miles and miles of lonesome desert road has folded beneath my mother, my sister and me as we listened to rock bottom stories on tape. I have read the literature. I have attended my fair share of Al-Anon meetings. Addiction is one of those concepts I cannot recall ever learning. A notion I seem to have been born knowing. Words my mother had been taught to say too late. She’d had to learn for herself, and told us when and where and how she’d learned, was learning. She told vague stories about the years she drank, gestured to things she’d done to us when we were little, described Lise protecting me, me protecting Lise, shameful incidents neither of us girls remembered but which our mother confessed to anyway. AA was as close to a church as our family would ever get. My mom was careful to never say she was an alcoholic or used to be. I ached for her to say it—the present tense frightened me. For years she had cigarettes, coffee, work, gardening, building, making jewelry, making dinner. She was never still. She never played. I asked her often how come if people replaced one addiction with another, like she said, she couldn’t just get addicted to playing. That’s not how it works, she said. You can’t get addicted to anything that’s good for you.
She kept a rainbow of chips in her jewelry box, sobriety medallions in every gleaming color commemorating days then months then years. I was allowed to touch them but never to remove them. I often opened the jewelry box to stroke them. I liked how they stacked up, how they slid. They called to me, budding kleptomaniac, but I never took them. All I knew for sure as a girl was that if my mother wasn’t sober, my sisters and I would be the kids in those rock bottom stories: lost, taken or dead.
Today I know even less. I don’t understand her at all. I can’t. She is a void. She goes suddenly very still. Hurting all over, she said, and no one could say why. No one believed her, she said, and she was right. Too late, they diagnosed her Lyme disease. A tick had bitten her in Sonoma, she thought she remembered, while she was getting the mammoth. She was given OxyContin for her chronic pain.
Soon, with help from the internet, she became her own doctor.
She quit the museum or was fired, we didn’t know which. I read the accusations in the paper. She took the money but only as a loan, she said, and what she took was nothing compared to what she was owed.
The Navajo house filled with rocks and bore down on us, that stick-built house with a brick-and-mortar mortgage. Cigarette burns opened like eyes on the blankets and cushions and on the couch where she watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files, Law & Order.
We watched her fall asleep with cigarettes smoldering between her fingers. I remember my dad almost burned alive in the van. We developed a technique of intervening at the fabric’s first singe but not before, for if she woke she’d accuse us of overreacting, and without a burn hole we’d have no evidence to the contrary.
On her arms were morphine patches and on her nightstand a mortar and pestle so she could grind her Oxy and snort it. Many mornings she did not wake up and some she could not wake up. Once she took so many pills that she passed out before she could swallow them all. She still had them on her tongue when we found her, in various stages of dissolve.
Lise and I took turns on those mornings. One sister walked Lyn down the road to a friend’s house, asked Lyn’s friend’s mother to make sure Lyn got on her bus, then this sister boarded her own bus for high school.
The other sister waited at home for the ambulance. She greeted the EMTs. One of the EMTs was a few years older than me. Sometimes I ran into him at parties, sitting around a fire on old tires or tailgates, he and I usually the only ones not chugging Robitussin. He never acknowledged that he’d carried my mother naked on a stretcher down our bad energy stairs on more than one occasion.
(How many occasions?)
So many I lost count. So many the emergency wore off. Waiting for the ambulance was the worst job, and Lise and I bickered bitterly about who would do it, who had a test in first period, who had too many absences, whose teacher was more lenient and whose was a hard-ass. I often won. My first period was Drama 2 and I got a scholarship to Shakespeare camp. Lise’s was Algebra and she failed it. I took Drama, Anatomy & Physiology, Civics, AP English. I was on the yearbook committee and put so many pictures of myself in it that the class of 2002 called it the Claire Bitch Project. Lise got held back, needed glasses but no one noticed. She skipped class for the darkroom. I skipped class for Dance Dance Revolution at Mountain View Casino and Bowl. My seasons were volleyball, basketball, plays, work. I answered phones at Domino’s Pizza, lifeguarded and taught swim lessons at the public pool. I read at work and through various boyfriends’ band practice. When I turned sixteen I was given my mom’s 1970 orange Volkswagen Beetle.
Lise stayed home and basically raised Lyn. She read the Golden Compass trilogy and the Encarta encyclopedia and watched Pop-Up Video. She mastered first the SNES, then PrimeStar and finally dial-up. She barely graduated from high school.
I graduated easily but could not afford college. Ron had been slipping large portions of his paychecks into slot machines, I deduced after he finally agreed to fill out his portion of the FAFSA. The spring my classmates spent saving up to move out or dropping out to have their babies, I spent having risky sex with dullards and overexercising, baffled on the treadmill at how my stepfather’s tax returns could tally up to over a hundred thousand dollars per year and yet every day at lunch one of my girlfriends loaned me two of her five dollars so I could buy Pizza Hut breadsticks or a seven-layer burrito. The mail drawer overflowed with envelopes that went white yellow pink. The phone rang and rang and we did not answer for the caller ID always said UNKNOWN.
