THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

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7. Room Service

NANCY

A seminary is traditionally ten weeks long. We fell in love with six weeks to go. Johnny moved in with me immediately and our room became a source of great curiosity. We were supposed to get up early and meditate all morning, which I usually did, but he slept till noon. While everyone ate lunch in the dining room, I would fix a tray for us and sneak up to the room. He loved waking up that way.

Candles, music, and sensuous delights were wasted on Paul, but John was enthralled. As a teenager, he fantasized about having a wife like Myrna Loy's Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies -- intelligent, savvy, and insouciant. "You're a real man's woman," he'd crow with delight. Mystified by the girl-next-door appeal, I feared it led to a sexless marriage. My Russian blood and a steady diet of French and Italian movies created a more global sense of glamour for me. I did not fight the battle to become liberated simply to slap a girdle on the soft curves of true intimacy. Johnny and I were both romance junkies. We had a knack for making the world go away, especially in hotel rooms. We'd get so far out that an elevator ride to the real world was culture shock.

At seminary, after we'd finished eating, we'd stick the trays outside the door, as though we were expecting room service to pick them up. There was no room service, only fellow Buddhists who prepared the food and washed the dishes. Eventually we would carry the trays back down to the kitchen. Sometimes there were several stacked outside our door. We rapidly established the reputation that we were way too busy doing other things in that room to engage in mundane activities like taking the trays downstairs, let alone leave the bed.

We talked up a storm through languid, velvet nights and glorious dawns. I couldn't even stop to sleep. No one had ever talked to me like that, so intimately, with such depth. And the laughter! John made me giggle hysterically, especially at myself. After class, we could hardly wait to get back in the bed, make love, and start talking all over again. Endless stories, infinite comparing of notes taken on life. Theories, poetry, quick sketches of people we saw every day. It was as if we'd seen things out of the same eyes before we even met.

We drove the guys crazy on the other sides of the walls. They couldn't sleep because we never shut up. Sometimes at three in the morning, Johnny would shout a Martin Luther King-esque "I have a dream. I have a dream." It would echo down the hallway. That would usually elicit thumps on the wall from our neighbors but we were too convulsed in our giggles to hear or care. Ordinarily, I would have cared. But something had come over me and for the first time in my life I ignored all constraints. Johnny's insouciance made me feel deliciously wicked, totally alive. His love made me feel immortal. Experts make all kinds of predictions now about how long that heightened sense lasts in a relationship, but after twelve years of constantly being together, it never died. He always had the marvelously nurturing ability to wrap me in his arms and make me feel like a well-loved baby. There was a maternal tenderness about him that left me breathless.

On the morning before our first date for the banquet, I was standing behind the door to the meditation room, signing in, when John and Johnny Meyer walked by. They didn't see me. John started singing "Putting on My Top Hat" and he did a Fred Astaire soft-shoe for a few seconds before walking into the shrine room. I melted into a puddle. He had a black and white, forties movie-type charm, straight out of an art deco Manhattan apartment set, with a curved staircase and ice tinkling in crystal goblets. It was partly due to the way he'd been raised, but also he had an innate grace, an aristocratic nobility. His magnetism was extraordinarily captivating.

Our room became a gathering place for the curious, lonely, and sociable at odd hours, any hours. They said it was like a cross between visiting John and Yoko's Bed-In and the set of Tom Jones. By keeping the window open a crack, we created a windowsill refrigerator, complete with Brie, fresh fruit, and champagne. People commented that they'd never seen a couple have so much fun falling in love.

When we'd make the bed together, we'd start to feel sad, knowing the pink cloud would dissolve at the end of seminary. "I've never missed someone before saying goodbye," he'd say. "It's such a peculiar emotion. We've got to figure out a way to continue this in the real world." We weren't sure we could. He worried about breaking up my family and I waited demurely for him to ask if it were possible.

There were ominous notes, which I chose to ignore. One night I had gone back up to the room to study during a movie. I heard John and Johnny Meyer going into Johnny's room several times during those two hours. I couldn't figure out what they kept coming up there for, and then it dawned on me. How could I have forgotten their reputation? They were refilling their glasses. A chill crept over my heart. I recognized compulsion for the first time in my life and it scared me. But, what did I know? Did that mean John would be compulsive tomorrow? Foolishly, I thought probably not, because I loved him enough. Back then, we thought only skid-row bums were alcoholics; we knew nothing about the syndrome. It took three more years before I was driven to educate myself about alcoholism. By then, I had learned the hard way that women who are raised in alcoholic families continue to replicate the patterns of abuse until the cycle is broken through education about the disease.

Rinpoche had imposed a rule against drinking during those first two weeks, so I fell in love with a sober John. When the sanction was lifted, Johnny Meyer sang prophetically to me "call him irresponsible ... " as we walked down the hall behind John. He was trying to warn me. Another friend asked why I was contemplating replacing a husband who worked constantly and drank on the weekends with a man who drank constantly but didn't work. I honestly didn't make the connection. I was so in love with John that I thought he would just naturally change if I asked him to.

Whenever we had an anniversary or on Valentine's Day for all the years to follow, we would repeat the litany of those events. It was the beginning of our myth, and it is in the beginning of every legend that tells a story of love.

"Remember when I came down the stairs and saw you? My heart jumped so violently I staggered?" he'd ask me. "Remember all the dawns, the rapture, the raps? Remember the time we were sitting with a group and someone said it's really hard to let go of an affair if the sex is particularly good."

"It's impossible," I had said, ruefully.

"I was shocked that you knew about the prison of great sex in a miserable relationship," he said later.

"It takes one to know one," I shrugged.

We discovered we had funny little things in common, like feeling anxious if there were no lemons in our room. "You never know when you might want to make the odd veal piccata," he'd muse. We were astonished at the subtle depths and amazing heights of our twinship.

John told me endless stories about his past. While he never spoke directly about the war, he spoke of his deep connection with the Vietnamese people. One time, he saw a bomb explode, cutting a peasant woman nearly in half. John held her as the life flowed out of her. He noticed a flicker of embarrassment because her body was exposed. Gently, he told her she was dying and to forget her modesty. That great generosity was the essence of John. When you woke up in the morning with him, you didn't feel like you had to rush out of bed to put on makeup and brush your teeth, acting like you barely had a body. Through the years, he'd often exclaim, "Look at you, without a speck of makeup. You are so fresh and gorgeous! I'm so glad you're not one of those women who thinks she has to put on a face in order to wake up next to me!" When a man whispers words like that, he holds your heart.

Throughout the hotel, the constant question became "What's going to happen after we leave here?" Many of us had been transformed by seminary affairs which were notoriously short-lived beyond those cloistered walls. Though John had a girlfriend in every port, he swore they meant nothing to him. As he revealed his romantic history, I realized he had never been alone for long. This was due in part to his mystique, but he also had a desperate need for a love object.

Thom tells the story of a sad winter day when Johnny walked into Le Bar after a fight with a girlfriend. Forlorn, he pulled up a stool, reached into his pocket, carefully placed a baggie on the counter and stared at it. Inside was a Siamese fighting fish, swimming in water.

"What's up with that?" Thom asked.

"It's the only love object left in my life," John said mournfully.

I had been trying desperately to accept the conditions of my marriage when I arrived at seminary, coming to the pitiful conclusion that perhaps I should quit asking for more than the kitty litter I got from Paul. Maybe this is all I can expect. If the Buddha says the basic fabric of life is suffering, then I must be doing the right thing, because suffering is my middle name. Long-Suffering.

And then I met John, who filled all the neglected spaces so beautifully. He wanted to be with me. He loved being with me. He made me laugh, and best of all he got me to laugh at myself. His communicative gifts heightened the horror of Paul's grunts, snarls, and psychotic moods. When I saw the vast discrepancy between what the two offered me, I was determined to leave Paul. I had to create a space for John to join me and the children.

''I'm going to have a very exciting life and I want you to share it with me," he said. "Am I going to have to try to extract you from your family like a dentist pulling a tooth?" I promised him it would be easy. Beyond hope and fear, of which there were plenty, I could not imagine living one day away from him. It astounded him that I could make that leap with so little conflict, until he realized how starved I was in my marriage.

One afternoon, Rinpoche invited all the parents to bring their children to the shrine room for a blessing. Johnny and I watched the expressions, especially on the babies and toddlers. After it was over, alone in the elevator we exchanged a look that said it all. My children were already John's. Paul could never give me this new level of affection and intimacy, and I would never again settle for less. Later that evening, at the hotel shop, he bought little gifts for me to take home to Megan and Michael. among them toy birch-bark canoes, which he lovingly oiled so they would last in the bathtub.

Johnny had been deeply disappointed by other women. Concerned that I might change my mind once we were back in the real world, I sensed toward the end that he was preparing a tough skin. One morning, Paul called my room. John stormed out, slamming the door. I found him in the kitchen, pouring a glass of milk. He didn't want to admit he was jealous, so I let it go.

On the last night, I started packing while John was making the rounds, saying good-bye to friends. Johnny Meyer stopped by my room, looking totally freaked out.

"It's awful," he moaned. "Everyone is becoming who they were before they got here. It's like the pod people are taking over."

I knew he was right. I could feel it in myself. He was such an eccentric, Little Prince kind of guy. He told me he used to let himself in my room and watch me sleep because it gave him comfort. I never felt violated. He lived in another realm. That's why he was able to join me and John so easily during those precious early days.

It isn't just financial independence that lets you live outside the mundane world. It's a mind-set. It can be artistic genius; it can be criminal; it can be addictive, spiritual, or idly rich. Even before we met, John and I lived in a separate reality, another dimension. For the first time in our lives, we could share our private realms rather than hiding the heartbreak of our loneliness. He could take me along to the heights and depths of his fantasies. He was delighted to be transported into mine. That relief was tremendously liberating, like discovering a playmate who speaks your secret language after a lifetime of silence. We both knew this was not to be taken lightly.

