by admin » Fri Mar 18, 2016 7:34 pm
11. Trouble in Paradise
NANCY
After Paul moved out, I never missed him. Since he usually worked past their bedtime, the children adjusted to his absence. I'd had all the burdens of being a single parent with barely any of the benefits of being married. Paul was angry over the separation and caused some ugly scenes, but I knew he'd stop, out of cowardice, when John joined us.
That summer of 1979, Michael ran his bike into a wall and bruised his face so badly it looked like he'd been beaten. I could tell the separation bothered him and my heart broke. He didn't have the conceptual framework to talk about it. At the tender age of nine, Megan understood exactly why I asked Paul to leave. She had witnessed his rages and felt the pall of unhappiness that hung in our house. "John makes you laugh, and Dad makes you cry," she observed wisely. But a boy misses his father. Michael was too young to understand that I needed more than Paul could give me or that he deserved a loving father. It is so sad the way kids have to go along for the ride, no matter what. They don't have a choice and in their innocence they try so hard to support you with their enthusiasm.
When John heard about Michael's bruises, he suggested I paint designs on Band-Aids to make them look like war medals, so Mikey would feel proud of his bravery about the pain. He responded exactly as John had predicted. Impressed by John's capacity for empathy, I began to feel a security I'd never experienced. He approached everything with the creative mind of a genius, so you never knew what to expect. Over the years, he nurtured and fretted about Michael and Megan as much as I did, especially when they were teenagers. With tremendous care and concern, he poured a lifetime of attention into them. They adored him. Several years later, when Paul bellowed his usual belittling humiliations at Michael, I said coldly, "If you even wonder why the kids took John's last name and consider him their father, remember what you just said to your son."
Early one morning in October, I woke to the sounds of an intruder climbing through my bedroom window. Screaming like a banshee, I scared him off. The police found him hiding in a neighbor's bushes. I called John in terror.
"Honey, you've got pheromones that would cause a man to bore through a brick wall," he quipped. "You need a dog until I get there. Thom's been keeping George, my standard poodle, since I was at seminary. He can bring him to you." He asked me to keep an eye on Thom till he arrived. "I'm worried about his drinking. Don't let on, or he'll bolt. He's very skittish." And so, a few days later, I met Thom and George, the wild white standard poodle.
I couldn't decide who was more unruly, the boisterous brother or the dog. Thom and I went out that night, to Le Bar at the Boulderado, for drinks, of course. I liked him immediately; he had the same uproarious humor and spontaneity that I loved in John. He was warm, exuberant, and alive.
I'd been cutting apples that afternoon for the children at the Buddhist school we were organizing. As we were walking back to his van, I discovered I'd left a carving knife in my purse.
"Oh, I get it," Thom teased. "You're such a tough chick, you can't just make due with a switchblade." As I look back on it now, it symbolized the protection we would need to guard against this incredibly wounded man, just to keep Johnny alive. Reluctant to sacrifice his lifelong drinking buddy for the sake of his health, Thom would mindlessly undermine John's every attempt at sobriety.
We sat playing with George under the canopy of maple trees on the lawn. Suddenly, Thom's mood swung from gaiety to menace. He held the dog's white cotton head in his hands.
"Do you have any idea how easy it would be to snap his neck?" I froze in terror. The eerie ring of the telephone broke the silence. I ran toward the house. It was John, psychically sensing his drunken brother might be getting out of hand.
"He's got a mile-wide mean streak," John said grimly. "Put him on the phone." He sounded disgusted, but hardly surprised. I sensed a strange sadistic tension between the brothers that would take me years to understand. Although I found the incident disturbing, the chaotic intensity was familiar. These were my kind of guys, dog and all. If I met Thom or John or even George today, I would heed the red flags. I am no longer charmed by living on the edge, but back then I was game for adventure, even danger. When Thom left, I resolved to domesticate all three of them.
John flew in for Thanksgiving with all his worldly possessions and ensconced himself in our home. That Christmas was the most memorable yet; we still talk about it. John embodied the holiday spirit and the children basked in the warmth of his sunny generosity. As he lavished carefully chosen presents on us, the joyous celebration shone in sharp contrast to the dreadful past holidays ruined by Paul's drinking. We sang and laughed, and frolicked like puppies. John kept playing Kenny Loggins's "Please Celebrate Me Home."
"I feel at home for the first time in my life," he told us. He wasn't cool about it. He cried.
