It was her widespread, unrestrained, and contagious smile that I see when I think of her. Her expressive hand gestures seemed like separate limbs from her straight, head-held-high posture. Frankness, unpreparedness, and ebullience made her the embodiment of who I wish I were.
I was on the phone with a friend when the news alert filled the screen, and a photo of her signature smile.
“ Oh my God!”
“What?” he asked.
In a voice trembling with shock, I replied, “Diane Keaton died.”
“ Whoa, how old was she?”
“ Seventy-nine. She was the only contemporary actress I related to. I watched Baby Boom last week, so Keaton. It was like watching me if I had the same experiences. “
“ She was great in The Godfather, not a lot of people would agree with that, but that’s my opinion.”
“ I never thought of that. I watch it once a year. She was in an interview years ago, and the host asked,” Why didn’t you ever get married?”
With her arms opening like a double door, she exclaimed, “ No one ever asked me!”
Her last post on Instagram is worth reading.”
And in the same weekend, I think of this. We can’t feel another person’s sickness, or what it’s like to sing if we don’t sing, or fly like a pilot unless we’ve been one. We cannot imagine what it is like to be a hostage of Hamas.
I wandered about yesterday, in the gym, the veranda, and the lobby, and later, had appetizers in the restaurant. Two flat screens, football, the rest couples except the man next to me. I couldn’t help but notice that he was three inches from me at the bar. A shrimp cocktail showed up, he ate voraciously, then a steak and a large flat potato sort of tortilla, a side of vegetables, and he ate enthusiastically, then a lobster plate, with more vegetables, and he ate, and then dessert. I left before it arrived, so I wouldn’t swipe it from him.
I wanted to say to someone, “The hostages are coming home!” I didn’t. Diane Keaton would have!She lived with squamous cell cancer or many years. That explains the hats and turtlenecks.
The order of this week is disorder. Not the trivial disorder of a closet, or a work in progress; this week is the unraveling of the self, which comes with separating from someone or something you love dearly. It is the subject of: poetry, theater, film, literature, dance, visual arts, and music — all forms of music from opera to rap. For all of you who have mothers and fathers close to death, and you don’t want them to leave.
Adults protect you from the brutality of death when you’re very young. They keep it behind locked phrases like ‘she had to go away to a better place; you’ll understand when you grow up.’The camouflage of death may go on indefinitely until one day, you are hit over the head with a block of ice, and it splits you right down the middle. You can see your guts spilling out, and everything is all out of order. Walking is an effort. Thinking clogs with the big question: Why? Why can’t we all stay here together and live forever?
Flashback to 1966 — I was very young, not so much in years, but when I was 13, my mental and emotional age was more like that of an 8-year-old. I don’t know if I was ADD or DDT because those acronyms were not in vogue yet.
My development was arrested because I was raised on a fantasia of false identities, fiction, and privilege. I thought we were prosperous, happy, and would live together forever. The fantasia of falseness was abruptly taken away on June 19, 1966. On that day, I saw for the first time my father weep uncontrollably. I was told my mother was in heaven. My father was seated on my mother’s avocado green sofa in our tidy mid-century apartment in Westwood. Nana — mother’s mother — was sitting on the sofa next to my father. Nana and Dad had reconciled for the period my mother was sick with cancer. They both were sobbing. I was not, I was in shock. There was nothing inside of me but resistance, a blockage of emotion that remained there for so many years.
I was left in my father’s care. He was busy avoiding government subpoenas and running the Fontainebleau Hotel in Florida. He kept a command post on my emotions. He would not tolerate my grief, because he could not tolerate his own. So, I had to chin-up, chest out, walk up and down Doheny Drive in Hollywood where he lived and pretend I was going to be fine.
When I turned eighteen and left my father’s apartment, I was free to unravel my feelings for the first time. The emptiness was filled with confusion, anger, and drugs. If college was supposed to be my best years, then I missed that chapter. Looking back, the real leap to personal growth came at that time when I was left unattended to wander through life with my own eyes as guardian, and my heart as my compass. That is when I missed my mother the most. It was my fortune to have my father back in Los Angeles, throwing his weight around from a distance. He kept me under radar by having a friend’s son working in the admittance office of Sonoma State College.