Through the years we became convinced that we were part of a larger soul, a perfect circle, Siamese twins of the heart, our fates stamped with the same sealing wax. Both Geminis, eternally bound by admiration, respect, and awe. No matter how volatile our relationship became, there was always a shining polestar that would guide us back to our bedrock of unconditional love. "Ye thuong," John would croon to me. That's Vietnamese for "easy to love."

''I'm going to die first!" he'd tease.

"No," I'd protest. "I want to die first! Why should you be the lucky one?"

"Because you could live without me, but I could never live without you."

John and I developed a velcro twinspeak of language and vision. Through the years, Michael and Megan joined in our silliness, our private language and childlike play. That lovely gift of whimsy, which John inherited from his father, cemented our fractured family years after John's death. Although the kids now live two hours away from my house, we still find time almost daily to be zany on the telephone. Playful interchanges with adult children keep them hanging around for other things as well, like your interpretation of life's complexities. Before going out, we still say very solemnly to our dog, "Watch good the house," just as Steinbeck would say to Charley. We continue the Steinbeck tradition of anthropomorphizing our pets to a ridiculous point, carrying on conversations with them, dressing them in outlandish outfits. That joyous laughter, never heard when Paul was around, is the most precious legacy John left us.

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8. Prince Charming the Fourth

NANCY

The last night of seminary, I poured John's clothes into his suitcases. We watched the dawn crown pink glaciers reflected in the morning glory lake. Clinging to each other, we prayed that our tender web would keep us connected after we dispersed like the Tibetan tent culture we emulated. Soon Chateau Lake Louise would be claimed by the tourists who'd peered in the windows and wondered what we were up to. After three months in that magical "Canadian Sunset" realm, we were all afraid to return to the real world and its wheel of monotony. John and I were particularly anxious because we wanted to be together, but we didn't quite believe we deserved it or that we could pull it off. In our hearts, like the song, we believed we'd see each other again, after fire and rain, and when we did, we would be just as close.

Johnny left early in the morning on a bus to the Calgary airport. I had to stay for several more days to break down the bookstore. I fell asleep to numb the pain of separation and freeze-dry the warmth of our bed. In the afternoon I went reluctantly down to the hotel lobby, dreading to see the changes. The silk-brocade shrine was dismantled. Our blissful, hermetically sealed world had disappeared, leaving only a garish floral pattern on the long empty stretch of carpet and the bright glare of glaciers outside.

John had promised to meet me in Boulder soon. I could tell he was terrified, already hardening himself to the possibility that I might write off our interlude as a fling and return to Paul, who was driving up to Canada in a new Mercedes he'd bought to woo me back. Paul had heard about my affair with John and he was trying to Band-Aid the past years of conflict. When we first met, he was a pistol, full of ideals and a natural leader. Excessive drinking had turned him cantankerous, killing my love for him. I had wanted to leave him for the past nine years, but I was afraid of being financially on my own; I wanted to stay at home to raise Megan and Michael. When John offered me a way out, I did not question whether I was going straight from the frying pan into his flame.

The ride back to Boulder with Paul was excruciating, except for listening to rock and roll after three months. John had warned me "that kind of media abstinence makes Barry Manilow sound like Puccini." Just before we parted, he showed me a New Yorker cartoon. Under a picture of a man driving a car and a woman staring out the passenger's window in abject despondency, the caption read: "Irreconcilable differences."

"Is it going to be like that?" he asked. It was, for a thousand miles, except the times Paul exploded. When it got particularly ugly, I called John and asked him to talk to Paul. John was terrifically cool. "Calm down and be a man about it," he told Paul. "You've got seven hundred miles ahead of you. Make sure you both arrive in one piece." Testosterone met testosterone and Paul listened.

Megan and Michael had missed me sorely. My absence took a toll on their psyches. They were sensitive, loving children. While I was away, their nanny had nurtured them as best she could, but the separation had traumatized them. I felt terrible; their short lives had already been filled with turmoil from Paul's drinking and our fights. I desperately wanted to give them a better life.

Three weeks later, John came to Boulder to check things out. Although Paul had been warned about our plans, he was not going to give in that easily. I picked John up at the airport, feeling human for the first time since we had parted. We went straight to the Boulderado. After a breathless reunion, he asked me to go to the corner liquor store. I felt like a blues song; my man was back in my arms. Walking barefoot and full of his love, I was on my way to buy him a bottle of booze. My life was complete and I was ready to die to keep it all just like that. When I got back to the room, John announced that he had sent me off on purpose so he could call Paul and arrange to meet him in an hour.

"I don't want to walk around wondering if he's going to attack me with a tire iron. I want to tell him I'm in love with his wife and figure things out, man to man. There's a whole family at stake here and I don't want to be cavalier about it." Impressed with his courage, I wished him luck.

They spent several hours together, while I nervously watched TV in the hotel room. Suppose Paul convinces John I'm a bitch. Tells him about every knockdown fight we've ever had and blames them all on me. It might be all over between us. Suppose they just slug it out and one of them is dead.

When he returned to the room, Johnny was excited. "Baby, you've got great taste in men!" he crowed. They had put on their best bravado and agreed to be chivalrous. Paul could see the kids whenever he wanted, and we'd be one big happy family. Paul told me he went home and cried that night. Our twelve-year marriage was over.

That summer of 1979, back in the real world, I started to see sides of John that I hadn't at seminary. One evening at sunset, we drove to the mountains. He was distant. Sensing a case of cold feet, I burst into tears. "Please have faith in us. I'm not going to hurt you. Or smother you."

"I guess it would be strange if I weren't a little daunted by the prospect of an instant family."

"Hey, I've got the same fears."

"You think I'm going to abandon you in a supermarket aisle while we're shopping for diapers," he teased.

Damn right. Here was this wild cat who had managed to stay unattached for lifetimes in his thirty-odd years and suddenly he was going to be a father and husband? Believing in him more than he did, I knew we could do it, especially when he met Megan and Michael.

We had gone to the annual Buddhist Mid-Summer's Day celebration, held in a mountain meadow above Boulder. Since I was staying at the hotel with John, Paul brought the kids. I had wandered off and found them sitting under a tree. Megan was playing with Ganesh, Rinpoche's enormous Tibetan mastiff. She was crooning to him, her fist buried in his drooling black mouth. Suddenly John appeared by my side. He studied them silently for a few minutes. I loved the way he would put his entire being into the Other, as if he were receiving a printout from his intuition.

"Megan's ease with that monstrous dog made a deep impression on me," he said later. "So did your utter lack of concern." It was an auspicious sign to him. Crystal, the mother of his daughter, had been terrified of dogs. "She transmitted that fear to Blake, which really annoyed me."

John was born in the Chinese year of the Fire Dog and he'd had wonderful relationships with them all his life, including his father's Charley. The thought that Crystal had taught his own daughter to fear Fido was a source of consternation.

"If I'd played a stronger role in Blake's life, I could have countered her mother's fear," he said ruefully.

Megan recalls that meeting vividly. "I felt that John was totally interested in me. Not Oh, you're just a kid. I'm going to fake talking to you and then dismiss you. Rather, it was Who are YOU? What are YOU about?" She had experienced her first hit of Johnny's unique style of communion.

After he'd met Michael and Megan, all the pieces fit together. John had fallen in love with my babies. "Your children are Bodhisattvas. Do you know how lucky we are?" I could have wept. While Paul treated them like annoying bugs, John had gazed into their souls.

Things were different the next day, however, when he invited us all to breakfast. They tested him with every bratty kid trick they could pull. They behaved abominably. When he bought a newspaper from a vending box, they caught the door before it shut, ripped out the remaining newspapers, and stood there expecting him to chastise them. He merely turned away and walked into the restaurant, ignoring the bait. They fought over the menus and what to order. Curious to see how he'd handle them, I kept quiet and let him take over.

John responded uniquely. Instead of becoming punitive or critical, he got real cool, with a punkish kind of detachment. He didn't make any ineffectual attempts to control them. They were given plenty of room to test this guy whom they sensed would play a huge role in their lives. He sat there like a papa lion watching his cubs, disinterested but very present. When they saw they weren't going to get a rise out of him, they quit. I had never seen anyone treat kids like that. Along with an appreciation for his parenting skills, I sensed we were in for an interesting ride.

Tibetan Buddhism has a particular level of enlightenment called Ati, which means "Old Dog." At a certain point on the path to enlightenment, the practitioner sees life through the half-raised eye of an old dog, lazing around, thumping his tail occasionally, never very excited. Johnny could be like that. He had seen so much of life and death that nothing really surprised him. I loved his rock-steady confidence.

John asked if I thought it might be best to wait six months before he came to live with us. Touched by his caution about starting a new family, I felt protected by his concern. He had a thoughtful side that treated affairs of the heart with deep respect. His wisdom bound me to him. It felt as if we had done this for lifetimes, danced these steps for thousands of years. The still, calm space in our hearts knew our union was inevitable.

I went home and told Paul he had to find another place to live. John went back to Los Angeles, ostensibly to pursue his "movie career," which, I later discovered, meant he periodically shopped a screenplay around Hollywood, based on his time in Vietnam. I did not know how he spent his days and never thought to ask, having no idea that he drank all night and slept all day and did little else except visit friends. When he began to call me after midnight, obviously drunk, I started to get the picture. But because I knew nothing about alcoholism, no red flags went up; everyone I knew drank excessively. We talked for hours, sometimes till the kids got up. I don't know when I slept. His daily calls were my life's blood. We continued to weave our spells and the magic was saturating the fabric of our souls, leaving us mesmerized and enraptured. The depth of our connection and joy was intoxicating. Megan even picked up on it. She wrote a story for school called "Prince Charming the Fourth."