Mom called her overdoses accidents. I let myself believe her. Lise didn’t, couldn’t. But Lise wasn’t unkind with her wisdom, allowed me my denial. So many years before, when our father was dying, Lise had been the one to tell me what dying meant. It’s my first memory. She explained impermanence gently but exhaustively when I came up for air in the busted hot tub, so perhaps she thought she needn’t explain it again. Still, it’s a concept I struggle with.
I moved to LA, into an apartment with my cousins. Lise stayed behind in Pahrump with Lyn. That’s when, Lise says, the wheels came off.
Mom made more trips into Las Vegas to get pills from her sister. On one of these trips she totaled her car by driving it off an on-ramp. Lyn was in the car. Years later, we found out it was Lyn driving. Lyn would have been ten.
After the accident, Mom took Lyn. They disappeared for six days. When she came back, out of money, Mom said they’d been in Utah taking a friend to a doctor’s appointment, that she had wanted to show Lyn Utah, that it was none of our beeswax where she was she was a free woman.
She took out a restraining order against Ron and he took one out on her. He was at work the day the deputies served it, forcing Mom out of the Navajo house. She took Lyn with her. Lise was seventeen and could do what she wanted, Mom said. But Lise, who knew her capable of any insane thing, went with her, to protect Lyn.
Somehow Mom convinced someone to rent her a house, though she had no job, no money, bad credit. I doubt she even had a bank account at this point. But she was smart, knew how to manipulate the dirt farmers, as she called the men in our town. She told a landlord that she was being beaten by our stepfather. I don’t know that she wasn’t, but I never saw him hit her or be violent with any person. What I did see was my mother hurt herself, often and not always by accident. She would pass out on the toilet and fall face-first into the sink or throw herself down the stairs. In this manner she had broken her nose many times and the blood vessels there seemed permanently open, her nose squished and pink and blooming. It would not have been difficult for her to convince a landlord that she needed a place immediately, a battered woman and her girls. If you knew my mother you’d know it would not have been difficult for her to convince a man to let her live for weeks and weeks without paying him anything. This would have been a kind of sport for her, she who enjoyed a well-crafted scam, swiped letterhead and stationery wherever she went, who always said you could never have too many death certificates on hand. (At the time I was paying part of my rent in Mar Vista with fraudulently extended Social Security checks, survivor’s benefits from my father that would have expired on my eighteenth birthday if my mother had not used my letters of recommendation to forge documentation to extend them for another year—my graduation present.) So while it isn’t at all difficult for me to see how she got into the rental, I still find myself fixating on this figure: the landlord. Maybe he represents a sort of valve that might have closed, preventing everything that happened, after.
I was in LA working as a roller girl at the Puma store on the Third Street Promenade, discovering yoga and Al-Anon, failing to learn to surf, taking English 101 at the community college and falling in love with California’s legendary weed. One night, a Sunday, on my fifteen I used a calling card to call the Navajo house looking for Lyn and Lise. Ron told me Mom had taken them.
Where?
He didn’t know.
How long had they been gone?
Almost a month.
The next day I called my old high school and the receptionist said Lise hadn’t been there in three weeks. Lyn’s elementary school said longer.
I’d like to say I started packing. No one knew where my sisters were. I’d like to say I went home to find them. If it happened now I would get in my car and scream across the country and drive up and down every road in Pahrump kicking in every door until I found them. But this was my mother. I loved her and she loved me, loved us. I was eighteen years old, a roller girl at the Puma store. Their disappearance was somehow the Fates, the natural and inevitable culmination of all the accusations and secrets and blood, so the situation seemed somehow inevitable, maybe okay. I could not say to myself: she is a drug addict and she has kidnapped your siblings. It was that and it wasn’t. I did not drive home to the Navajo house. I did not go looking for them. I had class in the morning. I had to wake up early to find free parking close to campus. I had to finish Heart of Darkness.
In the rental Lise and Lyn slept together on a mattress on the floor, Lise stroking Lyn’s hair to get her to sleep. Lyn was in the third grade. Lise was a senior in high school. The rental was a two-bedroom duplex. Mom had her own room. Before she left for school, Lise told Lyn, Do not go in there. Lyn begged Lise not to go to school. Lise stayed as often as she could without dropping out. There was no food except what Lise’s boyfriend brought from a gas station. Lise made sure they kept their shoes near.
One night, Mom passed out and Lise took Lyn’s hand and whispered that she was to run and not to stop. Even if you get scared, she said. Together they ran into the desert night. It was dark. They stumbled over bushes and rocks. Lise pulled Lyn and together they ran toward the glowing neon tubes of the Mountain View Casino and Bowl.