I remember days when my mental attitude needed electric shock therapy. Miraculously, I did find my way home, and to the matter of my mother, and growing up with gangsters. From a wafer of stability, very slowly, I’ve built a nice lifeboat to keep me afloat. My screaming, cantankerous, and intimidating father who loved me beyond measure is in this imaginary boat, and my mother who loved with a silent gentle hand she gave to me whenever I needed assurance.
All I have to do is look at her photograph placed in every corner of my house, and I regain momentum in my lifeboat. When I am particularly insolvent with life’s measures, I recall the years she spent fighting cancer so she could continue to hold my hand. How can I disappoint such a woman? I cannot, and I know that with more certainty than I know anything.We all have a basement strength that rises up and balances us when we need it. Each time we cross that unpleasant road and say goodbye to our friends, our pets, our parents, or our siblings, we have to find our basement strength.
You can read poetry and essays, listen to opera or rap and find five-thousand ways of expressing the same painful stab of separation. If the comfort comes in just knowing — we all have that in common — then all you have to do is tap the shoulder of the person in front of you, and ask, “How did you handle it?”
Or as Henry Miller said, “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”
ADVENTURESS IN LIVINGNESS this week ends with new directions in living. Before that happens, you have to get lost, detached, and miserable. It messes up your social life, your routines, your comfort, and your partner. I don’t have one, so it’s all up to me.
Men wonder why women change so often, why we are spirited unicorns one day, and mules the next. It comes from the universal need to roam, to feel new sensations and passions, and to find more things to love. Even our closets are overflowing with love: “I love those shoes, I love that coat.” We replace our wardrobes because we need more garments to love.
At the crossroads of some moment in time, I stopped loving material things, my reflection, and went looking for a deeper direction of sensation.
It started last year, when my life was tangled up in two projects that were not progressing. As long as someone didn’t raise the curtain on my imaginary life, I stayed right there, like a gearshift left in neutral. When failure and rejection continued to knock me on the shoulder, I welcomed the familiar knock and remained stationary.
The exact moment I decided to shift gears was a painful one. I let go of both projects that were obstructing my motion. I have extracted the nature of the projects because it really is irrelevant. After I let go, and watched those long-term efforts just dangle from boxes, notebooks, and letters of correspondence, the straight of my back curved. Where is my direction? Where are any of us going anyway, except away from that moment we have no control?
If I asked why this happened, and that happened, I was then distracted by some woman in the car next to me who was having more fun in her convertible talking on her cell phone. Routines were becoming burdens, and my favorite places of comfort were boring. Encouragement came from writing columns, reading letters, and those long, solitary road trips in the night. I felt like I was sleeping, but even in that state of detachment people were finding me, and shaking me up.
I remembered one of the faintest memories of my childhood. I cannot even recall the place I was, or who was there; most certainly, it was not my father and mother. We were camping out and I was in a sleeping bag on the hard gravel ground. It was so unfamiliar to me, the simplicity of the natural surroundings, the heavy black balm of tranquility, and the brightness of each star. I lied awake most of the night talking to my fellow campers, and at some point they said to go to sleep. I could not close my eyes. The adventure had swept me into a state of alertness, the kind that makes you feel extraterrestrial. That night must have taught me to welcome new adventures. Sometimes they have ruined months of my life, but most definitely, at the end, I sprung up with a new line of faith.
Again, I am leaving out particulars because it is not the direction I took or what I’ve chosen. After all, it could be anything. We all want to roam, and love, and find some nugget of truth at the end of the road. I think women need to roam more now than men.
