March 2006 Archives

Once the rail car's hydraulic lift drops me on the train station platform in San Francisco, I have two options to get to my routine Thursday destination. One involves an electric bus operated by the city's Municipal Railway, a.k.a., Muni, and the other involves the streets, which appear to be operated by no one and occupied by everyone. The road surfaces in the burgeoning area south of Market Street are faring badly these days. Block after block is under construction, renovation, and general revitalization, which combined with a historical pot-holed, badly paved sort of San Francisco neglect, makes the streets one unpleasant place for wheelchairs. That on one particularly dreary, rainy, cold late March day, in what now passes for the northern California spring, is the route I chose. Overland. Busless. By wheelchair.

Early on, things started looking bad. The pavement was so uneven that my progress slowed to a crawl. In one block, the sidewalk had given way to bulldozer-damaged asphalt, and the adjacent block of old warehouses had succumbed to condos under construction. In the next block, the sidewalk had been pounded by Attila's army of Huns with sledgehammers, presenting a vista of cracks and fissures. In the next , construction sent everyone into the street, over a rumbling boardwalk. And on and on. But why dwell on the pavement? Because disabled people dwell on the pavement. They ride low. They sit and bounce in wheelchairs, only occasionally looking up at the world, mostly looking down at the perils of street surfaces. Which in the area South of Market, includes the perils of street people.

They are everywhere in San Francisco. They are so numerous and so varied that the term "street people" seems beside the point. They are people who have no homes, or no homes they want to be in and are rootless and tomorrowless and generally out. Are they dangerous? No, mostly not. Especially if you're an able-bodied person striding along a sidewalk looking like you have a destination and are determined to get there. In a wheelchair, the story is much less certain. But in broad daylight, on a workday, heading up 4th St. with a mixture of under-thirty office workers, tourists and poor people, there is really no cause for alarm. Still, the alarm bells go off. And it's not because of a real and present danger. It is because of a real and present proximity.

For one thing, poor people in wheelchairs look remarkably like affluent people in wheelchairs. And there are plenty of the wheeled destitute in that neighborhood. We pass each other in the street, avoiding eye contact. A quick glance helps me separate the respectable, middle-class wheelchair users like myself from the impoverished. This one is wearing a baggy sweater, for example, posture in a disturbingly S-shaped slouch, his shoes scuffed. A reassuring distinction until a block later, the plateglass window of Whole Foods reveals me passing in a shapeless pullover, scoliosis tilting my neck sideways, and, yes, I haven't shined my shoes for months. On and on it goes. Block after block, wheelchair vagrant after wheelchair vagrant. I am riding low, brought down to street level. The level of street people. And what distinguishes me from them is difficult to discern.

Pride. It's one of those naughty vices we try to overcome. False pride. That's the baddie. Not that the difference between authentic and false pride seems very clear. But never mind. Pride. I had to overcome it and kept trying in those dark years after the collapse of Silicon Valley. The jobs had gone and cripples had stayed, and it wasn't summertime and the livin' wasn't easy. In fact, making a living was looking impossible. I networked, I chatted, I phoned, I wrote. But the notion of paying technical writers to do anything had become passé. I was out of work. I was out of luck.

Someone, doubtless a friend, told me I should try a nonprofit for disabled people. It was in Santa Clara, not my usual neck of the woods, but I was hardly in a position to quibble. And, of course, it had been years since I had sunk to the level of seeking work from an organization that helped disabled people find jobs. I was supposed to be beyond all that. Way beyond. But, in my mid-50s, that's how it was. I wasn't way beyond anything. I was back in my 20s, so to speak, jobless, phoning an employ-the-disabled office and making an appointment.

