TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 55

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 10, 200000006


Dears,

	I got a fair amount of mail after the 
last Life Story (54), about the new cello.  I'd 
kind of thought that my father looked cruel 
enough already, but this one seemed to have 
touched some nerves with people.  I must say that 
we, all three of us Shapiro offspring, spent 
inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out 
what he would do next, why he was doing what he 
was doing, when he would stop whatever game he 
was playing at the time, how our mother could 
tolerate it.  We knew him to be this perversion 
of humanity.  But, there were plenty of people 
who thought he was just an eccentric, loveable, 
mad scientist.  And there were some who would 
tell me in excited tones, "You're so lucky to 
have a father that's so with it."  I never knew 
what to do with comments like that.  There was a 
time when I was in junior high and high school, 
even college, when the first thing that people 
would learn about me after introduction was that 
I hated my father.  The hate was so palpable that 
it kept me going.  I often think about that Star 
Trek episode where Kirk, Bones, Spok and maybe 
somebody else are captive in some alien's cage. 
And they figure out the only way to survive is to 
think primitive thoughts, hate them severely and 
strongly, just keep those thoughts in their minds 
and then they couldn't harm them.  It was kind of 
like that.  But hate like that causes scars.  And 
I have those.  After his death, the first thing I 
noticed was a sense of relief, and then an 
unusual, nearly unknown feeling of safety.  Now, 
ten years after his death, I am calmer, and I 
don't have to hate anyone.  It's a blessing.  The 
whole family looks better without him 
ministrating at the hub.

	Another blessing.


 
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Unfathomable Dream

	Dweller and I gave my brother, Daniel, a 
coupon for his 14th birthday.  It said that when 
he least expected it, we were going to surprise 
him and take him to his unfathomable dream come 
true.  I remember those words, too.  "Your 
unfathomable dreams".  Of course, he didn't know 
what to make of it.  What were we going to do, 
and what was his unfathomable dream?  We planned 
this very carefully.  Daniel's birthday is in 
November and we chose the winter holiday break to 
surprise him.  There would be no school and so we 
could spirit him away.

	What we planned on doing was packing him 
up for a trip and taking him in our VW bus all 
the way to Southern California to go to 
Disneyland with us and Pearl Shear's two 
children, the friends of my childhood, Kerry and 
Stuart.  There were two other revellers, 
Dweller's friend from his growing up days in 
Riverside, "Mouse" Edwards and his wife Anne 
Shorsky Edwards, who had, coincidentally, been a 
friend of my sister's in high school.  Her mother 
was Catholic and her father Jewish, but she was 
raised as a Catholic, and she was famous for 
having told my sister, "Don't worry, Dana.  There 
will be a place near heaven for you."  Dweller 
had a host of comrades from school and all of 
them had nicknames.  Dweller's was Cliff Dweller. 
And that's where that name came from, another 
story to be held in store.  So we waited until 
the day of departure, making sure my mother had 
packed him a good suitcase.  And I prepared a 
bucket of chocolate chip cookies made with a 
powerful dose of marijuana.  This was stored 
under the seat in a safe inconspicuous place.

	The morning of the Shanghai, Dweller and 
I showed up in Daniel's room bright, early, too 
early, and woke him up with our marching in 
circles, reciting, "Unfathomable! Unfathomable! 
Unfathomable!"  He stirred and looked up, excited 
and a little scared.  Just what was going to 
happen?  We didn't tell him.  We told him only 
that it would become clear as we were on the way. 
We guaranteed he'd guess.  We loaded him in the 
bus with his suitcase and a good breakfast in 
him, and we headed toward highway five, the 
interstate that goes in a straight line down the 
center of California.  A boring, tedious, 
monotonous run.  The driving on highway five is 
frightening.  People are going for hundreds of 
miles at a stretch and the landmarks are so 
spread out, that you can memorize the signs over 
the course of your journey. 
"Buttonwillow/McKitrick" was one of my 
favourites.  About halfway down the state of 
California, Daniel figured out that we were going 
to Los Angeles, and it wasn't long after that 
that he deduced it must be Disneyland.  We 
arrived in Los Angeles in the evening, just in 
time for the rush hour traffic, and went directly 
to Pearl's house.  Pearl had extra room for us to 
stay, and we bedded down in her Sherman Oaks 
house on the hillside on the windy road, the 
hillside of a thousand backyard swimming pools.

	The next morning, we got up and prepared 
to go to Disneyland.  Dweller was driving.  Kerry 
and Stuart met us at the house and we set off to 
pick up Mouse and Anne.  When everyone was all 
aboard, I brought out the tin of chocolate chip 
cookies with the special surprise in them.  Most 
of us ate three cookies.  Dweller and Anne ate 
none.  Dweller was the designated driver, and he 
didn't like grass too much, anyway.  I used to 
resent him, thinking he was being aloof, not 
joining us lowly peasants in our earthy 
pleasures.  But it turned out that I was grateful 
for his abstention.  Poor Stuart ate 17 cookies. 
He said he was just hungry.  I warned him that 
the intoxicating element was mighty and powerful, 
and three cookies ought to do it.  But he kept 
slogging them down and chewing them up, one after 
the other.  It took about twenty minutes for the 
cookies to take effect, and it came on strong. 
Everything was distorted including time and 
purpose.  The only people not affected were 
Dweller and Anne.  The rest of us were wrenched 
into a world of bizarre reality, or no reality. 
Naturally, we were worried that someone else, 
some other, might be able to tell that we were 
stoned.  So we tried our best to act straight. 
Which is a laugh.  The more you try to act 
normal, the more obvious is the diversion from 
the norm.