The long list is what you started as a youth or maybe later. It represents one of those adventures you must do before you die. The list you started without even knowing you were making plans for your future. This list does not have to be in writing, keyed in a smartphone, or posted in Outlook. The long list is about shocking the sensibilities: habits, norms, routines, and coming back unharmed. It is an exceptional journey, and we visualize it while waiting for a flight at the airport, waiting in line for a new driver’s license, or the light turning green. All of the things that we monitor in our lives, like the need to have a cavity filled, updating your platform, passwords, or checking the coolant level, are multiplying, and that short list is so long that we rarely have time to consider the long list. If at random I selected ten long list entries they’d read like this: Safari, Lombardi Italy, Greece, a cruise on the Cunard, a gallery of my own, a husband, a dog and cat, and a place that is quiet, like a ranch. The short list, fix the broken window in my bedroom, fix the roof and ceiling in the guest room, get the three non-working electrcial outlets fixed, the dishwasher, garbage disposal, stage the attic and basement cleaned out, and relocating to a place I’ve not named. The short list is a big obstacle in the way of the long list.
By the time we get to the long list, we may be crippled by fear, turned into a sofa shouting grumpy cynic, or worse than all the above, we may have forgotten what we desired.
Waiting too long to start an adventure on the long list is what happened to me two weeks ago. I waited twenty years. The journal entry was written in 1986 after visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the first time. It was the weekend of the Burning of Zozobra. I read about it in the visitor guide and saw pictures of the paper Mache statue standing thirty feet tall. The mystical ritual of the burning of Zozobra is intended to wash away all our grief and sorrow that builds up each year, and so they call him Old Man Gloom. I missed the event that first time, and I made the following dozen visits for business and pleasure. Some years, I was within days of seeing Zozobra, but I left because someone was expecting me, or I ran out of money. After twenty years, Zozobra became a symbolic representation of what I must control.
This September of 2006, nothing would stop me from seeing Zozobra. Dodger and I drove down from Taos to Santa Fe late on the afternoon of September 8, and checked into the La Fonda Hotel. This is where I stayed on my first visit to Santa Fe. The anchor of the Plaza and all that happens outside eventually flows inside and settles beneath the cathedral viega ceilings of the hotel lobby. As we arrived on Fiesta weekend, the traditional celebration culminated in a juxtaposition of historical events, cultural exhibitions, parades, handshaking, hugging and margarita’s tipping from arms air born. La Fonda opened its doors to the entire population of New Mexico. .
You can sit on an old Spanish colonial leather chair , sip a tangy margarita and watch the fiesta kick off right in the lobby. The procession of costumed soldiers replicating the Spanish conquistadors marched through the lobby while Dodger and I were checking in. From here, I wandered over to the Concierge Desk and shouted, over the roaring and singing, about dinner reservations. Nancy, the concierge, made reservations, handed me maps and numbers, and turned us loose. That first night we stood under an umbrella in a downpour and watched the Opening Ceremonies in the Plaza, and later hopped in a Pedi cab to Ristra, where we dined on appetizers at the bar and I watched the activity with my notebook stare. I love being inside a strange room full of people, to me it is like starting a new book. I make up stories about the people, or if I am feeling brave, invade someone’s privacy to find what they are about. The diners were too removed, so we left and returned to the Plaza. In a few hours, I would be descending the far side of town to meet Zozobra. Twenty years had passed, and the moment was finally here. I was wearing my new cowboy boots and seated on the Palace Patio, looking into the sheets of rain that soaked all the out-door booths.
“ Are you ready to trek in the rain little mama?”
“ Yes, finally, trust me this time, you will love it. Do you have your earplugs?” Dodger has tinnitus and is implacable about loud noise.
“ Yep. Hope it’s better than trekking in the rain to see Funny Cide race.”
“ You hated it didn’t you?
“ I hated carrying that thirty-pound tote with all your junk.”
We walked about a half-mile in the rain, Dodger moved in stern choreographed steps to avoid the mud. “Damn, these are brand new boots. I’m going back to the hotel and change”
“ Cowboy boots are supposed to be worn looking. You can go to Lucchese tomorrow and have them polished.”
“ No, I just paid five hundred dollars woman, f I’ll bring you another pair in your closet.”
“ We won’t get the same place and you’ll never find me, I wander. So, just suck it up tough rugged warrior of earth, land and sea?”