My parents decided to buy a home for us. Johnny and I had already fallen in love with a sprawling house surrounded by an acre of lawns, an apple orchard and a beautiful view of the mountains. The master-bedroom suite, with a fireplace in the sitting room, was separate from the children's wing. We could have privacy from Saturday morning cartoons and they would be spared our late-night talks.
John and Thom had a huge moving truck deliver the family antiques that they'd kept in storage since their mother's death in 1975. We spent three days unpacking the treasures, a cherry-wood armoire, flown over the Hump by General Stilwell who'd picked it up in Burma from Dutch missionaries; Queen Anne tables and chairs; Venetian glass, family portraits; and dishes from Napoleonic times. Suddenly the Steinbeck legacy filled our house.
Thom spent hours lovingly unpacking everything, lingering over each piece, explaining the history to me, but Johnny eyed them coldly, claiming they held sad memories of his childhood. I sensed the tension as we opened each crate filled with objects that reflected Gwyn's exquisite taste.
"Mother developed Dad's sense of aesthetic beauty," Thom told me. "She also threw the heavier objects at Johnny's head when she was drunk." There were gifts from every "uncle" the boys had to suffer through after the divorce, along with cocktail-party props and an endless silver service they'd had to polish repeatedly at her whim. Although our house looked beautiful, the elegance was permeated by a slight uneasiness, as if ghosts were unpacking their baggage as well.
With the arrival of memories, Johnny began revealing his painful family secrets to me. Sensing the wounds were too tender, I had never asked about his parents. On one of our first nights together at seminary, lying in my arms, he told me about his relationship with Steinbeck. Feeling safe enough to finally speak the unmentionable, he suddenly burst into heartrending sobs. As I soothed him, I vowed to get to the bottom of his sorrow. Vats of scotch and bales of marijuana later, John finally found the courage to stop anesthetizing himself and learned how to heal those old wounds. After his death, several Steinbeck scholars told me they cannot imagine how Johnny survived his childhood. I wished I'd been able to talk to them in those early days, instead of being locked into the tight-lipped trap set between him and Thom.
As I grew to know John, I discovered many unique parts of his character, such as his distaste for name dropping. Unimpressed by the famous people he'd known, he took them quite for granted. When William Burroughs asked John to write the preface to his son Billy's posthumous autobiography, Speed, I heard for the first time about the months John and William had lived at the Boulderado while tending to Billy's liver transplant. Johnny adopted William as a father figure and he felt close to Billy because he was a fellow son of a famous father. Born addicted, Billy wore out his liver with drugs and alcohol. After the transplant, he couldn't stop drinking, and soon died. John saw a prophecy in Billy's life that frightened him.
We wanted to create a refuge for our family and our love, a home filled with harmony and joy. Johnny relished tending the grounds around our house. He created beautiful tanks of tropical fresh- and salt-water fish, decorated with ferns, sunken ships, and pirate treasures. One night, Thom turned up the thermostat, making bouillabaisse from a fortune of exotic creatures.
"I thought they looked cold," he said, abashed and then blamed the scotch.
John was proud of his new family and our beautiful home. He loved hosting dinner parties so he could show off his spread and preen in front of friends who invariably took me aside to whisper, "How did you tame the monster?" They'd ask the same thing about George, who had been notoriously unruly. I really believed my love could domesticate their bestial natures. In the long run, I was right, but I had no idea how long that run would be.
For two years, Johnny drank and smoked pot every night. I drank, too, though never as often nor nearly as much. Gradually, the skeletons started coming out of our closets. Although his drinking didn't affect me strongly at first, there was an underlying uneasiness as my denial slipped. I knew nothing about alcoholism, the signs, the symptoms, the effect on the family. I noticed that sometimes John would get nervous when he hadn't had a drink. He would keep his scotch in the kitchen, which I later realized was a way of controlling the flow. If he wanted another drink, he'd have to get up for it. In my ignorance, I filled Steinbeck's antique crystal decanter and kept it near John so he didn't have to get up. Now it sounds like an Enabler joke, but by that time I was developing the desperate pattern of a codependent, trying to prop up a sense of order like a corpse.
I don't know when the transition happened, when the avalanche of alcoholism hit our safe house. One day there was the joyous fruition of our seminary dream and the next day we woke up to find all our genetically impaired ancestors camped in our backyard. At first, there was the inspiration to create a family that was vastly different from our childhoods. All too soon, pain and confusion had buried us. There were no guides, no signposts. Consciousness about addiction had not yet been raised to the popular level.