John's prudence about our relationship felt somewhat incongruous juxtaposed to his free spirit. He came to Boulder several times and started building a relationship with Megan and Michael. As the months passed, he continued to be very precise about laying the ground for the establishment of our family and my new identity. He had escaped a relationship with a neurotic, alcoholic member of the Buddhist community and her two children. He did not want to recreate the devastation from that aborted attempt at family life. While they had lived together, I remembered being at a party at their house. Noticing some rather decent pieces of art hanging on the walls, it struck me that they were a reflection of John's taste, rather than her Midwestern country-club background. A sorrowful yearning welled up inside me for what I had lost in terms of my own upbringing. I had always felt uncomfortable around the ubiquitous mediocrity of the hippie and wanna-be sophisticated Buddhist scenes. Sensing that John had been into literature and art as a way of saving his soul, as I had, I felt a deep camaraderie. If you clung to Beethoven or Thomas Mann, or a certain style of counterpoint, if the hopeful pastels of French Impressionists saved you from teen suicide, then you know the level of culture I'm talking about. It has nothing to do with sofa-sized paintings or season tickets. It is etched in the soul, and the rarity of finding such a kindred spirit eventually bound us even closer.

Living on the dregs of his substantial biannual Steinbeck royalty check, John had neglected to pay the rent on his sublet Los Angeles apartment. He received an eviction notice. I never discussed finances with him, naively thinking that all adults could manage money. When the royalty check came, he bought me gorgeous jewelry, a $4,000 Concord gold watch for himself, and paid cash for a new car. I figured he knew what he was doing. I didn't know about his indulgent habit of spending money freely when he had it. I was used to Paul's financial management, which, no matter how little we had, always covered our needs. We never argued about money, so I thought couples just naturally figured out how to conserve their income. I had no idea what John and I were in for, but I sensed trouble.

Staring that uneasiness in the face, I thought, No matter how bad it gets, I am willing to risk everything to make it work. I sought Rinpoche's advice. "Watch out. John has a lot of neuroses. The karma of fame is particularly difficult. His family is tragic, like the Kennedys. When he starts acting crazy, don't get sucked in."

Michael sat on Rinpoche's lap as we spoke, and suddenly another little boy rushed over and wildly hugged both of them, knocking over Rinpoche's chair with his enthusiasm. I watched him fall slowly backward, as if he were floating, with no fear. He laughed all the way down to the ground, landing on his back. The boys tumbled on top of him. As his attendants helped him up, he looked at me and said, "That's love for you!"

As I walked away, I felt the force of the obstacles that would barrel at us with furious speed, attempting to knock us off our balance. The karmic patterns we carried in our trousseaus would have to be unpacked and resolved. We're really in for it. Are you sure you're up for this? It's going to be incredibly heavy. My heart sank. For one brief second I had a choice. I could have walked away. Time moved on, my heart chose John, and I leapt into the raging river, never looking back.

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9. Outside In

JOHN

A critical voice inside me has always insisted that what I really needed to do is grow up. This remains the case though what growing up might mean always hovers around a transient ideal. Today, in 1991, it is coupled with a potent notion about nurturing a "child within"; that kid who was frightened, or rejected, or confused, and maybe abused. It is a fairly common understanding nowadays that we must learn to re-parent or at least reassure ourselves and to try to find the connection with who we were when we were small, and then actually communicate with all these historical selves that are frozen like a school of Canadian Black Fish in the permafrost of our shame.

On its face, responding wholeheartedly to that child and trying to grow up seems to be a paradox, but the suggestion is that perhaps you have to do the one to achieve the other. At first it seems like a very irritatingly ungrown-up way of going about things, particularly when accompanying this process is another phenomenon which only the very slickest of journals now refer to as "parent bashing." I love it; "Learn to Nourish the Little Skinhead" within. Personally, as far as I'm concerned, people can bash whatever they like. In the end it all comes back to finding some sense of resolution, which is, after all, the only game in town if you want genuine relief.

If you need it, trying to summon up this child or teenager, whatever the age, is interesting material. Fortunately, regression or accessing a multiple personality disorder is not the issue, but yes, this kind of thing is strange. It embarrasses a lot of people, including me, particularly if it's done too seriously.

I swear the voice inside my head sounds the same to me as the voice that could count to ten on Seventy-eighth Street. Nothing has changed. I can't even discern a difference in the tone or vocabulary. The unchanging quality in my "voice-over," with its constant stream of "I" in front of every thought, always amazed me and compounded the eternal question of, When can I tell that I have grown up?

One thing is inarguable: all through my youth, I definitely wanted to grow up, and I wanted to do it fast. This is not unique, but I think being from New York had something to do with it. People there were supposedly more sophisticated, but apart from that there was also the tumult at home. Though children mostly take note of when things aren't going their way, in my mother's house it often rose to the traditional drunken hysterics of tears and violence. In my father's house it could sink to a brooding sulphurous depression, or the quick wrath of an old dog poisoned by distraction. Like seismic activity, these things were vaguely predictable though the timing and ferocity of their cycles varied. So, I thought that through "grownupness," I would be able to orbit off this wheel of potential disasters and maybe even avoid further catastrophes by putting some distance between myself and the people who scared me. Since I also loved and looked up to both my parents, I suppose I should be more clinically precise and say that I wanted to be away from the feelings in me that scared me. Those feelings had a particularly sad and painful tenderness that only got in the way of what I thought being grown up was like. As it turned out, my solutions weren't those of an authentic grown-up, though by example I see they were a lot like the adults with whom I came in contact.

Since I really didn't want to savor more of this erratic, emotive world than I had to, and I couldn't just grow up and get out, I usually went in the other direction: womb reentry. I liked small dark places. I wanted to escape into something. As a very young child I liked places like the bottom of the bed under the sheets, or even just under the bed itself would do in a pinch. It was particularly good if I was in a hurry. It really was the cat who had pointed this out for me, as he went there the instant he heard the ominous tinkling of ice cubes. Dr. Lao was as smart as his name. I liked closets and basements too. I didn't really want to feel that I was hiding, just sort of getting away -- vacating.

Later, I developed a strong affinity for rooftops. In this regard, New York City was empyrean, a veritable wonderland like the Himalayas. Instead of down and out, they were up and over. Then I discovered the marriage of the two worlds. I started going into the rooftop boxes where the elevator mechanisms of the big buildings were housed. I particularly liked this. You could climb in, sit on a grate, and watch the gears and cables pull the cars up and down thirty floors or more. There I would daydream of what I would do when I did grow up. Vertigo actually felt great. It made me a little dizzy, but then this business of making yourself dizzy brought up a lot of possibilities all by itself. Perhaps there were even three possible worlds: up and over, down and out, and outside in.

As anyone could guess at this point, there were more than just a few reasons why I became interested in altering my consciousness. I love that phrase. It is such a lofty-sounding, even scientific term. It has such a nice ring to it, like my purpose was as benign as some sort of casual psychic tailor. This was not really the case with me. What I wanted was to be able to be the captain of my boat and be able to negotiate the wild sea of my fears and others' moods. I was an innocent I suppose, but I wanted control. I was terrified by my feelings and the jagged coastline of my surroundings. If I could steer those feelings or distract them, even into base neurological confusion, well, that would be better than being left adrift in the capricious uncertainty of Mom and Dad.

Eventually, as an adult, this almost primordial lack of humility (sometimes known as survival) became a big problem. But like most kids I was too aware and very sensitive to all of the contradictory instructions and skewed examples that I was left alone to decipher. My parents were equally sensitive. Without any doubt, I see how strongly they reacted to their own inherited dilemmas, but the remedies that they chose to give them refuge, like anger or alcohol or shamelessly experimenting on us kids, by making us jump off high chairs, only added to mine.

When I discovered that literally spinning around in circles disengaged almost everything into a world set askew by a neutral dizziness incapable of registering even the direction home, I found another sort of home. I was more than simply amused. I was set free from the tyranny of time and boredom and what was becoming a borrowed shame -- since my parents didn't feel any for their shameless behavior.

Then, I learned how to faint by hyperventilating and pressing on my jugular veins with my thumbs. Coming to from this sort of blackout, extremities tingling and not even knowing where I was, became a sortie that I would fly hundreds of times a day, anywhere. I would hit the deck in the park, on the street, in the gym, in fact right in the middle of class behind my books. With this magical technique, I could soar away beyond any need for an imaginary friend. "If happy little bluebirds fly," etc. Why, Harold Arlen and Dorothy were right! Slap it to the head and the irksome phenomenal world with its tiring dimensions of anxiety and guilt would disappear into something beyond a normal gravity.

In my mother's household I discovered that there was also a lot of pharmaceutical support for this predilection for self-propelled transcendence and escape. From my point of view there was a real need for it. It was the age of miracle drugs. Why, penicillin had only really come into use four or five years before I was born. When my brother and I were just teething, instead of Dillworth's Gripe Water, Mom dosed us with codeine. If we couldn't sleep, barbiturates would do the trick for sure. Thom and I even had practice drills on how to take pills so that we would swallow them "like a grown-up." We had to put them at the back of the tongue and swallow them quickly before they could start to dissolve. We practiced on aspirin, of all things, which required extremely quick reflexes. Every adult we knew was talking about something called Miltown, one of the first tranquilizers. The way they talked about it made me wonder where the hell that place was, and why we never went there on vacation!

Eventually I found out where the codeine lived in my mother's medicine cabinet. When she had given it to me for whatever reason, I remembered that I always had a terrifically warm and safe feeling and wonderful dreams. Now that was the kind of thing I was after for sure. Maybe if I just went to sleep long enough, I would wake up and most of the growing would be done. The story of Rip Van Winkle fascinated me.