“ Oh, all right, but I’m not happy.”
“ Look, there’s Zozobra!” Dodger stood in stillness, eyes wide as marbles.
My head was soaked cause I’d forgotten the umbrella and Dodger harmonized a lot of cuss words as we reached the front gates. Gangs and families, children, old timers in costume, scurried to reach the event’s standing front row. As we trudged through the rain, I noticed a crescent of anticipation that united everyone on the path. When we reached the arena, we looked down at the muddy slope as teenagers, mothers and strollers, slid down the hill to the front gates. I envied their loyalty to Zozobra. I was within a hundred feet of the stage, I could not remove myself from the unified adulation for Zozobra. As a ritual to burning the curses of life, people bring letters, photos, rejected elements of a personal tragedy and place them in the circle before the fire light. The crowd had expanded into a gyrating crush of participants, swaying back and forth, cheering the appearance of Zozobra, as he rocked back and forth in flames of fire. A convergence of strange mystical wailing, and an encore of audience howls ignite the lighting of firecrackers that set Zozobra in flames.
What I saw was the burning to the ground and the howls from the musicians that accompanied his death. That happens if you let the long list precede the short one. Dodger stopped grumbling when we returned to the hotel and exclaimed to guests, “We saw Zozobra!”
Morning comes after two cups of French Press. I sit here at the desk, peeking out the glass door to the shady side of the street. I do not know where I will be living, what I will be doing, or who I will be doing it with next month. Uncertainly, I move in and out of situations and get swept up in my ideas and fantasies. I buy and sell, make and remake, move-in, move-out, leave homes, careers, friends and relationships. I move out of comfort
art nouveau dome of light (Photo credit: e³°°°)
and into uncertainty because it feels more like home moving than staying in one place.
I have to put the words on the paper and look at it to make it real.
Raising a family, sprouting barriers and responsibilities might have changed me, but I didn’t. I’m unchanged in some ways, still running through the hallways of the hotels, gardens, and neighborhoods. Do you know what I mean?
I have to turn the clock back to 1996, to the days of peeling back the first layer of family history. I was sitting at a dining room table in a casita in Taos, NM. It was winter, the first time I’d lived in snow outside a few teenage weekends in Arrowhead. Snow silence that sucks up every imaginable sound, and the absence of any neighbors, I was the only resident in the compound, left me to unravel a secret life, the one my father guarded with irreproachable tenacity.
The first layer came off from the Immigration and Naturalization (INS) files on Allen smiley, birth name Aaron Smehoff, tagged “Armed and Dangerous.”
Allen married, Irene on January 16, 1926, (my father’s nineteenth birthday), in San Francisco. On July 18, 1926 Allen was arrested for robbery in a drug store on Geary Street with another unidentified boy who fled the scene. On September 17, 1926, Allen was convicted of first degree robbery and confined to Preston Reformatory for boys in Ione, California. On November 23, 1926 Irene, who remained in Oakland, gave birth to a baby girl, named Loretta. Allen was released from Preston Reformatory in December of 1927. He returned to Oakland to reunite with his wife and child; but they had vanished. This is what the INS gathered from Dad in an INS hearing. I read from the court transcripts of that hearing, about 300 pages of interrogation and the answers’ in my Dad’s own voice.
The snow sedated the choppy feeling in my stomach, the jaggedness of suddenly discovering, why my father was wired with anxiety. His whole life was occupy Allen Smiley; arrest him, convict him, send him to Russia, and never pull the tap from his apartment, or the FBI guys from his tail.
When I ordered all those government files I had no idea that the government probed into personal lives as much as criminal activities. They recorded all the household conversations, arguments with my mother, his betting on the phone, his visitors, discussions with his housekeeper about the ashtrays, and his hatred for the government, “I wish somebody would drop a bomb, just to get rid of some of these guys.”
What would I say to this daughter now in her eighties, about the father she never knew?