Things turned ugly and it broke our hearts. Our first fight started during a trip through the southwest to San Francisco. We planned to see Thom in Austin, their grandmother in Nogales, and then my parents in San Francisco. John also wanted to introduce me to a previous girlfriend's family in Texas. I wasn't looking forward to a tour of old relationships, but since Paul was welcome in our house and often spent holidays with us, I tried to keep an open mind. Old girlfriends can be great if they at least treat you like you're visible. The ones I can't tolerate are those who act like you're not there and the guy who dumped them to be with you is really still interested in them.
By now, I had seen scores of women throw themselves at John. I was beginning to get a taste for the invisibility which often plagues women in celebrity relationships. You become an appendage as these hungry, predatory females pretend you just wash his socks. They smell stardust and suddenly they act like it's just them and him in the room. With the scent of blood in their nostrils, they go for the jugular, that hit of fame. Appalled by their rudeness, it took me a long time to learn how to deal with them.
For example, a well-known New-Age anthropologist was once the guest du jour at a friend's party. She must have known John was coming because when we walked into the room, she honed in on him like a laser. Everyone noticed. It was downright embarrassing. She tried to entertain the whole room with one of her "There I was, out in a kayak with a bunch of Tibetan lamas, chasing a killer whale ... " stories, but the whole time she spoke only to John.
"I wanted to punch her," he said with disgust. "It's so rude. She acted like you were invisible."
I began to wish Johnny came with handouts for those women: Just because this man is polite and charming, it doesn't mean that he wants to sleep with you. In fact, when he goes home, he'll probably dissect you mercilessly and rail against his people-pleasing cowardice which prevented him from shutting you up. We ran into the woman years later at a spiritual conference in Newport. When she cornered Johnny for his phone number, he wrote it under both our names. "She'll never call when she sees your name next to mine," he smirked.
There was an incident over a mustard jar which epitomized those ghouls. Another one of those types, who positively drooled whenever Johnny was around, managed to finagle an invitation to dinner at our house. She was standing in the kitchen when she spotted a crock of imported German mustard on the counter.
"Look at that," she crooned to John. "Who else would have a jar of gourmet mustard?" She raved on about his sophistication. Actually, my mother had sent it, and it was the kind I'd grown up with, but she would never consider it was my choice. Only Johnny could possibly be so special. For years after, whenever one of Them started to drool, Johnny would lean over and whisper to me, "Love your mustard, dahling," and I'd snicker.
In a quandary about those situations, I started asking other women in my position. We'd all reached the same conclusion. Married to a charismatic husband, after several dozen encounters like that, you start cringing when you see the signs. You even go through a period where you hate to meet new people, especially single women, because it's so predictable. It helped when we stopped socializing with other alcoholics, but good manners are rare these days in any circle.
Johnny had an uncanny effect on women. He had what singer Van Morrison calls railway- carriage charm. Graciously European in his bearing, he made women feel like he was genuinely interested in them, and for some, that was highly unusual. Given the choice, he'd rather hang out with them than most men. "Don't leave me in the other room with the guys, talking about chain saws and studded snow tires. I want to be with your girlfriends, talking about emotions and interesting things."
When the company of men grew too boring, I could feel him listening across the room to what I was talking about with the women. I loved that. Soon he'd wander over and plunk himself down amongst us. In spite of his macho, stand-up guy persona, he could tap deeply into his feminine side. Frilly bedrooms never made him nervous. He'd snuggle in, prop his feet on the lacy pillow shams, and spill cigarette ash on the pastel duvet.
Some women aren't accustomed to being treated with respect by men; they interpret it as a come-on. Especially the lonely single ones, with no life. You could predict it like clockwork. After we were married, we had dinner at the house of Sam Brown, the guy who started the Peace Corps. Seated at separate tables, John found himself next to one of "those women." Several days later, a perfumed letter arrived. "John, I had such a delightful time with you the other night." Her phone number appeared casually below her signature.
Johnny wafted it by me as it sailed into the wastebasket.