I found the office on MapQuest and set out in plenty of time. Of course, time seems plentiful when you know where you're going, or think you do. But I didn't, and soon I was pulling over on side streets in downtown Santa Clara, trying to correlate the map with what I saw before me. Or what I didn't see. Which included a disabled parking space large enough for my van. In the end, I pulled the side wheels up and over the curb, lowered the wheelchair lift, and begin rolling up a block. Down on the ground, down at wheelchair level, it was easier to see the problem. The addresses stopped where an alley began. Downtown Santa Clara had one of those pedestrian-friendly walkways lined with photocopy places, sandwich joints and the offices of this help-the-disabled nonprofit. I rolled in the door and gave my name to the receptionist. I checked my watch. Five minutes late. Oh well.

A large black woman strode out. Hello, I said, bright and chipper. Sorry, she said, explaining what the time was. She couldn't meet. The appointment was for 11. It was 11:10. I got the message right away. I had been naughty. This was the kind of Calvinist tough love outfit so highly prized on "60 Minutes." Clients were going to learn how to dress, answer politely, be on time. All of which was splendid, but in my mid-50s, after two decades in Silicon Valley, a polite slap on the wrist would have done. "We like clients to be on time" would have been more than sufficient. Point made. Mea culpa, and let's move on. No, said the counselor, she didn't have any time. How much time had she set aside for our meeting, I asked all smiles. This seemed to throw her. Finally, she muttered half an hour. Well, I said, let's talk for the balance of that time. She insisted there wasn't enough time. I insisted there was, enough time for me, anyway. She relented, and we had a tense, useless talk. At my insistence, she gave me some info sheets. The organization. The process. The clients. The jobs.

I rolled out the door reasonably convinced that there was no sensible reason to endure this place. Professionals didn't get jobs here, I told myself. Not that I was entirely certain. The only absolute certainty was that I was outraged. I was proud. Falsely proud? Who gave a fuck? But driving home, I had the nagging feeling that I had exited too proudly. I was a cripple. My options were limited. Help was help. Work was work. I had none of either. I needed all the help, and all the work, I could get. I had been humiliated by a woman as black as the kids who had shot me. She was nothing, I told myself. Which wasn't true. She was something, all right. She was reality. I wasn't calling the shots these days. I would have to be on time, and scrape and bow when I wasn't. I had been brought low. And I wanted to bring others low.

Oddly, I almost got my chance at revenge. It turned out that a large Valley company needed a disabled person for a Personnel project. The company was hiring the handicapped. And guess what nonprofit was helping them. But like so many Valley projects, the study or the report or whatever it was to have been, slipped into budgetary nonexistence. After a couple of meetings, the company paid off its consulting team and sent us home. I never met with the nonprofit, but often fantasized how our meeting would have gone. I knew my way around the corporate campus and always found a disabled space right in front of the semiconductor division. So I would arrive in the conference room on time. And the nonprofit's big black woman could be late. Sorry, I would say, we don't have time to talk.

What fuels such grudges? Can't I take a little humiliation? Can't I get over it? The answer to the latter question appears to be no. I haven't gotten over it. That's the simple answer. The simple question is, what is the "it?"

It began, as all great intrigues do, in secret. It required skill, patience and a steely determination to succeed. It began with a phone.

The telephone system in my father's office anticipated the modern home/office by decades. But it wasn't exactly a twin of the contemporary knowledge-worker's online work space. More an evil twin. My father had moved his office into an old house prior to divorcing, then with his family in tatters, occupied the upstairs with his sons, retaining the downstairs for his practice. The phone, for reasons thought to be practical, consisted of a single line with extensions for home and office. In the era of house calls, this made a sort of marginal sense. Patients called my father at all hours, as did the local hospital's emergency room. So, having a professional line upstairs might have been logical. But hard wiring home and office into one inseparable unit, wasn't. Still, there we had it. All day long, or all afternoon long, in the hours after school, the telephone in the apartment hallway would ring senselessly. There was no reason to pick it up. My father's receptionist downstairs did that until 5:30. And the calls that came in after 5:30 were all about medical matters. Either way, the phone in the hallway outside the bathroom, and next to my father's bedroom, was not a friend.