It was a one of a kind experience, to pick up the phone and speak with Chris, the granddaughter, who discovered me from my columns. She went looking for the other Smiley daughter, and confronted her own family secret. The tension cross-circuited our conversation, both of us heaving with questions, anxious for an answer to the family puzzle, the answers we could not wait to get, that I cannot share, even though the names are changed, I do honor the right to privacy.
I paced the room moving unconsciously from one place to another, reaching for my father’s voice to soothe her, rewrite history in between dusk and making dinner. Then the unveiling of the tragedy; the loss and the family shame, surrounding a marriage to a gangster, a father whom they never got to know, as I did. In the passing of an hour or less, my voice resonated the stories of her grandfather; his health and humor, his disciplinary regulations, and his life long battle to remain anonymous, in the public eye of organized crime.
Chris asked if I wanted to speak with Loretta, my half-sister, and I said of course I would. She set up a phone call for the following Sunday,
with a forewarning that her grandmother did not encourage the communication, or the research, she was beyond asking for a resurgence of truth or pain. How does one retrace seventy or eighty years of believing the color red may be the color blue or least a bluish tint. Loretta was not proud of what she read about Allen Smiley.
In the days before the arranged phone call I sifted through my internal index of Dad’s history, and what might console her. I could tell her about the time, he sat me down in the living room, to discuss sex with a gentle sternness;
“ Once you get pregnant your whole life changes, and you’re not even close to being ready for that. It happened to a gal I loved, when I was a young man.”
Was that Loretta’s mother he was speaking about? When this young love of his said she was pregnant, he tried to persuade her against it, because he wasn’t “properly financed.” So I asked him what happened.
“We’re not talking about my life; I’m trying to get you to understand the consequences of sex. You see God made the act beautiful so we would procreate, and if you ignore the consequences, you’re not fulfilling God’s wishes.”
I waited by the phone until it was time to accept that the call wasn’t coming. During that time of waiting, I tried to walk in Loretta’s shoes. I only had to take a few steps to comprehend the combustion of emotions she’d face by having a Sunday evening chat with me.
I made the choice to be public, to be viewed by strangers all over the world, and to receive their rage as well as their rewards.
It wasn’t a year ago that I received an email from the most distant of childhood memories. The email came from Inga, our first Nanny. The last time she saw me I was six years old. She sent me photos of us in the backyard at Bel Air, photos of her watching over me on the swings. She told me by letter, that my father was so good to her, so generous, and she loved being a part of our family. “I had no idea he was involved in anything criminal, and even if he was, it wouldn’t have mattered because he was such a kind man.” The color red is also the color blue, and because of my Dad, I learned to accept the contradictions in all of us.
Our interior life is uncensored, unsuitable to guidance from our parents, our husbands and wives, our lovers; it is uniquely you, red and blue.
Ken drove a rusty VW hippie van that configured around his restless and unpredictable patterns. He was known to drive, stop, and stay in the same spot three days. Our adventures began on Pacific Coast Highway driving along without any direction or plan. Ken would be singing the blues, and I’d be sitting in the back, stretched out, watching him in the rear view mirror. He had cloudy blue eyes that perpetuated the intensity of his tortured soul. The only time they didn’t appear preoccupied was when he was playing the piano. I’d noticed that the first time he took me home to meet his parents, Bernie and Anna Marie.
They lived in hillside split level home. The first level belonged to Ken. As soon as we crossed the threshold he darted into a dimly lit carpeted room and sat down at the piano.
“Hi, I’m here! I have Louellen with me.”
“What! I can’t hear you Ken,” his father shouted back. It was apparent they were a family that communicated in various tones of yelling; the kinds of people who never consider finding the person they are talking to, they just yell from one level of the house to the other.
“Bernie, I’ brought Louellen– put on a pair of pants!”
“SuEllen did you say?”
“Come on Lou, you gotta meet Bernie. I told him about you. But he takes so many pills he can’t remember anything.”
“Okay.”
We climbed the stairs to the living room and Ken shook his head as we reached the last step. “The television is always blasting.He thinks he’s deaf.”
As soon as I laid eyes on Bernie I could tell he lived his retirement in front of the television, clutching the remote as one does a cigarette. His form had molded the sofa into an abstraction of his physique.