Neither of my parents believed in small supplies of medicines, and so I hooked about forty of these deceptively tiny pills and secreted them away in my bedroom. That first night, being an instinctive addict, I took three of them at once. The warms came, and indeed the night was full of flying dreams in amniotic oceans. The next morning, however, found me vomiting my little heart out. It was sure painless though, and it had the added benefit of making my mother think I was sick and unfit for school. I didn't have to go to the trouble of having to heat and break any more thermometers over the light bulb. This was real. I was spontaneously retching and it was great. I was tucked away in bed, given coloring books, and brought warm broth, the whole works.

The next night I did the same thing except I upped the dosage by a pill, and the warmth and dreams increased proportionally. I kept on like this for about two weeks. The good Doctor Craig, our pediatrician, came and all that, but he was hardly looking for codeine poisoning in spite of the fact that my pupils had become the size of pinheads. He left mystified after prescribing paregoric for my upset tummy. Yummy, more opiates! I stole more pills.

One day there came an abrupt end to this routine; something a junkie never likes. I had begun to lose a lot of weight and so without warning, I was transported to Lennox Hill Hospital, the place of my birth, for observation. The doctors there knew of my spastic stomach when I was an infant. Perhaps there was a connection. Maybe I had cancer!

And so I began my first withdrawal from opiates at about age seven in the children's ward. Though I had some stuffed toys, these could just barely save me from the meanest bunch of kids that I had ever encountered in my short life. En masse, sick city boys are monsters. They soon ripped the head off my toy frog, and basically terrorized me for three solid weeks. One kid in a cast and on crutches had the physical movement and behavioral motivation of the Terminator. Another liked to strap me gagged into a wheelchair and then shoot me out like a friction car racer to see me bounce off walls. I was in hell.

Not looking in the right direction, the doctors obviously could find nothing wrong with me. No cancer, no virus, no childhood disease. They then sent me to a hospital psychiatrist. That was just becoming a somewhat "in" thing to do, and after all, I had been sick. As I know now, I really did have a disease despite what I considered to be my innocent, if secret collusion with Morpheus.

The psychiatrist smelled strange, and he also showed me some grainy pictures called a Thematic Apperception Test which I found terribly embarrassing; particularly the one with a half-naked woman in bed and a man in the foreground holding his head in an attitude of what I took for grief. It looked like something having to do with sex or murder or both!

These sessions with the shrink made me extremely nervous. I was afraid he would be able to hypnotize me and find out about the little pills.

After some inkblot work, he concluded that part of the problem with my condition might have something to do with my family life. Actually I thought my family was essentially fine. At least my friends' families weren't much different as far as I knew. On hearing this diagnosis, after first taking the opportunity to briefly attack each other, my parents furiously agreed with me. I was fine. They were fine. Why I hadn't thrown up but once since I first went into the hospital. True, I couldn't sleep for about a week and was often found wandering the wards in the wee small hours, but I was eating, getting better; that was the main thing.

When I returned home the pills were in the same place that I had stashed them in my room. This near-opium den was interestingly called the "chocolate room" because it had been painted that curious color. In its brown darkness, it had been the perfect womblike environment for my occult narcoleptic purpose.

I hadn't been to school in a long time and I was really in no hurry to go back. Like any addict, lacking all regard for timing the very first night home I popped four codeine pills, and the next day I was again to be found vomiting into the toilet. Well, my mother was often drunk, but she was no fool; she knew then that something perhaps similar to her own agenda was occurring up there in the chocolate room. She didn't know what and never did to her dying day, but puke or not, she sent me off to school.

Fear of eventually being found out helped me stop. Also, I didn't relish the idea of another trip to the gauntlet of the children's ward, and after all, the bottle was getting lower. Anyway, summer was just around the corner and that would be the end of school for the time being.

As I look back at this period, it occurs to me that with me home all the time, it must have been very hard for my mother to maintain herself. Even though I slept the days away, my habits were getting in the way of hers.

The next year, after the hospital stay, I more or less stopped going to school. On the rare occasion that my mother got up to check if I was still in the house, I slipped into my spot under the bed for a little more sleep. I needed the sleep too since I was up most every night till 4:00 A.M., reading under the sheets at the bottom of my bed, or listening to popular love songs or mystery dramas with a little crystal radio shaped like a rocket ship that I had sent in for.

This wanting to be finished with growing up included the pursuit of just how to do it. If the movies were to be believed, facing danger was an important element. Even by the time I was six, I had begun to get into some exciting trouble running in and out of that same church where I had tried to get the appointment with God. With my own gang of hoodlums, a modicum of danger could be arranged by blowing out the votive candles on the altar to see if we could make the old ladies in there chase us. But by age eight, this had grown far too tame. Real danger was needed. This could include rooftop jumping from building to building, running up and down fire escapes past startled people's windows, facing down rabid building superintendents, or as I said, just making yourself dizzy by any new means possible. Of course since this was New York, one could always manage to get chased by what passed for gangs in those days (boy choirs compared to today) or the more generic choice, the police.

Eventually I guess the police caught me enough. My career as Batman in Brownstone Gotham ended. The water-bomb king of the tenements had gone too far. My mother had gotten word of my daring exploits and started looking under the bed. She even hired an off-duty cop named Robert to escort me to school a few blocks away. Since she drank till very late with her friends, or "uncles" as we called them, neither she nor they were able to see to this task themselves. But even after the patrolman escort service started, I used to walk in the school's front door and out the back to go riding the subways or buses to the end of their routes. Then I would turn around and go back the same way, back and forth until school was supposed to be over, at which time I would rejoin Bob the cop for the short walk home.

This was like traveling the Great Trunk Road in Kipling's India. I think I rather fancied myself as Kim. I began to really love the sights and sounds of my city. There were so many tribes and casts in Megalopolis. I began to hear and understand a lot of different dialects and unique tongues that were never heard in my part of Manhattan.

Sometimes I would spend the day in the Museum of Natural History. Now this was a great place. It had whole whales and dinosaurs, and dioramas of Africa. They even had a room that looked like the rain forests with what I thought were stuffed pygmies. There was also the room with the huge war canoe of the Indians of the Northwest with beautiful and mysterious eyes on the bow, as well as the great totem poles with wonderful pyramiding animal faces. There were fantastic things here to see and I read the signs, and I learned. The museum also had its own roof that I could sneak up to and look out over Central Park. When I discovered I could do all this, ditching the cop became a really serious business. Of course, in the end I was caught. My brother, Thom, had been gone for a couple of years by this time, sent off to boarding school, and my parents thought that it was time to get me out of town, too.

[admin]

10. Boarding School

JOHN

For reasons that were never made clear, at least not to us, my father felt early on that it would be good if my brother and I were separated. Since we didn't actually live with him, this idea smacked of those old Spartan theories that were fast becoming his trademarks as a part-time parent. You had the feeling that if it was good enough for Hector or Agamemnon, it would do wonders for us. Though my father had a cruel streak that varied in width depending on the extent to which his feelings were hurt, these theories were not part of that sort of backlash. He truly reveled in the abstraction and possible range of technique when it came to us. Some of them worked out quite well, like his great endeavor to get me to stop reading Reader's Digest.

Judging correctly that I had the heart of a felon, he placed books that he wanted me to read very high up in the bookcase, or even went so far as to lock them up behind a glass case on the second-floor landing. After threatening my little neck, he hid the key where he was sure that I would find it. Thus was I delivered up to the "wine dark sea" of the Iliad and sailed even further to meet Circe and the wonderful Cyclops. But not ever hearing the reason, looking back at his rush to separate Thom and me fills me with suspicion.

Nonetheless, in the fall of 1953 at age nine, Thom was sent away to the Malcolm Gordon School for Boys up the Hudson River near West Point. I remember being taken there to watch him play ice hockey on a flooded field that first winter. He was built like a little Samoan at that age, and ice hockey was definitely not his thing. Rather than actually being able to skate, he moved around with his ankles splayed out like little seal flippers as he tried to outwit the mocking puck. Unfortunately, without skating skills, they had made him the goal keeper which made him personally responsible for the many goals that continually slipped through those sad flippers. I remember that people laughed a lot at him, and though he tried to act like a tough little guy who was just having a bad day, I knew that he was really cold and wet and miserable. I thought the whole thing was abominable and cruel. And then later when at lunch he wore his little red-felt waistcoat, which he thought was quite dashing, the teachers giggled and called it his "menu" because it had food stains on it.

By the time lunch was over I had seen enough of winter in Sparta and couldn't wait to get home. Thom cried when we left, and I knew from my own experiences at summer camp, where we had both been shipped off to since age five, just how he felt.

Though by his own admission Thom was often mean to me, I missed him horribly. In the bedroom that we had shared, there hung a painting of my father and mother holding my brother as an infant. Using this romantic graphic as a target, I vividly remember putting myself to sleep alone in this room with a ray-gun flashlight which I used to selectively indict my parents for the loneliness that I felt, and what I perceived as their uncaring brutality toward my big brother. Spotlighting each of the three faces, I would say out loud and ever so dramatically, "How could you, and you, send him away?" I would continue with this circle of light, over and over until I was almost hoarse. I fell asleep with a mixture of exhaustion from this soliloquy to separation, and exhilaration at my brilliance as the avenging Flash Gordon with my terrible accusing "killer beam."

I had been able to escape to the rooftops until about age nine, but eventually the bedroom was completely empty except for the old portrait. I, too, was sent away to school.

I immediately managed to find the dark comforting places there as well. There were boiler rooms in the basements of dormitories, or woodsheds, old attics, or better, the woods themselves. Always I questioned what was supposed to happen later. These places, at least the ones that catered to really young children, were called pre-preparatory schools. In other words, schools that were going to prepare you for life in the schools that would prepare you for college, where somehow all your dreams would come together and you would be prepared for your real life. I was already pretty cynical and felt that obviously, all of this was somehow designed to help me create a plan which might give me a handle on how to amass enough money to die gracefully and perhaps endow all my prep schools. I didn't like this path at all. I wanted to just get on with it, whatever it was. Perpetual preparation was not the life sentence or even the parenthesis that I wanted.