In retrospect, I suspect my father was going broke. Why else would anyone have a single phone for so many human lives? Yet, to the uninitiated, how could a doctor be going broke in Southern California in the 1960s? I do have an answer to the latter question. I went bankrupt myself in the 1990s and discovered that it's remarkably easy. Combine a certain degree of emotional stress with a dab of physical disability and it's not hard. But that's another story. For now, we are in Banning, California, upstairs in a 1920s plaster neoclassical house, all porches and windows, which my father has paneled and subdivided into a bland office downstairs and a strange bachelor quarters upstairs. My father spent many long hours trying to rewire his own telephone. That's the other part of the story. By dint of drilling, hammering, pulling away at molding, and, ultimately, bashing in a portion of the hallway wall -- which professionals ultimately had to repair -- my father did convey the signal of Pacific Bell Telephone to his upstairs domicile. He even managed to screw a couple of molly bolts in an alignment that was almost parallel, and hang the plastic instrument on the wall. The exposed wires stuck out crazily at the bottom of the phone. But it worked, save for the occasional problem with volume and, now and then, the absence of a ring.

But the phone was only part of the preparation. Doubtless, this was not my father's intention, but it grew naturally out of his hateful obsession with his ex-wife, that the phone was to be his instrument of revenge. My parents had business, after all, the normal business of arranging weekend visits. My sister journeyed down from Santa Barbara once a month. And my brother and I occasionally did the opposite trip from Banning. The arrangements should have been routine. And they might have been, but both parents managed to goad each other into less than exemplary behavior. My sister remembers the time when she arrived at Santa Barbara Airport and found no one to meet her. One of the ticket agents drove her home. She must have been all of nine years old. How could my mother not have known, at least more or less, when her daughter was arriving? Or, in fact, that she was arriving? And how could my father not have informed his ex-wife? The details are murky, but the bottom line is clear. They bashed each other by bashing us.

Their war from my perspective lasted five years. After that I was out of the house and beyond reach of combat. My brother and sister probably have a slightly different timeframe. It took something like six years for my sister to change parental custody and move in with my father. But in the war's first year, when the ground campaign was ramping up, the combatants were sparing no civilians. That was when I was drafted, more or less. I entered the battle myself. I got to testify.

From his tone, I gathered that this testimony would be something like an Eagle Scout badge. It took courage. It took preparation. One had to be stealthy and know the ways of the forest. One had to use the telephone. My father explained what to do. I would go downstairs, sit at his desk and pick up the phone when he yelled downstairs. He would then dial my mother in Santa Barbara and begin his discussion. The subject of the conversations had to do with the most boring details of flying my sister to and from Santa Barbara, or picking her up by car, or returning her. Or money. There were lots of discussions of money. My father wanted me to pay attention to this in particular. She was robbing him, he said. Nurses made lots of money, more than they deserved. She was getting way too much, using my sister like a money-earning hostage. So, I would hold the phone to my ear, and my father would dial, and the conversation would begin. My mother would answer, not very friendly. This confirmed everything I already believed about her. She was a cold person. She didn't love me. Just listen to the tone of her voice. So, I understood all there seemed to be to understand in these conversations within seconds. But I stayed on the line listening, attending, because I had a mission. I was supposed to listen to everything that was said about money. And, just as my father predicted, as he rattled off dates and times and arrangements, my mother would change the topic. Where was the money? Where was her check?

Even as a boy, I absorbed intimations of the truth. My father's tone was icy, guaranteed to try the patience of a former intimate. As for the checks, he either didn't send them, or sent them late. Across the decades, I cannot reliably say what he expected me to hear in these conversations. Of course, I heard all the wrong things. I heard thwarted love. I heard that intimacy wasn't worth it. I heard that no one cared about me very much. And I heard the occasional detail that, my father assured me, would be very useful when I testified.