Johnny called it eyelight. "They're missing eyelight. Nobody's looked in their eyes for years." For him, it was never about being emotionally available. He had a genuinely curious and gregarious personality. No one feared that a dinner conversation would lag when he was around. After he died, I hated going out. I had forgotten that people can be so boring. I was used to a certain comfort zone, knowing there wouldn't be an awkward moment unless he allowed one. The man dripped savoir faire and je ne sais quoi. Not many guys have his qualities these days, not even movie stars. So many men are frozen in their monologues, as if they're these great mythical beings. They start talking and all they want is for you to nod periodically and say "Really???" Johnny's conversational skills left me channel surfing through most men. I remember him often teasing, "I'm telling you, I'll be a hard act to follow."
The first few days of our trip were filled with excitement and romance. Then John's history began to seep in. I watched him become agitated in Austin over the offhanded way Thom treated our visit. "He does it every time. Dad was the same way. They act like they can't figure out what you're doing in the same town. Neither of them could handle intimacy, so they cover it up with bluster."
Thom found his equilibrium by playing Older Brother, goading John into the younger, disadvantaged role. It frustrated and enraged John. When we were alone, he brooded with resentment.
"Why don't you say something?"
"He'd just laugh. He's been cruel to me ever since we were babies."
The cognitive dissonance of Thom's sadism was a disturbing contrast to his tremendous warmth. Knowing nothing about dysfunctional family loyalties, I wondered why John bothered with Thom if all he got back was condescension. Remembering Cal and Aaron in East of Eden, I began to realize what a self-fulfilling prophecy that novel would be for the Steinbeck brothers and me. I felt like the character Abra, mediating between the two. Thom had actually been married for a brief time to a woman named Adra. It was my first glimpse into the ancient blood rivalry between the brothers.
One evening, I went for a walk while John sat paralyzed with anguish about Thom's brutality. It's as if they are acting out a childhood curse. Did Steinbeck foresee the primordial competition between his own sons, or did he just think he was spinning a good tale? Did his failures as a father, his withholding of love and approval, pit brother against brother in a fatal, sickening struggle for dominance? Was the book written out of ambivalence, a favoring of one brother over the other? Ironically, Thom seemed just as desperate to win his father's posthumous approval as Johnny.
When I got back to the hotel, John was napping. Thom asked me to join him for drinks and he opened up to me, as if sensing my confusion. Keeping secrets is the hallmark of a dysfunctional family. When your father wins the Nobel Prize for literature, it raises the ante. "One wants to be loved and accepted by their parents," Thom explained. "I realized that if the world loved Dad and looked to him for his opinion, and he didn't love me, then there must be something wrong with me. If the whole world says this is a great man, who am I to argue with them? If his opinion means this much and he gets the Nobel Prize for it, then when he tells me I'm full of shit, he must be right. When we got into similar trouble, Dad would say 'You're unhappy, but Johnny's crazy.' He could allow me the usual teenage angst, but to him, Johnny's was a sign that he was emotionally defective. And so I bought into that."
As the eldest sibling, Thom played the role of the family hero. "Johnny was the scapegoat and mascot. I was the 'yes' man. I had to get along with Dad and Mother and our stepmother, Elaine. My job was not to defy. My job was to be loved and accepted. That was my survival. It caused Johnny to rebel. He pulled unbelievable stunts that had nothing to do with the payoff, which was mostly negative attention. It had to do with the fact that he could stop time for these people. I loved him for that. He was always in trouble, always testing the boundaries, and so he was always the first one to be jumped on."
Johnny had told me how his mother physically and emotionally abused him after the divorce. At the tender age of four, she would wake him in the middle of the night by smashing scotch bottles on his head, drunk and sobbing. "It's all your fault. If you and your brother hadn't been born, I'd still be married to your father." When the boys got up in the morning, before the maid arrived, they'd find the Picassos slashed and the walls smeared with blood from her fights with various boyfriends. Johnny couldn't stand the sound of ice tinkling in a glass because it would remind him of his mother's drunken slurs, just like as a vet he couldn't stand the sound of helicopters. It took years for me to understand these complex emotional undercurrents.
"Mother loved us to the extent that she could love anybody," Thom told me. "She never copped to her abuse of us. She conveniently forgot anything that was remotely embarrassing to her. She did do one thing that was meant as pure torture, and she was a torturer, believe me. If she wanted to get to Johnny, she would tell him how I was loved best. She'd say, 'I understand why your father liked your brother better,' and Grandmother would back her up.