As I said, neither Thom nor I were quite sure why we were being sent away. Not really thinking too much about my delinquency from day school as part of the cause, it seemed to me at the time that it was possibly due to a new wardrobe. I knew there was some connection there, as the Lord & Taylor's clothing store had sold Mom or Dad several pairs of special long pants. They were grey flannel and came with a blue blazer complete with red piping and a patch with a furious bird that keened, The Eaglebrook School.

The boarding schools of the day were truly special little worlds unto themselves. These gulags, which were to be more or less my home for the next eight years, were at the very height of fashion. They may still be today. They all seemed to have been established sometime soon after the War of 1812. Some of them were extremely beautiful, and well outfitted. Parents could be forgiven for thinking that they were providing their son with a sublime academic setting, replete with ponds and gardens, and what approximated the playing fields of Eaton. The Eaglebrook School even had two little ski jumps, for chrissake.

The schools were brimming with tradition and head mastered along nepotistic lines. In fact, school management was a sort of family trade. Often they were the creation of some inspired and kindly man of learning who probably loved boys, and books, and his own childhood adventures as he learned about the varied richness of the world. But I think that even this sort of kindly patriarch was probably unprepared for the dumping ground that affluent parents could make of the finest of visions.

Some of the parents were alumni, but of course they had long since forgotten that their own glorious boarding-school memories were singular in their dedication to the various ways that they had tried to escape, either psychologically or actually. Many a child from these schools with enough allowance to hit the tracks was recaptured at Grand Central Station.

If you were an inmate, the old New England boarding schools were scary places full of men with long brooding eyebrows. To me, they were sad, musty places that mixed higher learning with even higher anxiety. A lot of my friends at Eaglebrook were the spawn of remote, workaholic business-types, and what we now call dysfunctional parents of one sort or another. They rarely saw their mothers or fathers except on holidays. Some boys were perpetually nervous and tail-down, like field dogs that had been shot over too much as puppies. I remember one eight-year-old kid who just plain died of an asthma attack within the first week of being plopped down in one of these bastions of tradition. It was not just a matter of artistry and creative intelligence that made J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye a popular book. These schools were hothouses of prepubescent alienation, and later an increasing suicide rate.

As institutions, they also seemed to follow a common pattern. There was always the gay English or French teacher who would invariably be caught diddling his "A" students, or the alcoholic-manic-depressive headmaster who would disintegrate, disappear, and then reappear after spending long months or years in a sanatorium somewhere far away from the board of trustees. Fittingly enough, Catch-22 was to replace Catcher as the Bible and basic manual for boarding-school existentialism.

I want to be careful here and say again that there were many teachers and "Old-School" educators whose main love in life was to try and guide young boys into a world of learning that had made their own lives a wonderment. Today, teaching is one of the most thankless jobs in our society and I would hate to be guilty of any sort of easy dismissal. But within the truly warped framework of most of the families who could afford to send their sons to these boarding schools, the emotional and cognitive availability of these wounded kids was not great. Also, for all children, no matter the background, the kind of real mentor connection that the good teachers might have yearned for can only really be made with one or two very special people in life, and we all remember this if we have been lucky enough to have had that experience.

The dominating fact was that in my day, boarding schools had for the most part settled into the fifties to become gilded holding tanks. They were guaranteed, guilt-free receptacles for the abjured children of the rich and the CEOs of America. Tuition rivaled the most expensive Ivy League colleges.

Eaglebrook was a case in point. With perhaps the exception of the actor/producer Michael Douglas, I was the only son of an artist. My first roommate's father was the president of TWA. Little Tom Watson of IBM was there, as were the two Kaiser boys whose father invented aluminum, I thought. There were two kids named Crane. One's father made among other things, most of the toilet bowls for our great land, and the other made the paper that dollar bills were printed on. Then there were the kids from Wyzetta, Minnesota, and Lake Minnetanka. Their parents were the Daytons and Gambles who owned competitive department-store chains that were like the Neiman Marcuses of the Midwest. There were many other children whose fathers ran the steel industries and oil industries of Pennsylvania. Even the American Can Company had its junior representative. Olivetti was there as were a posse of fabulously wealthy gaucho-types from places like Venezuela, Colombia, and the Baccardis of Cuba. All these kids took Spanish for their foreign-language requirements.

Since the tuition at these schools was so high, parents could easily feel that they were sacrificing enormously for their ungrateful sons, and I think to a large extent, that was part of the unspoken bargain. But there was another advantage: they could also lead their unique and powerful lives without the responsibility of any undue parenting.

For my mother, this meant that she could have her many suitors and drink, too. Her alcoholism had matured into far more than just a good time. She absolutely needed to drink.

In fairness to my father, he probably thought by sending us away that we would not only be assured of enduring the kind of classical educational environment that he never had, he was removing us to a "safe" environment. It also allowed him to appease his lifelong sense of inferiority by sending his sons away to where the "best" people's kids went. Certainly his income was a minute fraction of my school chums' families. Like many people with a certain kind of insecurity that comes from being smart enough to hang out with the elite, but too broke to hang out far, my father could sometimes be very sensitive and terribly aware of his image. It got him into a lot of very expensive posturing.

There came a point when my mother's behavior became too much for me. I would come home from boarding school on vacation with a friend only to find her passed out naked on the floor, or something equally bizarre. The strange thing was that my friends took this in their stride, which gave me somewhat of a clue as to their situations at home.

After I finally had too much of her, I locked and loaded my .22 rifle and pressed it to the temple of one of Mom's boyfriends while he was sleeping next to her and twitched him awake. Shortly thereafter I packed my bags and went to my father's house on 72nd Street. Thom, who had been making model airplanes in his room for years (enjoying the glue, I presume), was out later that afternoon.

Shocked, but exonerated, we were welcomed into Dad's lair. Now he would have his chance at showing the world what a great man could do with his sons, since after all, my mother's condition made the question of custody academic. It was also his wife, Elaine's, chance to relate with "the boys."

Dad stopped trying to compete with the CEOs and we went to a city school for the rest of that year. At one point, we traveled through Europe with Dad, Elaine, and a young aspiring playwright named Terrence McNally, whom Dad hired as our tutor. That trip broadened my horizons significantly. It was, for the most part, Dad at his best. Certainly he tried hard to allow us to learn about language and our culture from Roman history, through the Italian Renaissance and English history. We toured North Africa, Sicily, Crete, Athens, the works. In ten months I was trilingual and had a taste for travel and learning that has never left me. It was a great gift, and one that I also passed on to my own children in Asia and Europe when they were old enough.

[admin]

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.

[admin]

12. Revolt

JOHN

Though we both wake up considerably more clearheaded than we have been for a couple of decades, when sifting through buried and drug-dampened memories, my brother and I still find it hard to recall the "facts" of the next two years following the European trip of 1961. For me, I think that this is because of a basic numbness. But oddly, I think it also has something to do with the other fact that I have my own grown children now. In the course of raising Megan and Michael, I have at times manifested some of the same sensitivities that my father was prey to, and I know that I've also harbored some of the same feelings of abandonment by my kids. Usually we think of it as being the other way around, but really, nobody can give life to the concept of being used like a parent spurned.

After our trip through Europe, North Africa, and Greece, in 1962, I once again returned to the familiar boarding-school system at the age of fifteen. For the next year and a half I was away at another one of those New England holding tanks called Hebron Academy.

Over Christmas vacation there was finally a break in the chain of parental control and the hypocrisies official gratitude. Ideally, we like to think that sort of thing should come about spontaneously, organically, and in a way it did. It is impossible to instruct a teenager that he should be grateful after all, and in my own bitter state, constantly listening to my mother and father maligning each other, while Elaine and Dad fought far more than I'm sure Elaine is happy to remember -- the validity of such a lesson in gratitude was sorely wanting. Dad and Elaine seemed to mostly fight after a lot of drinks the way most couples are likely to do, and as for Mom, well ... !

The tension inside of me was building. I rarely did well in school, and the letters that I got from England or wherever my father was reminded me that I was letting him down badly. Finally, after his return to America, over Christmas vacation, there was a fierce seismic change in me that initiated a period in which it was my turn to explode. By this time I was drinking, too.

Because of my intransigence when it came to not doing any homework in study hall, which I considered a parlor for light reading or letter writing, Hebron Academy had expressed some exasperation and had written my father suggesting that perhaps I should go somewhere else. I had not been an untamed monster, I was well liked, and so on, but my grades were a disgrace.

Thus challenged, my father wrote them back as only he could, and charmed them into taking me back. I wish I had the letter as I forget his irresistibly earthy approach which cornered and flattered their patience into such a blind alley of education vanity that it was impossible for them to not take me back. Some cold cash may have changed hands here, too, as a donation toward a future dormitory or something, I'm not sure.

The very day that I was supposed to return to school filled with gratitude that my father had managed this piece of grand manipulation, I had this tremendous fight with my stepmother, and then of course with El Patron. I said fuck it, and refused to return to the school in Maine. Of course when children who have been supported for fifteen-odd years make these kinds of decisions, the hurt and anger that flies back and forth is immense.

If I remember correctly, my stepmother began the contest while hung-over herself, because she had found a bottle of rum in my room, and my father quickly came in to it to tell me that if he chose to push the issue, I could go to jail for such an offense. On an earlier occasion during our trip, on a Greek liner he had informed both my brother and me that he could arrange a similar fate if we were caught fraternizing with the opposite sex in international waters. This seemed especially unfair since when he was drinking, he liked to flirt with our girlfriends if he could, even to the extent of telling them what pale shadows of men we were compared to him; altogether an insensate and embarrassing piece of work.