The county seat was in Riverside, and it was there we repaired for the legal dustups. The courthouse was very imposing, white, columned, plaster figures depicting justice, mercy, and everything august, projecting from the roof line. We ascended the steps, we turned a corner and made clip clopping sounds along a marble hallway. We entered a courtroom. My brother and I sat in the back. The judge in black robe ascended his bench, banged his gavel, and my parents stepped forward. I had the idea for a fleeting, preposterous moment, that I had got it wrong, and actually they were going to get married. They stood not quite side-by-side, each flanked by an attorney, but they were quiet and respectful. My mother was dressed in a tight dark suit, looking as though she was going to a party or something fancy, looking as though she hadn't looked in a long time. My father wasn't angry, and he was being polite, and no one was yelling. And if it wasn't quite a wedding, at least maybe it was going to be something nice. Chambers. Everyone was talking about chambers. My father strode to the back of the courtroom, and I pretended not to see him. OK, he said. Come on. I rose and followed him.

The judge's office was dark and large. Everything seemed covered in leather. Books rose to the ceiling. Heavy curtains, dark paneling, green light shades. I sat in a large leather chair, my feet dangling. I wanted to go home. I wanted to make jokes with my brother. I knew where the courtroom cafeteria was, and I wanted to go there and get pie ala mode. The judge was talking to my father's lawyer, a heavyset guy who had Perry Mason's body and Ed Sullivan's face. The lawyer was saying that there were problems with instability and irrational behavior. The judge turned to my father. Yes, my father confirmed, there had been screams and nonsensical changes of subject. And why is the young man here? The judge was asking both attorneys this question. Because, my father's lawyer explained, he had witnessed this behavior. He was me. I was the 12-year-old witness. The judge turned to me. He placed his hands on his desk. The lawyer turned to me too. I had talked to him, only an hour before, in his office just up the block. He had said this would be nothing. A couple of questions. The lawyer asked one of those questions now, just as he had before, and I was proud that fear hadn't completely overtaken me. I could still speak. I spoke. Yes, I said, I heard her yelling. She called my father a bastard. She yelled at him. She cried.

The judge raised his hand, leaned back in his chair, and it was surprising to see how he could tilt, how the entire leather enclosure, all upholstered in rows of brass buttons, inclined backwards. I thought his hand was directed at someone else, but he was looking at me. "So," he said, "you were on the phone listening to these conversations. Is that right?"

I flushed. I could feel the blood rush up my cheeks. "Well," I said, thinking of how to cover up this. Thinking that I should have thought of this before. Such an obvious question, and I had only the most foolish and childish answer. "Yes, sort of." Dumb. Unspeakably dumb. I was certain I had let my father down. I was ushered out of the chambers. My brother was waiting alone in the hallway outside the courtroom. It was relief to be there. Now, it seemed, my mother would enter the chambers and something else would happen. There was a Coca-Cola machine down the hall, and I had enough change to use it. I told my brother we should walk there and get Cokes. We set off in search of our drinks, then turned down one hallway, then another. We were talking distractedly about fat ladies and skinny men and the blind guy who sold newspapers in the lobby and anything we could think of. We were trying to get lost, I now suppose, but the Riverside County Courthouse wasn't quite large enough. And, as both of us knew, we were lost already. It didn't take long for my father to find us. He ushered us back inside, for the judge was coming back into the courtroom to pound his gavel and say something. Something about child support. Or visitation rights. God knows what it was. But some decision came down. It was Judgment Day.

We met at a time when I had more or less recovered from my injury and Edna from her divorce. We worked together at a community center for the budding disability rights movement. Already in my late 20s, I never dreamed I would be working in such a place. Perhaps Edna felt the same way. 30 years my senior, she had little patience with anyone. Neither did I. We got along fine.

We kept in touch until she moved to Hawaii, then our communications faded. Until she turned up again, more or less on my doorstep, at a retirement facility across from Stanford. A new place, renowned for being expensive, where the Bay Area rich could decline in comfort. Edna, now 87, was using a walker and living with what is euphemistically called assistance. I found her, one lunchtime, in the facility dining room, waiters bustling, tablecloths crisp. "The food is not very adventurous here," Edna told me. We sat together at a table, working our way through a bland clam chowder. Two others joined us, Jim and his wife Evelyn, they said. Jim walked with a cane. His wife, considerably more spry, appeared to be there because he was. Age.