"Their attempt to split us up began to work. Convincing Johnny that Elaine and Dad loved me best and didn't love him, giving me all the privileges and he got all the shit, only split us up even farther. Then we met in Vietnam, on separate ground, where we could recreate the relationship based upon the madness around us during the war, as opposed to our parents' insanity. Mother and Dad couldn't influence us there. I bless the war for saving my relationship with my brother. There's no doubt about the fact that he was cursed in that family. By the time we were in our twenties, I was sick of trying to justify that to him, as though I was in charge of our parents' conduct. Johnny always felt that I was yessing these people so they'd treat me better. He was right, but had he been given half a bloody chance, he would have done the same thing."
I felt we were being held hostage by Steinbeck's solidification of the sibling archetype in the book he'd dedicated to his sons. As I watched East of Eden with Johnny that winter of 1979, I tried to view it through their pubescent eyes. It made my skin crawl to think of those two impressionable boys watching the movie without any parental guidance. Steinbeck's portrayal of Kate, the mother figure, as a malevolent, depraved whore confused the issue further, just as Gwyn's increasing debauchery was deepening their mistrust of women. This was one of the many flagrant examples of their parent's irresponsibility. While the critics pondered the significance of Steinbeck's characters, the boys were left like feral children in a maze of neglect. In letters, Steinbeck worried about Gwyn's influence on the boys. In reality, he did little to protect them and he might just as well have worried about the effect he was having on his sons.
"Thom and I always wondered which of us was the James Dean character," John told me. "We figured Kate was a repository for all the vicious things Dad thought about Mother after the divorce." Later, when I watched the 1981 miniseries with Thom and John, I noticed the chilling effect Jane Seymour's vicious portrayal of Kate had on them. When it was over, we said nothing. An undercurrent of despair ran deep through the bottle of scotch they consumed that night.
Earlier, John and Thom had been asked to review the galleys for Jackson Benson's biography The True Adventures of John Steinbeck. Benson had unearthed a rumor that when she decided to divorce Steinbeck, Gwyn had taunted him by raising the question of Johnny's paternity. The brothers were simultaneously angered and convulsed with laughter; one had only to look at John to see the striking resemblance to his father. Thom told me, "Toward the end of their marriage, Mother had an affair with a neighbor. She was lonely because Dad was always traveling, but he certainly wasn't Johnny's father." Much to Benson's consternation, they refused to let him print anything questioning John's paternity. He always looked huffy around John whenever they met socially.
To add insult to irony, after Johnny died, Benson made the fact public in a subsequent book and in an Arts and Entertainment Network Steinbeck Biography. Both he and Thom are seen calmly discussing the insinuation that Johnny was not Steinbeck's son. That's when I realized you can't win for losing. John spent his entire life trying to live up to a myth, an archetype of biblical proportions and now that he was no longer able to defend his birthright, the remaining experts were fighting over his DNA. "Who, me?" Thom seemed to be saying in the interview. "I'm not my brother's keeper." Although the program outraged our friends, it only confirmed what I saw that summer afternoon in Austin, Texas. Each brother saw himself as the good son, but those of us who knew Johnny's talent, character, and compassion would cast our votes for him.
For the rest of our visit, John and Thom played out their genetically encoded mood swings and Pavarotti chest-poundings. The ebb and flow, swirling around their mutual double helix and mainlining into their veins, was always in direct ratio to the amount of scotch consumed. The pink cloud of my romantic dream was turning green around the edges.
While we were in Austin, Johnny took me to meet the old girlfriend and her five sisters. On the way over, he filled me in on their family history. One aunt had been lobotomized, their father lived with a demented woman who defecated all over the house, and their mother, who was in her seventies, had recently taken a young island lover in Belize. Liz Carpenter Lady Bird Johnson's former press secretary, was also an aunt, which segued into the Steinbeck ties with strong Texican women, like Elaine, John's stepmother. In 1994, Liz Carpenter published a book about raising the children of the demented woman, subtitled Confessions of a Seventysomething Surrogate Mother. It sounds tragic now, but that afternoon the sisters acted as if it were all very amusing and eccentric.
Unbeknownst to her, Thom and John's private nickname for the old girlfriend was Trigger, which had as much to do with her looks, they claimed, as her Texas roots. She was less than thrilled to meet me. I don't know why I went except I could tell Johnny wanted to show me off. He'd had such a hassle with Thom that I felt like obliging him.