Lise’s boyfriend had snuck her a calling card. Trembling at a pay phone in the vestibule of the casino, she used it. She had to be quick, had to make the call before a security guard came and said you kids can’t be in here without a parent. Lise called Ron and he cried and said where were they and to wait. They waited between two sets of black-tinted glass double doors, hoping security wouldn’t come. They did not know whether Mom had woken up, and if she had, whether she would beat Ron to Mountain View. The slots chimed. Maybe some of their classmates were inside, bowling. If it was a Saturday the fluorescent lights would have been off, the black lights on, disco balls and rainbow lasers spinning crazily at a ritual we called cosmic. If it was a Thursday it would have been league night, every lane full. If it was a Tuesday it would be youth league, where in another life Lise and I had bowled on a team called Bob’s Corner Store in identical royal blue T-shirts with pins screen-printed across the back. Lise found these shirts stuffed in a drawer at the Navajo house the night Ron brought them back. She and Lyn slept in them.
Mom was soon evicted from the rental. She moved somewhere with some man none of us knew and shortly thereafter went to jail. The Navajo house was repossessed. Ron, Lise and Lyn moved into a double-wide trailer on Mesquite Avenue. When Mom got out of jail, she joined them.
We always took her back. We always believed her (insofar as we were capable of belief) when she said she was sorry, that she would get better. There was another stay in rehab, a place in the mountains, as Lise described it—I never went. I came back from LA for the summer. For a few weeks we all lived together one last time in the trailer on Mesquite. Mom and I fought; Lise and I fought. I bullied her, but she rarely got angry. When she did it seemed involuntary, a spasm, mostly physical, like a crack went through her and her limbs spazzed out and one of them, her arm, her hand, grabbed a knife from the wood block and threw it at me.
The morning after Lise graduated from high school she moved to San Francisco for art school. She left before the sun came up. Only Lyn and I saw her off—Ron was already at work and Mom was not getting up. The dawn was violet. Lise threw two garbage bags of clothes into the bed of her boyfriend’s truck, ready to put some miles between her and all these houses. I was leaving again in a few weeks.
Lyn held Lise and asked her not to go. “Please,” she said. She was eleven. “Please don’t leave me.”
What could Lise have said if not what she did say, the most humane and honest thing she could say?
“Get off me.”
Lise remembers it violent but I heard the gentlest mercy. I remember she said it and it soared: Get off me. As in, You cannot be on me because you are on your own.
One way to say all this is, My mother was an opioid addict and she overdosed.
Another way is, My mother was suicidal and she killed herself.
Another way is, My mother was poor and ignored, dismissed, called hysterical and hypochondriac by doctors who believed instead their well-paid colleagues who spoke on behalf of Purdue Pharma, believed the FDA who renewed and renewed Purdue’s patent, and so despite her history of addiction, despite the fact that she was in recovery, that she had all those years sober, that she did not even have bananas flambé on Mother’s Day, her doctors put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin.
Another way is, Medicine tossed her to the Sacklers and they sucked her dry, destroyed her and everyone around her, and blamed her for it.
Another way is, She needed help and no one gave it to her.
Another way is, She had her mother’s pain swimming in her blood and her mother’s and her mother’s and her mother’s and she was fat with it.
Mom always said Lise got her Dutch parts. I got our dad’s fun Irish, his mean English. We both got the crazy because it came from both sides. She said we three girls had the same hands, artist hands. She taught us jewelry making, photography, breaking and entering. To scavenge and build and refurbish, to scam and steal and to bullshit. She taught us names of plants and rocks and the names of every part of our body. She taught us where the water came from. She died the way the Amargosa River dies, not so far from where it was born. Her whole life passed in the dusty outposts along the Old Spanish Trail. I see them now from above: Las Vegas, Tecopa, Trout Canyon, Pahrump, the dry and indifferent town where she died on the couch, or possibly on the floor in front of the couch, in the living room of a trailer too close to the road.
Her roads were Fairway and Tropicana, Stampmill, Lola, Navajo and Mesquite, where Ron and Lyn found her. Lyn was thirteen.
In the trailer when they found her: dozens of try-on eyeglasses from Walmart with the anti-theft sensors still on. A pack of six mail-order self-help cassettes about depression, tape number two missing, found later in the boom box in the bathroom. Books I had read in college and passed along, telling myself they would cure her. The House on Mango Street and Love Medicine. Every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS, every episode of The X-Files. In a dish on her dresser a coin stamped PAUL LOVES MARTHA, Disneyland, 1989 and a bb chain looped through a plastic fob with Lyn’s school picture on it.
In the trailer when they found her: a hole where the flooring in front of the front door had rotted away from beneath, covered with carpet badly sagged and torn in one corner where many over the years had tripped. My first love fell in this hole once, rolled his ankle pretty bad. We are not a subtle people. This was the last time I saw her. She got him some ice. He tuned her guitar. She looked good. The trailer was clean. She had plants.
In the trailer when they found her: a dark stain on the living room carpet.
A couch with many eyes burned in.
An answering machine with no daughter’s voice on it.
Plants in the bathtub. She must have watered them right before.