“Bernie, you look great. Can you at least get up to meet her.” Bernie rose reluctantly, rubbed his lower back, and shook my hand. He smiled as if he was happy about meeting me, but I knew he was irritated because I was standing in front of the television set.
“Anna Marie, Louellen’s here.” Ken yelled.
I stood there feeling like a new chair they were inspecting. Ken sensed my predicament; he read people before they even opened their mouth. Anna Marie came out with a pot holder in her hand.
“Okay Lou–this is the family. Now everyone back to their places.” I was the only one that laughed.
“Your cooking smells so good.” I said to Anna.
”It’s nothing, just dinner for us.”
“Mom‘s the best cook in the world. Did you make my potatoes?”
“Yes Ken, I made your potatoes, brisket, coleslaw, blueberry blintzes…
“Mom, there’s four of us—you’re not cooking for the German army.”
Anna Marie grew up in Austria during the occupation; the Germans took her family home and everything with it.
Bernie was back on the sofa, and Ken seated next to him in a leather club chair. He was bantering his Dad about watching CNN all day. Bernie talked back to the news reporters, scolded the football players, and grudgingly laughed at the comedies. It appeared Anna Marie wasn’t worth talking to any longer. She masked her sadness poorly; it was written so everyone could read her.
“What college are you going to Louellen?” Bernie asked. “ Sonoma State.”
“Somoa what? Never heard of it. Ken’s in law school– aren’t you Ken?”
“What? Did someone say something to me?” Ken winked at me.
“You wouldn’t know if someone clubbed you on the head for Christ’s sake. Why don’t you straighten up and start taking things seriously. All you do is drive around in that heap of junk in the driveway, that leaks oil by the way, and you need a bloody haircut!”
“What was the question?”
They went on like that and I recognized the mental match between father and son. I walked through the white carpeted living room feeling it’s history; safe and predictable, like coming home would always be the same. I noticed Anna Marie’s garden;, tiny rows of perfectly nurtured flowers set inside a large freshly mowed yard that looked untouched since Ken was a teenager.
I found Anna Marie in the kitchen stirring and juggling pots.
“Would you like something to drink Louellen?”
“No, I’m fine. What a feast you’ve made. Do you always cook like this?”
“Well, it never goes to waste. I got used to cooking for all the boys–Ken has three brothers you know.”
Just then Ken came in, kissed his mother on the ear and opened all the lids of the pots.
“Kenny,don’t you dare,” she said. Ken took a bite out of a potato and she yelped as if she was surprised. It was their playful match that had been going on for years.
Through out dinner I watched Ken; how he deferred their questions and manipulated the conversation so it remained directionless like his driving. After dinner we went downstairs to the piano room. Ken slammed his hands on the keyboard, and starting playing some Dixieland jazz. He looked over at me and smiled triumphantly.
“ Bernie hates it, he’s always hated it. I do this to drive him nuts. He can’t stand my playing the piano-the poor bastard doesn’t have a creative cell in his body. He used to break into my classical lessons and start yelling his head off. ”
“Kenny! I can’t hear a thing! Shut the door!” Bernie hollered. Ken let out a thunderous roll of laughter and kept right on playing. Each time we returned to have dinner with Bernie and Anna Marie, the routine slackened, and I felt more at home. I grew to like Bernie, and the feeling was mutual. Anna Marie would not allow herself to feel something for me, in case I had any ideas of taking Ken away. I spent the rest of that summer trying to help Ken figure out what to do, while he unknowingly was teaching me about my essence.
One day towards the end of the summer my father called me. “Ken’s father called asking if I knew where his son was.”
“Ken’s gone?” I answered.
“Apparently that’s the situation. What the hell kind of family is you mixed up in? What a thing to ask me. Ken told his father he was driving you back to Sonoma in September. Is that right?”
“Yes, he offered to.”
“Well, you can forget about that. If the bum does come back, I don’t want you going out any longer. His father isn’t all there.”
“That’s funny.” I said.