The five sisters, who had previously been eying Johnny as a prize stud, hoping for a Steinbeck heir, sat like lemons and gave me dirty looks. Nobody talked to me but they made a big fuss over John. Frozen on the inside, I managed to limp through the ordeal. As we were leaving, Trigger suggested we meet that night for a movie, along with Thom. She and her date came up to our hotel room. I purposely was lying on the bed looking ravished, just to stick it to her. She was definitely one of those old girlfriends who wished I'd drop dead. She'd write John a note after a meeting like that saying "Sorry it was so social."
"Excuse me?" I said when Johnny showed it to me. "What did she expect? You already dumped her once!" It's like they keep hoping the guy will wake up and come running back to them, even years later.
Thom pulled me aside after the movie to ask about the afternoon. "How did you ever survive? I can't believe Johnny put you through that." I made a crack about either having too much or absolutely no self-esteem.
The best old girlfriends are the ones who know what a pain the guy can be sometimes and they're more interested in getting to know you. Rachel Faro, who sang that commercial "in the Aaaarmy," was like that. John had run his you-have-to-meet-my-old-girlfriend number on her, so she knew it well.
"God, he had terrible taste in women," she shouted. I treasure the ones who know sisterhood can be delicious.
Our next stop was John's maternal grandmother's house in Nogales. She was ninety-two years old, bedridden for years with a colostomy. Filled with painkillers, she clung to life like a pit bull. She adored Johnny, and had driven him and Thom crazy for years by threatening imminent death and insisting they fly to her side, which they always did. This was Gwen, mother of Gwyn. Both had contributed to the brothers' misogyny. In her younger days, she'd been imperious in grand style, driving a canary-yellow convertible, asserting her way through life generations before feminism, in dramatic picture hats. She had the touch of St. Francis and taught Gwyn and then Thom and John about the secret life of animals, wild and domestic; of the sweet love and innocence in each silent creature. If a baby cried too long in a restaurant, she'd yell, "Put a sock in it!" She had a mouth on her that got passed on to her daughter who passed it on to her sons. The curse of alcoholism had traveled so far down the family food chain in its diseased genetic structure that it mutated into lewd obscenities.
"Mother could make a Marine blush when she drank," Thom boasted. With enough scotch, Johnny could make a Marine blanch, duck, and cover.
As we were leaving, Grandmother sent Johnny out to the kitchen to fix himself a snack. She drew me to her bedside. "I've been waiting for you to come along. I can tell he loves you with all his heart. I've been afraid to die and leave him, but now that he's found you, I know he'll be safe." It was our secret and she finally did let go a few months later.
Gwen's fourth husband, Stanley, was a broker of Mexican tomatoes, a consummate salesman who'd started in shoes. He was twenty years younger and looked like he could hardly wait for her to die. Not that he had any great plans, but he was getting tired of Grandmother ordering him about. When Thom was twelve years old, he'd worked all summer in Stanley's packing-crate factory, making tomato boxes. He'd saved one hundred dollars and just before he was due to fly back to school in New York, Stanley snookered him into a poker game. Stanley won, and he took every cent of Thom's savings. They hated Stanley.
I felt sorry for him. It couldn't have been much fun being married to a woman who selected her houses according to their proximity to the best hospitals so she could spend every holiday there. This was another charming trait she'd handed down to Mother. Gwyn would stage some illness that required a hysterical ambulance ride over Thanksgiving or Christmas, and the boys would be left to the dark and bleak holiday spirit of hired nannies who nipped at gin bottles. Once, Thom was so upset, he found Gwyn's little revolver, and climbed up on the kitchen counter, aimed it at his presumed terrorist, and declared, "I'm going to toot you." She was fired, but the holiday spirits never improved.
When Grandmother died, John and Thom went to her funeral in Tucson carrying the ancient ceramic chicken that held Mother's ashes. They'd kept it in storage along with the other furniture, not knowing what to do with her remains. As the moving men were unloading the antiques for our new house, they drew me aside and asked, "Are those guys really related to Steinbeck?" Then they whispered, "What's in that chicken? It says Mother's Ashes." John and Thom had hauled them around until Gwyn was finally placed next to her best friend and ally in perversity. We doubted they rested in peace.
I was starting to see parts of my gentle Johnny that shocked me. He began to take the strain of being around Thom and Grandmother out on me. Refusing to believe I was at fault, as he seemed to imply, I silently blamed his stress. This was the start of a dynamic that was to become a mantra for every woman who lives with an alcoholic when he's unhappy: denial and blame.