Though Thom and I discussed it all the time, it was probably the first time I had fought back by telling them about their behavior, rather than just being the object of a general inspection marshaled by them. I had eyes in my head, they weren't such hot shit either, etc.

Since both he and Elaine drank to character-changing, mood-swinging proportions themselves almost every night, I felt that this new threat of jail was cowardly at best, and hypocritical at the very least. In retrospect, it is clear to me that the fuse for this fight had been lit before I was even aware of it. The easy details of our mutual misbehaviors were only the enchanting decoys, but from the moon it would have been starkly evident that the argument was over deep wounds. The somewhat hypocritical theme about the manner and extent of the preferred methods of how we each had chosen to alter our consciousness was mere subterfuge. It was cogent only to the extent that this was how we had chosen to overcome the floating pain of life, and the revulsion we experienced in seeing ourselves in each other's mirror. The disappointment was infuriating on both sides.

So the argument quickly deteriorated to a list of all the toys that I had broken as a young child, and after that I had enough. I took a big drink, and left. After all, it was Christmas.

My brother followed suit later that night. He was smart. He moved in with a girlfriend, but I moved back with my mother who had been out of our sight, and thus seemed comparatively sane and friendly through lack of exposure.

Though his experiment at active parenting had not been a great success, even with the help of subletting us most of the time to boarding schools, tutors, aunts, cousins, and camp, my father naturally felt betrayed by us, and when later we sued him in family court for child support, he was mortified and, of course, delirious with anger and hurt.

His position about any support was that he had paid for our "upkeep" in boarding school, and if we refused to be there, then we would have to fend for ourselves. Not a bad point really, but the court disagreed and in the spring of 1964, Dad was ordered to pay $22 a week to both my brother and me. This was obviously not a major financial victory, but our vague point about the vicissitudes of his parenting and our freedom of choice had been made.

Almost immediately, my mother provided her usual alcoholic dramas which only encouraged my drinking as a palliative. I returned to a city school called McBurney for a time, but mostly I hung out with my music friends, and girls. I smoked pot for the first time listening to Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, and immediately realized that pressing on your jugular veins and even drinking were child's play.

On my sixteenth birthday -- June 12, 1962 -- I returned to my mother's apartment to find her drunker and meaner than usual. I went into my bedroom to try and escape her fury, but there was no real cover there. She came in and with a powerful "straight-arm" proceeded to push the heavy TV set over onto my shins. I literally saw stars, and then something snapped in that house too after all the years of being woken up at night, being pummeled by her fists, and ducking scotch bottles.

I jumped up and threw the television out the twelfth-story window of the apartment down onto York Avenue. Then I started to break up the furniture in the same manner that I had been raised to eventually imitate. Finally, when my mother protested but also railed Macbethian prediction of this outcome and my "true nature," and then tried to stop me, I punched her in the mouth as hard as I could, and hammered at her body for God knows how long.

After I got hold of myself I watched trembling as she lay on the floor. Unimpressed, in her stupor, she was just barely interrupted with her ongoing drunken epithets about her children and the cruel fate of the world.

Shaking violently, I took the Siamese cat and went to stay with friends. For a month or so I stole food from stores, and lugged the cat around for fear of reprisals on it. When eventually we saw each other, despite the fact that she was still horribly black and blue, we were silently contrite, and the incident was never mentioned.

[admin]

13. A Geographic

JOHN

Eventually my mother decided to take what is known in the alcohol business as a "geographical cure." She was now in the sweet wedge of her cycling shame. By trying to use willpower to rescue herself yet again from yet another series of disasters and the evident "bad luck" that lay at the root of her unmanageability, she was, like all of us alcoholics, going to metamorphose. She knew what the answer was, so she tried to become a person who would defeat her outrageous fortune. She became at least outwardly optimistic and full of resolve. Neither of us knew that she was suffering from a disease and was well beyond the point where strength of character would do any good. I, too, was optimistic as I helped her move out of New York City to the high desert of Palm Springs, California, for her "asthma." After the events of my sixteenth birthday, we both felt guilty as hell. So the curtain went up again on another fresh start; new beginnings with the old solutions of regret and reform.

Though I didn't know it, my needs were becoming the same as hers. But I was still young, and my only discernible addiction at that point was to cigarettes and the ever-shifting vicissitudes and emotionally chaotic situations provided by others.

There were a lot of good reasons to go to California. My mother loved the West. She was really a lot more comfortable there than in New York. She had spent most of her time in California when she was a singer. She had met my father there. They had romanced during the filming of The Grapes of Wrath, and went on to spend a lot of time in Cuernavaca while he was writing The Pearl and a little screenplay called The Forgotten Village.

My maternal grandmother lived in the San Bernardino Mountains just west of Los Angeles. When we weren't sent off to camp, my brother and I had spent many summers with her. She was a great lady and perhaps the only really functional adult I knew in my immediate family.

A far as I was concerned, an abrupt move was just what the doctor ordered. In fact, the doctor was the late Milton Brothers, Joyce's husband, and like most doctors back then, knowing very little about the real underlying nature of alcoholism and addiction, he advised the move as well. And what a benefit to me. At last, I would finally be near blonde girls, cars, and sunshine. My father and I had become essentially estranged since I had left his care and the dubious protection of various boarding schools. The sting of family court was also an injury not to be easily suffered. I was more than content about the prospects waiting for me in California. At age sixteen I was ready to begin my adult life.

With a deep voice and an East Coast flair, I gave myself a headstart and told everyone that I was twenty-one. Since I loved music, this fantasy kid was a graduate of Julliard. After first scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins for a while, and working as a stock boy at the Palm Springs Bullocks Department Store, I started working in radio. Because we were raised on American Bandstand, being a disc jockey was a goal for anyone from the rock 'n' roll generation. After doing that sort of thing for a while, I fell in love with broadcast news.

Since I worked in radio news, I was also friendly with most of the Palm Springs police force. In fact, they comprised most of my drinking associates. That proved to be fortunate since Mom's new leaf fell quickly with the last of autumn and the cops were often called to my mother's address to quiet some drunken tirade.

It was a new twist for me. Police coming to the house was more of a California phenomenon than a New York City scene, to be sure. Sometimes, loving any sort of vexing engagement, she would call the cops herself, and they would now and again find her brandishing a gun like Annie Oakley, at some invisible foe. Eventually, she knew each of the cops on a first-name basis. After all, it was Palm Springs. To me, her behavior was as scary as it had ever been, and made what was to come in the mail that summer of 1964 look like a cakewalk. GREETINGS: We've drafted your ass.

The draft blew my cover. On my twenty-third birthday I turned eighteen. It came as a big surprise to the police I was used to drinking with, especially the one whose wife I'd shacked up with for a brief while. As for me, I had always wanted to see the Orient, and what's more, found war movies stirring. Even though I had totally emancipated myself by then, and had my own apartment, my life was actually beginning to get quite boring. Living alone with my dog and pretending to be older than my years just wasn't making it. I was already drinking a lot by that time, but I rather felt it was only to obscure my mother, who was acting more and more like a trapped animal when she was drunk. The alcohol seemed to help me deal with a murky legacy and the fear of some unnamed failure insinuated by my father.

Actually, as far as my father was concerned, my deficiencies were not entirely unnamed. They were the usual failures of sons. I was a lazy, ungrateful, self-centered bum; probably unworthy of his name; and, of course, "just like" my mother. In some ways, he was right, but I don't think he appreciated how badly I wanted to get out from under the barrage of everyone's hysteria, including what I thought was his less-intoxicated style. Little did I know how he had long been medicating himself and passing his ups and downs off as righteous indignation or the license of poetic depression.

I wasn't particularly afraid to go to Vietnam. After all, I like to travel! I even became convinced that the war might help me where I couldn't help myself. Though it was an incredible idea, for a while the war did help. However, the pressure-detonated issues of Vietnam with their multiple time settings would continue to explode in mine and other people's faces for decades to come. Nonetheless, the war presented a somewhat unique solution for the impasse in the two John Steinbecks' relationship.

[admin]

14. The Rose Garden

JOHN

In retrospect, it seems that within moments of bending over and coughing for an army doctor, I was on my butt in Saigon. This swift move is not just the compression of hindsight, but directly due to the fact that on receiving my draft notice, I had reopened talks with my father and asked him to use his influence with President Johnson to get me out to "Our War." This attitude so stirred my dad that a detente immediately fell in place. Now here was the sort of son he wanted, goddamn it!

After basic training at the improbably named post of Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, I went east to New York to visit my father and tour his personal study of the psychology of war and manly patriotism, mostly based on John Wayne movies.

Dad had been sort of a correspondent during the Second World War, and compiled a book called Once There Was a War that was full of the kind of absurd human detail that he loved and was famous for.

I remember one story in particular that always appealed to me as an inveterate escape artist. Apparently there was a disgruntled Italian American soldier who dearly missed his girl back in the Bronx. One day on the beach south of Naples along with some other grunts, he was charged with guarding and loading a battalion of Italian Fascist troops onto landing craft to be taken out and put on bigger vessels where they would be taken to POW camps in the United States. Being awfully homesick, he became suddenly inspired. He stripped down to his skivvies and bolted away from the beach, screaming Italian obscenities. He was immediately apprehended by the MPs, thrown into the line of captured soldiers, and boarded for home!

Whether or not this really happened was never the important part of getting a story or even veiled political advice from Dad. Not being too literal in deciphering the message was. He would not have found it amusing if I managed to escape from Vietnam or even the draft, so one had to be very careful as to just what was being advertised when it came to following the thread of what he did or did not approve. He thought of both my brother and me as "goldbrickers," which is something that we are both sore about. If he only knew the energy it took being his son! Hell, I was volunteering to get killed over it.