“What’s so funny about it?”
“That’s what Ken says about him.”
“Well in any case–forget the bum–he’s not going anywhere. His father went on for half an hour and I heard everything I need to hear. He had the audacity to tell me he read about me in the newspapers.”
“What about?”
“That’s irrelevant. The point is you don’t reveal what you know about someone.”
“Why not?”
“Because you have the upper hand.”
That fall I returned to Sonoma, Ken dropped out of law school, and my father was arrested again. Bernie and Anna Marie remained together until Bernie passed away. Ken moved to the southern tip of Baja and plays piano in a resort. Every few years he drops me a line, and we talk about Bernie and my dad.
WHERE TO BEGIN THIS STORY OF A FATHER THAT I ONLY CAME TO UNDERSTAND BY READING HIS FBI FILES, BOOKS ABOUT MOB HISTORY WRITTEN BY LAW ENFORCEMENT AND COLLEGE PROFESSORS, AND DOCUMENTARIES PRODUCED BY FOES OF MY FATHER.
My last year with Dad was 1981. Naïve, and unconcerned with where I was headed, or how I’d get there if I figured it out, I was spinning around in an executive chair; waiting for the big hand on the black and white office clock to set me free. Time didn’t pass; I hauled it over my head, in my bland windowless office, under florescent glare. I was trouble shooting for an ambitious group of USC guys as they gobbled up all of Los Angeles real estate. Without any real sense of survival or independence, my life was in the hands of my father.
“Meyer’s coming to see me; haven’t seen the little guy in twenty-five years.” Dad said during a commercial break.
“Meyer Lansky?” I asked as casually as he’d spoken.
“Who else?”
“Why did you two wait so long?”
“It’s no concern of yours; he’s my friend, not yours.” I was twenty-nine years old and still verbally handcuffed.
The three of us went out to dinner, and while the two of them spoke in clipped short wave syndicate code, I noticed that neither one of them looked at all happy. It was rare to catch my father in public with a friend, without raucous laughter, and storytelling. My attempt to revive the dinner conversation with my own humor,returned two sets of silent eyeball commands to resist speaking.
Several months later I received a call from Dad asking me to come over to his apartment, he had collapsed on the bathroom floor. When I arrived, he pleaded for me to stay close by. “I’ll be all right in a few minutes; I just need to catch my breath. ” I sat outside the bathroom door biting my nails, and waited, like our dog Spice, for my orders. For the first time in my life, he was weaker than I, and my turmoil centered on that unfamiliar reversal of roles.
“Daddy, you should go to the hospital, I’m calling the ambulance.”
“Nope, no ambulance, I’m not going to the hospital, hang up the phone right now.” I pried the bathroom door open, and crouched down on the floor to hold him in my arms. It was the first time I’d held him like that, he felt so heavy and warm. When his eyes closed I called the ambulance and waited. Two attendants arrived, and immediately took his pulse. “Why didn’t you call sooner, within minutes he would have died?”
“ I couldn’t–you don’t understand, he wouldn’t let me. ” They grimaced at me, and removed him from my arms. Over the next few weeks I learned only that he had a failing liver. The mirage of doctors and nurses flowing in and out of his room, assured me that this was just a temporary set back. Soon he would be back at his favorite table at the Bistro Gardens, dining with young aspiring starlets.
When you love someone whose life is draining into illness, even their hollering and gripe is a relief. For the first time in my life, my father did not frighten me. I don’t know if it was because he was vulnerable, and dependent on me for comfort. But the feeling was ecstasy, the feeling of being inside his world, and not excluded.
“Imagine sending nurses in my room at six in the morning. Boy did I give them hell. They won’t soon forget the name Allen Smiley. They’re not treating me like a social service case. “ His voice came back and the salty blue color of his eyes. I took my father home, and sat on the crushed blue velvet sofa while he made his phone calls.
” Say what’s up buddy, what can I do for you? I’m tougher than you think; my daughter and I are going for a walk later. What can I do for you? When are you going to Vegas? Yea, I see all right, don’t worry about a thing, no I’ll handle it, I insist now, don’t argue with a sick man, you rascal. Don’t send flowers yet, send champagne!”
