Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Living a double life as studious teenage tennis champ and dope-smoking, lost child, I couldn't find peace until I gave up competition.
Jan 29, 1999 | I was on tennis courts all over California the year we invaded Cambodia, the year Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died, the year the students were killed at Kent State. I was at tournaments up and down the state with my doubles partner Bee. I was sixteen, a little bit fat in the can by now. Her mother Mimi drove us around the state in an old Country Squire station wagon. My own mother didn't know how to drive, and besides, she was putting herself through law school. We hardly saw her.
Mimi had prematurely white hair and a huge smile, sang songs from musicals as she drove along, and always reminded me of Carol Channing. She used to say that I was the most "utterly marvelous girl." Bee and I had been ranked number one in the state the year before in sixteen-and-under doubles, but my game was beginning to fall apart. In singles, Bee was thriving, but I was no longer in the top ten and that was very painful. I had two lives now, one with Bee on the green hardcourts and occasional grass, and one with Pammy, with whom I now went to school. We attended a little hippie high school in San Francisco and were two of the best students. There were fifty kids in my graduating class, many of them troubled children from San Francisco's socialite families. It was 1970 and we were smoking a lot of dope, which we could buy upstairs on the second floor of the schoolhouse in the student lounge. Two kids overdosed on heroin that year, although only one died, and a sweet rich boy of fifteen, on LSD, ran into the surf at Ocean Beach and was never seen again. We could buy balls of hashish soaked in opium for five dollars each. Pammy and I were getting drunk whenever possible, and then I was showing up for tennis matches hungover and really uninterested, except that I loved Bee and Mimi so much and had spent the last four years practically living at their house. They were wealthy, and Mimi had exquisite taste. I rarely saw the Christian Scientists anymore, though Pammy was still close to them. We all went to different schools, and I did not live near them on the lagoon, as Pammy did, so although I still loved them, I was with Bee and Mimi now. Mimi was an artist, a painter, who claimed me as daughter number two. She and Bee fought; she and I didn't. Bee and I wore our hair in pigtails, tied in bright ribbons. Bee had brown hair, brown eyes, brown limbs, freckles.
Pammy looked like a Renaissance angel in tie-dye, with white-blonde electric hair the color of Maryiln Monroe's, angel hair like you put on Christmas trees, and her skin was as fair as a baby's. Her breasts were large, and she was always a little overweight; she refused for political reasons to be thin. We were high on the women's movement; the voices from New York were like foghorns saving us in the night, but they also frightened us because they were so strident. I spent the night at Pammy's a lot; there we could swim in the lagoon, or sunbathe on the dock, and get away with almost anything, day or night. So Pammy and I sailed and swam and smoked dope and drank "spoolie-oolies," which were glasses of red wine and 7UP. We listened to Stephane Grapelli, because Pammy played flute, and we listened to Scott Joplin before anyone else, because she also played classical piano. She took lessons from an old blind Russian named Lev Shore, who was the father she should have had. Her father was still in prison. She was a little in love with my father, who was so much hipper than most of the other dads. He still lived with my mother, although things had continued to deteriorate around our house. But he took Pammy, my younger brother, and me to the beach on weekends, and his friends smoked dope with us and served us jug red wine.
I wasn't thinking about God that much, except that when I was stoned I felt a mystical sense of peace and expansion, and I secretly thought I might become a Buddhist one of these days. There were many Buddhists my father admired -- Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen, Alan Watts. My father by then was practicing transcendental meditation, which he'd first investigated for a book he wrote while Ronald Reagan was governor, called "Anti California: Report from Our First Para-Fascist State."
At any rate, Pammy and I had an English teacher our sophomore year whom we loved, a large long-haired woman named Sue who wore purple almost exclusively and was a friendly hippie sort. She was one of the best teachers I've ever had. Her hair fell to her chair like a puppet-show curtain. She made you want to be a teacher, to throw the lights on for children that way.
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