I asked Edna about an old friend of hers. How was she? Oh, Edna said, her daughter had been ill. A series of operations. She's had everything taken out of her they could take, Edna said. Evelyn put down her spoon. They can't take out everything, she said, because there wouldn't be any organs left. They probably just took out her appendix or something. Edna gave her a look. It was the sort of withering gaze that would have stunned most people, but Evelyn nattered along. You can't do without your liver, she said. Is that a fact, Edna observed.

I had grown up in a tense, embattled family, and knew what to do. I asked everyone at the table if they had seen any movies. No. Of course not. These people never got out. Getting out was an immense logistical affair. I felt a little bad for asking. "The Saragossa Manuscript," said Jim. "That was a wonderful movie." He recalled everything important about it, that it was a Polish film, popular in the 1960s, with a convoluted plot, action layered up on action, leaping from one locale to the next, one epoch to another. We chatted lightly about the film. I must have seen it at Berkeley. "The film has been lost," Jim said, sliding back his chair. No more prints were available, he added. "Very nice talking to you," Jim said. "I enjoyed our conversation."

At home, I searched the internet for a DVD version of "The Saragossa Manuscript." And there it was, $25, in a version lovingly restored by the likes of Jerry Garcia and Martin Scorsese. I bought it. What the hell. I imagined returning to Edna's facility, DVD in hand, and triumphantly presenting it to this old man, confined both by age and marriage. An old man with a young mind. If he offered me money for the DVD, I wouldn't take it. Enjoy it, I would say.

That day came. Edna had been in and out of Stanford Hospital across the street and was just returning to sociability. I found Jim seated in the lounge, playing cards with three women. "Jim," I said, rolling my wheelchair up to the table. Everyone looked at me tentatively, if not suspiciously. "I brought you something," I told Jim. Evelyn looked puzzled. I told her we had met at lunch. "I'm sure we did, dear," she said.

Jim regarded the DVD, read the label, turned it over. "The Saragossa Manuscript was a fine film," he said, "and also a very good novel." He said nothing else. I told him to enjoy it. "If you would like me to write a check or contribute to a charity, I will be happy to do that," he said. I told him no and quietly backed up my wheelchair. His offer had left me half confused, half startled.

Later, after visiting Edna, the two of us made our way to the front door, she with her walker, me in my chair. The recreation director breezed by, observing that Edna was getting around just fine these days. "That girl loves me," said Edna. "I told her not to wear knit dresses until she lost 10 pounds."

As I headed out the lobby door, another door, electronically locked, clicked open and Evelyn emerged. The locked door led to a special area for Alzheimer's therapy. Evelyn recognized me, it seemed. She leaned right over my wheelchair and asked a question. "Do you know my room number?" A woman at the front desk told her it was 143. I headed outside, wondering about certain things. Particularly why I would buy something for a rich person, then refuse simple reimbursement. "The rich are not like us," Scott Fitzgerald was supposed to have told Ernest Hemingway. Which, I suppose, is what makes rich people fascinating. And which makes us give them gifts. Gifts, which coming from people who are not rich, prove to be offerings.

It was hard to imagine Mrs. Babb as anything other than a crone. To me, she was impossibly old, perhaps in her 60s when she entered our young lives. Mrs. Babb came as a babysitter, and she sat hard. Twangy, wizened, thin to the point of skeletal, she went about her periods of child supervision in ways narrow and humorless.

"When my kids acted up," she would say, "I would go out and cut me a little switch." It was hard to imagine Mrs. Babb being young enough to have children, but it was easy to see her bending over some small willow branch, beady-eyed, and intent on corporal punishment. In retrospect, her folksy judgments must have grown straight out of the Depression-era Midwest. If as an eight-year-old you had asked me what had caused the Great Depression, I would have answered "Mrs. Babb."