Within a few weeks, my father was back at his favorite table at the Bistro Gardens wearing tinted shades. His passion for the company of females, was reciprocal, they loved him. He sent them flowers, and picked up their checks. He could wave his magic wand of favors at the studios, or for concert tickets, and the chips rolled. He kept up that pace for six months.
All my life he had made things happen for me, now it was my turn. I collected the telephone messages, walked the dog, and cleaned up the house. It was strange, to putter amongst my father’s things. I opened drawers cautiously, thinking he may have alarms on things. He had a pile of papers stacked on his desk, and unopened mail. His personal toiletries were still in immaculate order, his brushes, and collection of colognes. A heavy sadness, presided over the room. I noticed he was reading “Honor Thy Father.”
During his sickness, he presented a man only slightly off balance. He continued to camouflage his liver failure, like he’d masked his identity all his life. I recognized the anguish in his eyes, but I had to pretend it wasn’t there.
My character changed overnight. I did not hesitate over minor decisions, cower if he yelled, or hide inside myself. Something in him was now part of me. We were fighting together. One afternoon we took a walk in Holmby Park.
“What matter’s in life is that you don’t allow people to walk over you, see. No one looks out for your best interest, except your old father. You’ll see, it won’t be so easy without me.”
“Daddy, don’t talk like that, come on.”
“Why not, I’m telling you the way it is, what do you want, for me to lie to you? Everyone else will lie to you! Now, I’ve told you that I’m donating my body to USC Medical center. I already have it arranged.”
“Daddy, I’m not listening. Don’t talk to me about that,” tears welled.
“You must listen little sweetheart. There’s no expense for you to be burdened with. I wish I put more away for you, but I’ve always told you, haven’t I….that I spent everything I made. I only hoped that things would have changed…. be that as it may, you won’t have any expense.”
Smiley’s Dice Adventures in livingness
The throw of the dice this week lands on the adventures in the making. How could I have known 15 years ago?
Back then I had but a finger-bowl of resources, a blue chair, a desk, and a typewriter. Everyday I wrote into the flame of discovery looking for my mother. My notebooks were sketches of this woman I never knew. The absence of the most ordinary information, like where she grew up in Newark, what sort of neighborhood, what her father did for a living, what schools, she attended, and later on, what experiences she had modeling in New York. The closest I got was by reading John Robert Powers book about the modeling agency he started in 1923. He assigned unemployed Broadway talent to his agency to be photographed for corporate campaign advertising. According to John he was the innovator of the modeling agency concept- beautiful women and men will sell products to the public, the public never would have thought of buying.
I found her name in the index, Lucille Casey. She joined the agency when she was 16 years old. John groomed the models; and assigned disciplinary perfection in dialect, manners, appearance, character, and intellect. Powers Girls married anyone they wanted. They were invited to all the important society events, they were given card Blanche at the Stork Club, and the Morocco and they were transported to celebratory city functions. They met men of all means, character, and class.
After I read the book, I thought about what my father used to say, “ Your mother could have had any man in the world, but she picked me. Don’t you make the same mistake.”
That is a complex summons for a teenage to understand.
I sat in the blue chair and waited for the flares of information to come down to earth. After two years, I had very little to build a full page. My mother’s history was lost, her friends had vanished, or would not talk to me. She did not leave a diary. Her photo album as a model was all I had. What could I see in those eyes, and smile? Perfection. I gave up the search, and switched over to my father. The government documented his daily activities, and what they didn’t hear or see, was exploited in newspapers, documentaries, and books.
There was one woman who was alive, that knew intimate details of my mother, because I had met her, and she made it known to me she knew. That was Meyer Lansky’s wife, who went by the name Teddy. Women have a distinctive look when they are withholding secrets. Teddy always had that look when she brought up my mother. I told her I was writing about my father and mother and she said, “Let them rest in peace.” I didn’t take her advice.
ADVENTURERS IN SINGLE LIVINGNESS 