He took me to Washington to meet the commander in chief. I was photographed in uniform in the Oval Office shaking hands with President Johnson, the only man who could rival Dad for jug ears and that larger-than-life stance that some men of that generation seemed to have the patent on. Father's relationship with Lyndon Johnson was anchored not just in Democratic politics, but also in the fact that his wife, Elaine, and Lady Bird had gone to school together at the University of Texas. After our visit with the president, we went back to Sag Harbor, Long Island, where now I was treated as sort of an equal by my father and we drank and talked politics and war for a solid week.

Sleeping very little and grinning at each other like fools who had never had any differences about anything, I felt that this was the way it always should have been. Past behaviors were erased by the masculine import of patriotism.

My father was a master of implicit bonding and charming lies; and even if we both knew them to be lies, well, one had to suppose that, too, was part of real war and a warrior's passage in a kind of tribal bullshit humor. He bought me a lovely Colt derringer as a personal sidearm. For close-in fighting, don't you know. I mean two lousy shots for chrissake! We were obviously in some reverie of war fought in the mists of make-believe, groping toward a kind of manhood embroidered only in daring dreams of childhood glory. It is sad to say here, but fantasy, particularly heroic fantasy, can be a really terrible thing to have to negotiate when enlivened by the mind of a noncombatant.

Later, my brother and I (he became a helicopter door gunner through a similar "bonding experience") began to believe that at this point Dad had probably placed an order in his head for a new piano to pedestal the picture of whatever son would be killed overseas. I mean he could be very romantic. But then of course, so could we.

The war turned into a moral quicksand for Dad as for many others. Though he himself knew better, he was somewhat blinded by the heady association with power. Not since FDR and Adlai Stevenson had he been so near a presidency. But he did know better. Some years earlier, during the Kennedy administration when Pablo Casals accepted an invitation to play the cello at the White House, my father had written a piece about the danger of artists getting into bed with politicians, no matter how benign or lofty the atmosphere might appear. He was not snowed by that Camelot, but the many invitations to spend weekends with Lyndon at Camp David were irresistible to him.

These two men prided themselves on being rough-hewn, as compared at least to the East Coast establishment. Of course, Johnson often preferred to be downright vulgar, which was not exactly my father's style, but both of them had a need to exaggerate the difference that they felt separated them from their more "sophisticated" critics. They were both good men who more than anything wanted to be liked, but they also had a tendency to overcompensate in order to bathe their sense of inferiority as country boys. I think that at least part of their friendship was also due to the fact that they unconsciously recognized how easily hurt they could be despite their braggadocio. This was true in spite of the fact that by then the president of the United States and the Nobel Laureate were in charge. There is no doubt that they genuinely liked each other and it was a plus that they could share the sometimes hilarious burden of being married to Texas women as a binding factor of real consideration.

In the face of what he considered Communist aggression, my father was becoming more and more conservative. He actually identified I. F. Stone as the voice of Hanoi, and the man's venerable newsletter as the party line. That was about as extreme as he got though, as he preferred dark disagreement to real political argument. He also liked the peasant disputes he could have with his Russian writer friends. He naturally felt more comfortable with that sort of poetic guttural passion than wading in against the critical bite of sharp political scientists. Someone like Susan Sontag would have killed him.

In any case, with me now sporting my army uniform, we whipped each other into an extraordinary sentimental froth. By this time in the visit, patriotism had turned downright Darwinian. The hegemony of the tide pool, the amoebae's thrust to the sky was the real issue here, by God! We took lots of late-night walks, drinking and giggling to near oblivion in the starlight. We had huge impassioned conversations about things that neither of us knew anything about. Indeed, this really is what men like to do. We reviewed the myth of of our civilization back to the slime, and on up to what I would discover "Over There." And after all, that was why I was going to Vietnam, by God: to observe, to learn, perhaps to die. Perhaps to dream? Of course, the extreme foolishness of the war sank any such vainglory or romance.

I didn't know what would happen then, but now, in trying to understand and still appreciate the past, it has became very hard for me to surmount the assault of time and what feels like the perpetual disillusionment of this our age. For a variety of reasons it sometimes seems like so many of my experiences and the once-cherished moments of young adulthood are somehow missing in action.

I had never known anything like stability, and I didn't pursue it. I was young and durable and not very sensitive to the subtle fears that were by now deep inside me. So I of course liked this adventure, the best distraction. However effective in the short term, the technique of derring-do was inevitably to cause further numbing. Perhaps that was the idea. But before I would come to any real conclusion about that, this war and national agony took all precedent under the usual banner of responsibility and glory.

And so, along with so many others, my golden youth was aroused and then served up to the Asian crucible where the major amalgam was death and destruction and where any hint of personal regeneration was subtle if not impossible to measure. In the end, like the rest of the walking wounded, I came home to a country filled with anger and shame. The general population tried to hide its killing with ignorance, thus killing many more of its own with neglect.

I spent almost six years in Vietnam, and in a way, So what! So I've been in a war, I've flown a plane, and I certainly learned that given my background, a taste for ashes is easily acquired and one that doesn't quickly fade. Though the war co-emerged with so many other things in the middle of this century, it remains singular in its illusive moral. Even now, I try to fathom something of the purpose of this minefield which tore so many lives apart. For so many of us, Vietnam was like a spiritual concussion grenade. For some the ringing in the ears will never clear. Still, I was to go back to Vietnam many times; from California, from India, Cambodia, Laos, from Hong Kong, and Thailand, but it was my first trip there in the army that sank the barb. It also encouraged a variety of behaviors that nearly killed me. War is dangerous; especially in a world where even love can kill, quite accidentally.

[admin]

15. At War With Dad

JOHN

When I arrived in Vietnam, the newness of the Asian noises filling the air and the smells that mingled jasmine and shit, French bread, opium and incense completely thrilled me. I was wide open, and here, every minute was crammed with more seconds, more milliseconds, than an entire day back home in the states. Though I had traveled a lot for my age and felt rather worldly, I turned my head to take in everything with the dizzy focus of a four-month-old bird dog.

To be sure I was naive, but hardly anyone knew much about Vietnam when I first arrived in the summer of 1966. Well, people like David Halberstam, John Paul Van, and Daniel Ellsberg did, but they knew nothing about us, and we understood nothing about the war.

When I write about these times, it permits things to come out and lets them melt under my tongue, like sublingual vitamins. Now they are safe to examine, even play with. I don't think that I reacted to my circumstances the way most soldiers did. In fact, I'm sure of it. As the first days rolled by, the Vietnamese sunrise brought me even more things for my mind to grab and savor, and I did it with an avid panoramic awareness, like a child memorizing all the shiny metal objects worn into the asphalt of his neighborhood like they were jewels. Smooth and small, they don't exist for most of the people who move over them thousands of times a day. The Vietnamese themselves seemed oblivious to the textures. They laughed politely at me. I was charmed.

Because of my radio background, I was able to become a journalist for Armed Forces Radio and Television in Vietnam; a war correspondent for the Department of Defense and the people who brought you Good Morning, Vietnam. It was the early days of the electronic entertainment business in this ancient nation.

The ground for a huge station was being bulldozed and prepared, but when I arrived we were still broadcasting our FM/AM radio signals out of the basement of a Saigon hotel. The TV operation was literally up in the air as we went flying around in circles over the jungle in old prop-driven airliners, beaming down Love American Style, or the Dean Martin Show. We had plans to cover the entire country with ground stations to accommodate the big buildup. Within a year, there wasn't an inch of the conflict that couldn't enjoy that goofy girl Carol Burnett, or venture out of the jungle with Star Trek, and for the really gung ho, there was always Combat, with Vic Morrow. (I always thought it was weird that this poor guy would eventually be killed pretending to be in Vietnam during a Twilight Zone remake.)

Zone was also very popular with the troops, and why not? The basic idea for my unit's mission in Vietnam was to try to convince everyone, including ourselves, that we weren't really there at all! And if it turned out we were, well, the war was really just sort of Research & Development and maybe at worst, an exciting nine-to-five job with a few nasty occupational hazards. If our network mission succeeded, then after shutdown, one could just kick back with a cold beer and listen to the radio or watch the tube. The PX made sure to sell all the booze and paraphernalia you would need to support this idea. They also had the TVs, stereos, and refrigerators, and even Weber barbecues. Nothing was going to spoil consumerism in the abstract, though it turned out to be US that got consumed.

After I had been in Vietnam a few months, my father couldn't stand it anymore. He had to come, too! He asked my "permission," whatever that meant, and before Christmas 1966 he arrived at Ton Son Nhut airport in Saigon with my stepmother, Elaine.

After a few months, I had been removed to the field, as they say. But now I was permitted to come down to Saigon from my mountaintop station near Pleiku to visit my father the VIP. It was quite peculiar seeing him in that environment, outfitted in dashing camouflage ascots and drinking with generals and colonels while extolling the common man; the technique that was his trademark.

The army was getting to know me a little bit so I was only allowed to spend a few days with Dad, and then I returned to my mountain where he would come visit me in a fortnight or so after touring the front. Of course, there was no such thing in Vietnam, so basically VIPs were shown the toys and technology and maps and zeal of a military caught in a situation that it did not understand at all. Since our leaders were oblivious to our doom, there was a lot of nudging and confident winking that punctuated the sort of briefing that my dad and other visitors received.

From the South China Sea to the Cambodian border in the west, the Central Highlands of Vietnam represented the most beautiful, varied, and dangerous real estate of the war. This had been true for the French as well as the Americans. My little twelve-man unit had put up a small television station in an eighteen-wheel trailer. The site was on top of "Pussi Mountain," so named because of a vague significance that its sensuous curves held for love-starved soldiers. From its crest at about 3,000 feet, it overlooked the Fourth Infantry Division's base camp sprawled out on the plain below us. The countryside looked more like the African veld than what we think of as Southeast Asia. Getting up in the dawn light, I almost expected to see zebras and gazelle crossing the vast grassy expanse that led to the low hills of Cambodia in the west. This was also Montagnard country where the men dressed in colorful loincloths and carried crossbows and the women were bare-breasted as they slashed and burned for their crops in the ancient way.