It was surprising then to see her, years later, turn up in Santa Barbara. My mother must have been desperate for friends. Upon her arrival up the coast, Mrs. Babb sat at the dining room table, hands folded, listening to my mother's tales of woe. The tales were not surprising. Both of my parents were obsessed with their former spouses. My mother was short on allies in her seaside home. People from Banning were not exactly flocking to her doorstep. My mother had in her mild way become something of a mad woman to her former desert townspeople. Mrs. Babb, being no socialite, was well out of the gossip loops. And now she was here, in Santa Barbara.

Early in her visit, Mrs. Babb turned her withering eye on the three children. My brother and I were visiting for our first post-divorce summer. The August stay already had the air of routine about it. We rose each morning, and our mother drive us to the beach or we pedaled our bikes downtown. The beach was full of sand crabs, tar loosened by offshore oil rigs, manta rays flapping in the surf -- and the surf itself. I was becoming fairly adept at riding the waves. My inflatable air mattress flopped triumphantly from crest to foam, skidding me into the sand. I went at this for hours, half forgetting to pry $.50 loose from my swim trunks and purchase a lunchtime cheeseburger at the wooden snack shack.

It all would have gone on forever, or at least to the end of August, but my brother put his feet on the coffee table. This happened late one afternoon, after our return from the beach, downtown Santa Barbara, or wherever we had spent our day. My brother, feeling defiant, kept both feet on my mother's mahogany coffee table, the embossed-leather-covered one she had moved from Banning. My mother told my brother to take his feet down. He didn't budge. All right, she said, you're going home. Mrs. Babb, whom I had hardly noticed, chimed in with a similar observation. We were bad kids, her expression said.

At first, I did not take my mother's threat of banishment seriously. This seemed one of those family spats that was bound to peter out. One of the other would give way. But my mother was on her high horse, doubtless spurred on by the presence of her Babbian ally. My brother seemed delighted by the attention. Fine, he would go home. Bring 'em on, his grin seemed to say. At some point in the afternoon, I began to take my mother's stormy threats to heart. My brother and I had seen her only sporadically during the last year, and the notion that she would end our month's visit had seemed preposterous at first. But it was now looking credible. In this matter, despite our fierce sibling rivalry, I was on my brother's side. This was an injustice. There was no reason to send him home. Very well, my mother said, you're both going home.

My defiance melted like butter. Something in me drained, collapsed, and sprang from my eyes. I was crying, then sobbing. I retreated to the bedroom my brother and I shared in the dark rear of the stucco house. I sat on the bed crying, my sobs like thick spasms, liquid and unstoppable. I must have cried for an hour, perhaps more. My mother quietly opened the bedroom door. You can stay, she said. I looked up at her, teary, red-faced, humiliated. No, I said. We'll go.

The evening was a quiet one. The television was off. Mrs. Babb sat at the dining room table eating toast with milk. I asked her why she was eating such a thing. "You kids make me sick," she said, her face screwed tight. My sister burst into giggles. I watched the fog roll in, saw the night gather into a coastal cloud. It must have occurred to me that I too could relent. I wasn't really keen on going back to hot, dusty Banning. My brother probably wanted to stay as well. But I was determined to make my point. I could not say what point that was, only that my mother had rejected me and I would reject her.

The following morning on the way to the Greyhound station, my mother said again that we could stay. There was no need to go home. But I knew there was no home to go to, only places to be, temporary arrangements to endure. I didn't know what to do about deep hurts. I knew from my parents that the most effective response was to hurt back. It seemed odd to be riding downtown, then boarding the same bus with Mrs. Babb. My brother and I sat at the back of the bus, far from her. We were all headed to Banning and would logically have changed to the same Palm Springs-bound bus in Los Angeles. But I vaguely recall that Mrs. Babb's son had driven into LA to meet her. That was probably for the best. I would gladly have pushed the old woman under the wheels of the nearest Greyhound.