Johnny was becoming a monster and alcohol was the teratogen. While he seethed with rage, I oscillated between disgust and vulnerability, trying to figure out what was really wrong. I knew I hadn't done anything, but suddenly I was the bad guy. After a few hours of pain and insecurity, I opted for the wrath button and I let him have it.
A fight erupted on the first curve of the Pacific Coast Highway and lasted for six hours till we hit Monterey. I had held it in all week and assassinating his character was the only way I knew how to vent. This was years before any of us would learn to gently express our feelings in "I" statements. He pulled up in front of the Greyhound bus station in Monterey and ordered me out of the car. He suggested I take a bus to San Francisco to stay with my parents and he'd meet me back in Colorado or see me in hell. He threw my suitcase onto the sidewalk. I refused to leave the car and insisted we go to a hotel.
I wish John had come with an owner's manual, something to make him user-friendly. Or some kind, concerned family member could have sat me down and said, "When he hits boiling, don't push anymore. You'll never get what you want; he can't be pushed." It took me ten years to learn that. I was a pusher. Johnny was a pusher. It was part of that mirror thing we saw in each other. Eventually the pain became too great and we stopped pushing and learned to stick out our tongues at each other when we wanted to get a point across. Ten years it took for us to let go of the napalm brought in by the hounds of hell. By then, a fight would last three minutes, tops. We reached a level of enlightenment few couples achieve. But the path getting there was a battlefield, a very uncivil war.
Once settled in a comfortable hotel, I asked him if we could just drop the whole fight. It was important to me that he meet my family and I didn't want to break up the trip. Maybe he was nervous about meeting my parents, maybe he was flexing his childhood habituation to operatic fights in order to feel alive. I noticed that being in Steinbeck Country made him extremely squirrely and so I let go of the whole thing. John softened, the magic returned, we became entranced with each other again, and our world went back on the half shell.
Being around certain people created tremendous stress in John's system. He was driven to maintain a charming public persona, and after a while his nerves would be on edge from the strain of posturing. "When you were with John," a friend once said, "he held you close to the flame of fame. He could elevate you to the heights of that rarified air and make you feel like you were a star, too." While I was furious with him, and hurt by his insensitivity, I also knew that I was the only one who would consistently give him a place where his heart could rest, where he could drop the posturing and facade. Years later, when he finally got sober, Johnny became a wonderful curmudgeon and he refused to play that old role. But it took a monumental effort on his part to achieve enough self-confidence to lose the need to appear larger than life.
John hadn't produced much since his first book, In Touch, published a decade earlier in 1969, about his six years in Vietnam. He was drafted when he was twenty and served for a year over there in Armed Forces Radio and TV. Shortly after returning home, while he was still in the army, he was busted for possession of marijuana, which was very upsetting and embarrassing to Steinbeck. Although he was acquitted, Johnny told me Steinbeck's last words to him were, "They should have put you in jail."
When he was twenty-two, John testified before the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee on Drug Abuse as an expert on marijuana after writing an article titled "The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam" for the Washingtonian. Johnny was the first journalist to reveal the fact many soldiers were using drugs over there. As usual, he was not afraid to speak the truth and he used In Touch as a vehicle for his honesty. When he got out of the army, he was so enamored with Vietnamese culture, their women, and their drugs, that he immediately returned as a civilian. Along with Sean Flynn, Errol's son, and several other Saigon Cowboys, John lived in a brothel called Frankie's House, where they learned street Vietnamese, which made them privy to local stories before they were translated for prime-time news. John and Sean started Dispatch News Service which broke some of the most important stories, including the My Lai massacre of three hundred innocent civilians by U.S. troops on a search-and-destroy mission. Sean disappeared on a photo shoot in Cambodia, another son-of-a-famous-father fatality biting the Asian dust.
John also spent time living on the fantasy Phoenix Island in the middle of the Mekong, governed by a whimsical yogi, the silent Coconut Monk. This tiny, stooped mendicant adopted John as a spiritual son and invited him to live on the peace zone he had created in the midst of the raging war. Howitzer shells were hammered into bells by the four hundred monks on the island. There were seven tiered pagodas, reminiscent of Watts Towers, symbolizing harmony. The relationship between John and the monk was the start of John's search for a surrogate, spiritually evolved father.