	Dweller parked the bus in the middle of 
what seemed like a tsunami of cars, posts 
sticking up here and there designating areas of 
the parking lot and labelling them by sections: 
1, 2, 3, A, B, C.  By that time, I had no idea 
where we were, and only a vague idea of how to 
make our way to the entrance.  We had to stand in 
line, among other weird humans and work our way 
to the front of the line where I had to write out 
a few travellers' cheques to pay for our 
admittance.  I felt like I needed Dweller to 
guide my hand to fill out the cheques, so very 
stoned was I.  Daniel was taking this all in 
while grinning broadly.  But he told me later 
that his experience was not without worry.  He 
worried that people could tell, that he was 
underage and therefore specially arrestable, that 
he would get separated from the group, that he 
would get lost and require official assistance. 
Funny thing.  I was =worried about pretty much 
the same things.  In fact, after the entire day 
had unfolded, we'd all come down from our 
extraordinary high, our sensibilities had 
returned to us, and we could share our stories, 
we found out that each one of us had at one point 
or another contemplated turning ourselves in.  We 
were that stoned.

	What I remember best was the ride, "It's 
a Small World".  This was where we got into 
little boats and the boats travelled a course 
through the land of billions of dolls.  The dolls 
were all hooked up to bounce and wave, go forward 
and back, dance, or laugh.  They were all dressed 
in native garb from all the countries that were 
imaginable in the early 1970s.  And it was 
pejorative.  Disney was not famous for his 
enlightened views of humankind.  The African 
dolls had bones in their hair and rings through 
their noses.  The little Dutch dolls were wearing 
wooden shoes and the Israeli dolls probably all 
had big hooked noses.  And all the dolls were 
singing the theme song together in their high 
pitched chipmunk voices.  As we sat in the boat, 
Daniel cracked up.  He rolled from side to side, 
laughing, saying, "Everything's moving!"  and he 
nearly moved clear out of the boat.  Stuart was 
beyond help and beyond reach.  He sat still, 
deathly still, gripping the sides of the boat. 
Dweller and Anne just enjoyed themselves, robbed 
of the hyper experience of paranoia and balance 
control.  Nearly all of us, save Anne and 
Dweller, were on the verge of falling out into 
the water.

	Somehow, we made it through the GE 
Carousel of Progress, a great million dollar 
advertisement for General Electric's contribution 
to the modern world.  The riders file into a 
theater that is the doughnut part of the 
construction.  There are several theaters, and 
the doughnut revolves around the stages in the 
center.  It starts out with a stage set 
pre-electricity.  There are mannequins that speak 
to you and you are educated about what it was 
like during that era.  The two characters are a 
husband and wife.  In the good old days, the 
husband rules the roost and the wife is ironing, 
looking up every once in a while to say, "Yes, 
dear."  Then the music starts and the doughnut 
turns until you're positioned in front of another 
theater, further into the future, further into 
the miracle of General Electric's effect on the 
world, and life in the nuclear family.  The 
appliances are introduced as if they were 
treasured members of the family, and the husband 
expound upon the usefulness of the early washing 
machine with its dangerous wringer, for instance, 
or the new electric iron which is such a help to 
the little Mrs.  Then the wife says, "Yes, dear," 
as she irons at the ironing board.  The music 
starts and the doughnut turns again.  Finally, 
the doughnut brings us to the future, as seen by 
General Electric's advertising department in the 
early 1970s, huge whipping freeways, tied in 
knots outside the wall of windows in the modern 
house with appliances that do everything but say, 
"Yes, dear."  But as the eras progressed, we see 
a change in the wife.  Finally, it is she that is 
jabbering on about how wonderful General Electric 
is, and the husband who says, obviously cowed and 
defrocked of his masculinity, "Yes, dear."  And 
they both look out at the stunned audience and 
say in preparation for the carousel's moving on 
once more, "Well you probably all know the song 
by now, so why don't you just sing along!?"  And 
damned if there wasn't a couple of  people a few 
rows down and to the left who opened their 
throats and sang their hearts out: "It's a great 
big beautiful tomorrow, Shining at the end of 
every day!  It's a great big beautiful tomorrow, 
Something something U.S.A.  I've got a dream and 
that's a start, Follow my dream with head and 
heart.  And when the dream becomes reality, 
Something something and ultimately something I 
can't remember."  Watching them sing put me into 
peals of laughter.  Doubled over in my chair, I 
had to be hoisted by my fellow travellers to get 
out of there when the ride was over.

	We staggered through Disneyland, 
careening off of walls, stunned by the smallest 
of occurrences, pretty much obliterated by three 
cookies, except for Stuart who had seventeen.  I 
looked to Dweller and Anne as beacons of sanity 
in a flood of chaos.  I was so grateful for 
Dweller's sanity that I fell in love with him all 
over again.  It grew dark.  We went to the best 
restaurant Disneyland had to offer for dinner.  I 
wrote out a few more travellers' cheques.  Those 
of us who had been cookied, began to come down, 
the floors became more anchored, the mind slowed 
down and straightened up.  We left, exhausted, 
sighing with relief.  We slept solidly that night 
and slept in the next morning.

	Daniel had an unfathomable experience. 
By the time we returned him home, he was sober 
and coherent.  Surprisingly, not much 
conversation has happened about that trip since 
the occasion.  Some things just don't translate 
well into words.  But I'm sure he had to come up 
with something else for his, "What I did during 
my vacation," essay.


 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net