In early April, the latest snowfall in Rochester, New York, had left drifts higher than my 12-year-old head. I stood at the school bus stop, dressed like an Eskimo, lunch pail in hand, waiting for more than the bus. I was waiting for spring. I was waiting for my father to take me home. It had been a long, lonely winter in suburban Brighton. My parents were getting divorced, and my aunt and uncle had taken over their roles while the court room conflicts played themselves out in California -- or so the story went. With the melting of the last snow, I began walking to school, watching the gray mounds of winter melt into the gutters, shrinking daily. My father would be here soon. As for my mother, she could terrify even at a distance. A Pontiac station wagon, two-toned with green and chartreuse, rolled toward me on Highland Avenue, and my heart sailed into my mouth. No, it was not my mother's car. My mother was thousands of miles away.

My father arrived with my brother and sister, and by then, in the inexplicable warmth, winter's bleak days as remote as a nightmare, we set about doing Rochester things. Paddling a canoe on the Erie Canal. Visiting the Eastman Museum. On and on it went. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be home even in New York City, where we ate in delicatessens, visited Radio City, ascended the Empire State Building. I wanted to be home in California. And when I was, the blunt reality that not only our household but our desert house was a thing of the past, all that barely settled in before there were new distractions. Summer camp came first. Then Santa Barbara. My mother had moved there, to the Pacific Coast, and now had a new house, a smaller one, with a backyard that seemed cramped and a slope covered in ice plant. The latter, a fog-loving succulent, anchored the slanting ground. Like a cactus without needles, its fleshy green crushed into something mushy and slick. This was particularly true when one flattened a carton, sat down on the cardboard, and sailed down the slope. Rushing downhill, the ice plant went squishing, and the neighbor's back fence at the bottom kept nearing. Like many boyhood recreational plans, this one had no end and no brakes. Several times, my brother and I went plowing into the fence. We emerged happy, tennis shoes stained green, fence splinters here and there. By now, in the space of two months, Rochester had become a distant memory and my future, in Banning, California, living with my father alone, that was too remote to imagine. For now, there was the ocean, and the ice plant and bicycle rides down Cliff Drive to the wonders of downtown Santa Barbara. A library. An art museum. A Boy's Club. Three entire movie theaters, four, if you counted the one that only played Spanish titles. A pier that stretched 200 yards into the ocean. The Fiesta, where Governor Pat Brown rode in an open car along the ocean front.

And then it was over, and my brother, sister and I were together for a final weekend in Banning. The reality of my father's apartment, the absence of women, the impersonal grounds around the building, the overpowering sense of the downstairs office where he practiced medicine, all filtering into my consciousness. But for now, a final visit with the siblings. Then, my father would be mine. This had been my dream all year. My mother, frightening and unreliable, would be an occasional presence, but my father would be someone constant. There would just be the two of us. My mother had custody of my brother and sister. I would have my father to myself.

On the morning of my brother and sister's departure for Santa Barbara, my father walked into my bedroom with some news. There had been a development, he said. That development had to do with my brother. My brother wanted to stay. He wanted to stay with him. I absorbed the news like a bad shock. Beyond the usual sibling rivalry, love and affection were scant commodities in our family, or what was left of it. Now I was going to have to vie with my brother for my father's attention. I forced a smile. How wonderful. Now my brother would be with us. I was a fierce partisan in my father's battles with his ex-wife. Ours was the noble cause, just and morally correct. My father made some calls to his lawyer. Before I knew it, we were driving up the coast. There was something surreal about returning to Santa Barbara so quickly. My father stopped downtown and checked us into an old hotel. All hotels in Santa Barbara seemed old. My brother and I waited in the room, staring down from the fourth story window, thinking seriously about objects we could throw onto the street. My father had driven my seven-year-old sister to our mother's house on the cliff above the ice plant. We were bored. There was no was saying exactly why we were in Santa Barbara and no real indication of what would happen next.