Dad arrived at a small, dusty airstrip near Pleiku City where I picked him up by jeep. When I was just a little boy, he used to drive me around the moors of Nantucket in a jeep he bought from army surplus and memories of that time came to me as he climbed in, now dressed in his new combat fatigues.

It was a forty-minute drive through the countryside over roads covered with potholes, mortar craters, and deep furrows from previous rainy seasons. If I close my eyes, I can still see all of its snags. With the exception of the occasional convoy bracketed front and back with helicopter gunships, there was almost never any traffic on it. As a result, the road made you feel very exposed, so the technique was to drive very fast in a zigzag to avoid obstacles and possible bullets. For young and old alike, the drive was forty minutes of torture, but I couldn't help being amused by my father yelling at me to slow down as if we were on the Long Island Expressway or somewhere normal. Here, I was able to look at him and just grin as I pushed down on the gas peddle. Yup, this was my jeep, on my road, leading to my mountain in my war ... Pop.

Eventually we careened up to the top in a cloud of red dust. My father gingerly climbed out to meet the commanding officer, Captain Luckey, and the rest of the boys. Immediately he began to regale the unit in that special way he had that made them feel part of something very manly and full of ironic adventure, something almost secret. His "aw shucks" humility was very engaging and warm. Again, it made people feel as if they were part of a wonderful conspiracy of imagination and action that might be a little risky, certainly to be kept private, but the right thing to do in the eyes of those who knew the secrets of real life. He could pull this off with just the lift of an eyebrow, and all my life I saw hundreds of people tumble for it and be tamed into a submissiveness a sheepherder would admire.

As the first nightfall crept over the plains, my father and I stared out over some bombing far in the distance. It looked like the kind of fake thunder and lightning you see offstage in an opera. After checking our trip flares and claymore mines for our night defensive positions, we broke out the booze. With a nudge and a wink, Dad slipped me a couple of pink pills which I of course took immediately. Practiced as I was with survival kits, I soon realized it was pure speed; something very close to methamphetamine to be more precise. I would eventually learn the underlying significance of this gesture when it was later revealed to me just how long and often he had been taking these little beauties. For the moment, however, it was just part of this undercover fellowship that he transmitted through his bright eyes. We all talked late into the night.

The next day and evening, our little festival continued. Though one cannot discount the effects of speed and booze, war itself delivers an altered state of consciousness of the most compelling and bizarre variety. I've often thought that when a child or cadet looks into an old soldier's eyes, even if the war has been horrible, the younger man sees a queer faraway look on the veteran's face when he is asked, "What did you do in the war?" Survivors of combat have seen a bluer sky and a greener tree than most mystics. Glimpsing this, the kid knows that something very important had gone down; something more scary and unutterable than even sex, though it is mixed with something like that, too. Later, when I worked at the Pentagon around hundreds of professional soldiers who had never heard a shot fired in anger, I used to get chills knowing that more than anything, they wanted a taste of that look and would eventually, without any doubt, help perpetrate more wars to get it.

Our little unit was small and intimate and Captain Luckey, outside of being charmed by my father's presence, was a kind and loose commanding officer. But this second night was much different than the first. At about ten o'clock, the field radio started going efficient on us, reporting an attack on Pleiku City. Then we were probed by something as a trip flare went off in our outer perimeter wire.

With a shout we all flew to our combat stations. I had an M-79 grenade launcher, and Dad picked up an M-60 machine gun. As I jumped into my hole, the man in there before me set off our claymores with a roar, and I started lobbing grenades out towards the tripped flare.

Captain Luckey immediately got on the radio and called in the Fourth Division artillery which started laying illumination rounds over us as well as walking fragmentation up the slopes of the mountain. Time does funny things in these situations, but soon after the first illumination popped, I looked back over the edge of my hole. I saw my father behind some sandbags overlooking my position with his M-60 at the ready. There was nothing particularly awkward here. We both knew and liked guns, but there was something so incredibly touching and hilarious about the consistently operatic quality in which all our metaphors had crystallized. I mean, who, in God's name, was producing this movie? And what an amazing feeling to see him ready in his helmet and flack jacket protecting my back as I then continued to lob out more grenades. Despite the grandiosity that we were both capable of, this was a rare and oddly distinguished moment in our lives, and one that I continue to interpret in revolving waves of symbolism and flat-out caricature. For just a few moments it seemed that the entire North Vietnamese army and the American military-industrial complex had conspired to let us see through the parody of our true relationship, using perhaps the only tools that could nauseate our sentimental, overcompensating temperaments into a genuine clarity. The result of course was laughter. The probe turned out to be just that and of no consequence, but it had been enough to bring us to a brief moment of nondiscriminating awareness for each other. I saw the mirth in his eyes and felt a brotherly love in my heart. When I recall it into the forever present, my greed and longing for a feeling of connection with my father disappears. In those moments, everything is enough.

[admin]

16. Home -- 1967

JOHN

When I landed back in California after my first year in Vietnam, having been discharged, it was the same eighteenth day in June it had been the year earlier. As I wrote at the time, the weather, the air base, even the hour was the same, yet everything had changed for me, for my country. About half the soldiers were the same ones who had been with me going in the other direction that 365-day circle back around the Sun. We had all separated to different units. I hadn't seen any of them for exactly a year, but here we were again. Though I really didn't know them, they were obviously the same people, and yet they didn't look the same. Their faces were no longer the faces of boys. Grim experience had replaced any innocence. An odd mask of unsettled sureness that probably went back to the Trojan War sat where pure anxiety had once flashed. The other half of the men, well, they just weren't there, and the hushed presence of their absence was partly responsible for the new look on the faces of those of us who were left. I went into the jet's lavatory and looked at myself in the mirror. I started to cry, though probably not long enough, for the child I had lost somewhere. Then I went back, tightened my seat belt, and tried to go home.

Back home, things had really started zipping along. Within the first month of my return I was being chased around in the midnight Pennsylvania woods by an aged hippie wielding a bowie knife. He had discovered that I was a GI, and he felt a duty to eliminate me as a baby killer. "Ecology," he said. I was on my second acid trip ever, and boy, was I surprised. I felt a bit misled by the flowers in his hair. Maybe this was the New Left that I'd heard so much about. Though he was certainly a lunatic, he surely represented some unclaimed point man in the moonlight. In any case, I was resilient. The war had been bad.

I remained in the army for about six months after my return to America. It was like being dropped from one war zone into another. I went from a hell realm of bullets to a realm of confused and jealous gods with their "living room war," and bad-to-worse news bulletins. Once again though, I was eager to immerse myself in the "whatever," and it was obvious, at least to me, that in either theater, I was a volunteer.

As a reporter for the army in Vietnam, I had gone out looking for a good human-interest story, and I found instead more marijuana than Cheech and Chong's best dream. My research soon stopped being objective. The irony of it all: this amazing dope was right there where they had sent us to win hearts and minds. My square mind was immediately vanquished, and then my heart broke.

Now the counterproductive nature of the serendipity which found us slogging through a garden of sheer escapism was a pretty well-kept secret until I got back to the States. In 1967, people had somehow concluded that, quite apart from your domestic variety Communist-drug-addict-hippie-vermin, we in the service were high-minded scouts who were defending the integrity of our shores and interests with sobriety, M-16s, and probably Jesus. Hearing that, strictly speaking, this was not the case, an editor friend of mine asked for more detail. I wrote an article for the Washingtonian magazine called "The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam," and the cat was out of the bag.

My attachment to sincerity has always been a serious impediment. I was foolish enough to have written and talked about these things before I was actually out of the military.

After almost being court-martialed, I was called to testify in front of the Senate Armed Forces Sub-Committee on Drug Abuse. Though I testified in depth to a number of written questions, I basically told them that there was a lot of dope around, a lot of people were smoking it, and I didn't see that there was really any problem. I was careful not to bring up the Age of Aquarius or anything like that. Astrology was to wait in the background for another administration to bring it into the firmament of government and policy.

After this testimony. I felt a noble sense of solidarity with my peers, but I have to admit to a few shaky moments. Just a couple of days later, while driving my car, I turned on the radio and was immediately zapped with, "Today, Four-Star General of Army, General William Westmoreland, issued a statement saying, 'Private First Class John Steinbeck's comments on the use of marijuana in Vietnam are baseless.'" Talk about the long chain of command. Fortunately, a week later, on Pearl Harbor Day, my hitch was up and I was honorably discharged with a Good Conduct Ribbon.

Somewhat inadvertently, I had become news. It seems that I had become a spokesman for dope and its place in our society. So, advertently, I wrote a small book about my year in Vietnam. In Touch was nothing if not earnest. The war was ugly and ill-conceived, but I thought that the rift in the generations was due to simple misunderstanding, and that much could be healed with my unheated declaration of the facts. I knew nothing about the pathology of control and the substance abuse of power. I was too young to know, much less understand, that rage was an excruciatingly specialized style of addiction. Pressure and conflict were like alkaloids that offered a unique sense of well-being to whoever might develop the habit.

To be honest, I really didn't know much of what had been happening "back in the world." As I began to reconnect with my friends, it became obvious that my stint in the army, especially in Vietnam, was truly time spent somewhere off the planet.

America had become extraordinary. It was bursting with excitement. I had gone to Vietnam as a Hawk, and though I had turned into a veritable Turtle Dove, I still had a conservative streak. My love for history was one of the things that had kept me sane during the war. For some sort of cover -- and protection -- I became a student of the scene, a meteorologist for the changing wind, a wind that sometimes knocked you down, but once again, I was basically eager. This was my time, and I was a quick study.