While he was in the army, he fell in love with an older Vietnamese woman whose husband was a high-ranking general. Later, he had an affair with an American woman and their daughter was born in Saigon. In the course of those six years, John became a junkie, first on opium and then heroin. He also won an Emmy for the work he did on the CBS documentary The World of Charlie Company, which filmed the soldiers in action. When you achieve that much success at an early age, you become a hard act for yourself to follow. A few Playboy or Travel and Leisure articles and barrels of scotch later, he had to pump up the volume just to keep people from noticing that he wasn't producing. Growing up around famous people made both John and Thom feel that they had to spread a cloud of stardust wherever they went. The stories had to be scintillating, the humor razor sharp, Uzi quick. It was wearing on them, and it wore me down, too, but other people were dazzled, and that was everyone's reward for all their sleights of hand. No one but the three of us noticed the toll it was taking.
I had no idea how deeply John's Vietnam experiences had wounded him. Earlier that fall, he had been asked to write an article about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vietnam vets for Denver magazine and that was an education for both of us. The Disabled American Veterans published a list of traits which included sleep disturbances, emotional numbing, loss of interest in work, survivor guilt, suicidal feelings, the inability to talk about war experiences, alienation, cynicism and distrust of authority, and emotional distancing from loved ones. Johnny's favorite was "concern with humanistic values overlaid by hedonism." Four times the number of vets have killed themselves than were actually killed in the war, and now statistics claim over 40 percent of the homeless are Vietnam vets.
I felt like I had been given a topographical map to the Grand Canyons and Himalayas of Johnny's shattered psyche, with the staggering invitation to explore those uncharted depths and heights if I wanted to know this man. I was terrified and felt so alone. How could I navigate through his scarred memories when he refused to face them himself? There seemed to be so many things wrong. He was alcoholic, drug addicted, a Vietnam vet, an abused child, and to top it all off he was the son of a famous father. There was no one 1 could even discuss these things with. All of these issues were far removed from the collective consciousness at that time, whereas now the talk shows have run out of things to say about them.
You have to understand this thing about being named John Steinbeck. I would watch John flinch on the phone when asked his name. It always got a reaction. You couldn't just call up and make a reservation for dinner that night, or even order Chinese. And John felt he had to be gracious about it, if only to encourage people to read more if they liked Steinbeck's work. He was always heartened by the sons of famous fathers who achieved success, like Jeff and Beau Bridges, or David and Keith Carradine.
"I think their fathers really loved them and encouraged their talents, instead of being threatened," John said. "You get a sense of closeness and support. Their fathers look so kind, like they really knew how to talk to their sons and guide them in their careers. They didn't see them as a source of competition, but rather as a reflection of their own talents, as opposed to the distance and grudge holding that Dad was so good at."
"Dad was jealous of Johnny, because he knew Johnny saw right through him and it would infuriate him," Thom said. "Dad was jealous of Mother's intelligence for the same reason. They didn't act like he was the Great Man. Elaine catered to that need in him, because she knew which side her bread was buttered on. Though don't get me wrong, they fought frequently."
There was the answer to the turmoil I'd felt in Austin. When Steinbeck examined the ancient struggle that pits brother against brother in East of Eden, he forgot to take himself out of the equation. He shaped the duel into an unwieldy triangle with this autobiographical revelation. The real issue at hand was his refusal to let either son surpass him with their talents, wisdom, or courage. By dividing and conquering with his favors, he rendered his sons impotent to grow beyond the parameters of what he would allow. I saw the work that lay ahead and once again was filled with resolve that John would not succumb to his paternal curse. If a father does not transmit his encouragement and blessing to his son, he holds him frozen in a flight pattern of resentment and negativity, daring the son to evolve past the limits he has set for himself. In this grudging resentment of the betterment in each generation the son must self-sabotage in order to win the father's approval. I vowed in the name of Abra to beat the old man at his own game.
When we got to San Francisco, John charmed my parents. They didn't seem to notice how much alcohol he drank. Although my mother had quit drinking by then, his consumption of two pints of scotch didn't alarm her. Johnny entertained them with famous-people stories, like the time he was sixteen and drove Myrna Loy home from one of Dad's parties. Just as she was getting out, he asked her for a kiss because, as Nora Charles, "she was my first love when I was in short pants."
My mother told me later that she thought he was fatally attractive. And in spite of the semaphore of red flags going off all around me about his drinking and mood swings, I was still in a swoon about this guy. We told my parents we were going sightseeing and we spent the whole day wrapped around each other in our hotel-room bed. That was our idea of doing San Francisco.