Next came that evening. We had dinner in a coffee shop, then we got a taxi. The taxi seemed exotic. We had been inside several earlier that summer in New York City, but riding up Cliff Drive in one seemed as strange as peddling my bicycle up the aisles at Safeway. But here we were, stopping a block from my mother's house, early evening, my mother's neighbors walking a dog, my father getting out of the cab and standing on the sidewalk, an incongruous presence on this, my mother's turf. My father leaned into the cab and gave the driver some instructions. The driver said something. My father said something. This went on for several minutes. The cab drove off. My father and I stood in the dusk, watching my brother walk up San Miguel Street. The neighborhood, with its soft fog and planted terraces, turned foreign. We waited. My brother was nowhere in sight. My father shifted from one foot to the other, placed his hands behind his back. He told me not to talk. Porch lights were coming on up and down the street, and people were peeking through curtains. Just stand here, my father told me. He checked his watch. Five minutes. 10 minutes. I wondered what was happening with my brother inside my mother's house. My father had talked it through with him. How he was to enter her home, explain her what he wanted, then leave. What he wanted, he was to say, was to live with my father.

15 minutes. Every porch light on the street was blazing. The sidewalks were empty. A dog barked. Somewhere, a garage door slid up or down. The first evening mist was drifting by the streetlights. My father took a few steps up the street. We stopped just around the corner from my mother's garage. Her porch light was on and now her screen door flew open, slammed into its maximum swing by my brother, who shot outside. He was crying and half screaming in terror. My mother loomed in the doorway. I saw her and was certain she saw me. Standing there, backlit by living room lamps, she froze, tall and predatory. She yelled something, at my father or at me, but it was too late. We were running, all of us, down the street, one man and two boys, one sobbing fiercely. A block away, we stopped. No one had followed. My father looked at his watch. We would wait here. He checked his watch again, growing nervous at the accelerating pace of the porch lights coming on, shades lifting and curtains parting. My father told us to sit down. We sat down on the curb, somewhat too low for us, ludicrously low for my father. Be quiet, he told us. My brother's sobs were abating. Parked cars concealed us. It wasn't clear how much longer he would stay on this curb or why. A car crept slowly up the street. Stopping, driving on, stopping. My father stepped into the street and waved. It was the cab and the same driver.

The next morning my brother and I wanted to go to the beach. My father said no. The beach was too public. He drove us to Montecito and pointed at boring gardens and houses. We had lunch at a restaurant with a big patio and waiters wearing ties in August. I said I wanted to go to the beach. My father drove us to the train station. He bought two tickets, and we walked to the platform. The Southern Pacific Daylight arrived, hissing and old. My father waved goodbye. He would see us soon, two hours from now, in LA. We were taking the train for a reason, and the reason had something to do with my father's lawyer, but what the reason was no one could say. Strange to be sitting in the cushy seats from another era, looking at the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Highway 101 north of Ventura. Agricultural fields by Oxnard. The outer San Fernando Valley. Then Union Station, Los Angeles. The place was barely 19 years old then, but it already looked ancient, the art deco ticket booths in the waiting room more like something out of Grand Central Station, which we had visited months earlier. The waiting room had individual leather seats with wide armrests. My father wasn't there. My brother waited in one seat while I scouted out others. I wasn't really looking for seats, but looking for news. I glanced at the headlines in the Los Angeles Examiner. Nothing about my father. Nothing about my father and the traffic wreck that killed him. I was certain of it. I looked at the clock. We had been at the station for an hour. My brother and I went to the men's room. We returned to our seats. I walked to the Southern Pacific ticket counter and stared at the agents. One of them might know something. It was awful to have your father die. Where was I going to live? Back to Rochester? My mother? Dwarfed by the cavernous, echoing waiting room, my father approached in the distance, arm swinging, his tie askew. I broke into tears. Where had he been? My father had no patience for this. Hadn't I seen the traffic backed up all the way down to LA? Didn't I know it was Labor Day weekend? I didn't know. I didn't know anything. I only knew we were getting in my father's car.