The Hypocrisy of Disco: A Memoir

1

Hogging the Covers

Slap bang goes the screen door three or four times, fast, because the seven of us kids are all leaving the house at once. Me and Andrew have an elbow fight, going, Ow you dick and Shut up, turd. Haud and Matt jump off the porch saying Shazam, both their butt cracks showing whitely against the dusk of the night since they never, either one of them, pull up their pants right. Melena picks her way down the three steps carefully like a doe about to lose her balance. Scott and Cindy, who always wants to be called Cynthia, follow last.

We’re going out to the school bus parked in the driveway to have a slumber party. It’s early in the night and the air smells so good because it’s just starting to rain. Northern California, where we live right now, smells this one way when it rains, the deepest green piney cool from the forest mixed with the muddy smell coming from the river, which talks to itself a little way off. I can smell pennyroyal too, and I take big gulps of the air. The azaleas under the trees bloom pale blurs.

Together we make a sound of slapping tennies on dirt, of jeans and corduroys whistling, of gravel skipping ahead of our hurrying feet. We’re all hushed and excited, whispering for no reason, fumbling at the door of the school bus, which gives a squeaky groan when Andrew opens it. I’m carrying extra blankets, Melena has candles and matches. Matt and Haud are shoving to get ahead of each other, and Scott runs down the aisle of the bus to flop on the big bed in the back. Cynthia has the flashlight and she keeps it on while we light candles and pile the blankets on the big bed and on the smaller bunk beds. I throw one of the blankets over Scott. I hit or kick or pinch him any time I can. Last week at his house we played spin the bottle. I really really really want to kiss him again.

The school bus is Matt and Melena and Andrew’s mom’s school bus and it’s parked at my house for now. It has tables that unfold where there used to be seats, and cupboards and the bunk beds and a propane stove. Curtains go the length of the bus, strung on wires top and bottom, and there’s a carpet in the aisle. The bus rocks a little when we run down the center of it and Andrew says, Don’t, the candles will fall over. Matt makes an extra jump to show that Andrew can’t boss him and then he tackles Haud and they wrestle clumsily. Haud and Matt, they’re the squirmy puppy ones, always ratty and sleeping where they fall. Melena is scowly and picked on, and she always looks like she’s just been pinched. Andrew’s the bossy one with a big nose. Scott and Cynthia are always squabbling. I don’t know for sure what I am because I’m in me and can’t see me.

In age it goes Andrew, who’s thirteen, and then Matt and Melena, who are twins, they’re fraternal twins and they’re ten. Not identical twins, Matt will sometimes say adamantly, and I’ll say, No doy, otherwise you would look exactly alike. Scott and Cynthia are twelve and eleven, respectively. I’m Clane and Haud is my brother. I’m eleven and he’s nine.

I’ve got Spanish fly, Scott says. We’re all smushed together on the big bed and he’s sitting on the edge and banging his feet on the cupboard underneath. What’s Spanish fly? Melena and Cynthia ask, looking at each other and at me. Andrew looks up from the book he’s trying to read in a pool of candlelight and says, It’ll make you horny. It makes you want to hump. Melena scowls and Cynthia says, That just looks like rolled-up bread to me. I know it’s just bread but I tell her no, really, it’s Spanish fly, and she eats some even though she pretends she doesn’t want to and starts rolling around on the bed. She bonks into me and I bonk into Andrew and he says quit it and then he grabs my hand and he hits me with my hand and goes, Why are you hitting yourself, huh? Why are you hitting yourself? He always hits me and I know why, and I use this like my secret weapon against him. It’s because if he likes me, and I know this, and he doesn’t know I know this, then that makes me smarter than him.

Andrew and Matt and Melena and their little brother, Jude, and their mom, Susan, they live in a house near us, near me and Haud and our mom and our little sister, Ki. We live near the river in a vacation cabin even though we’re not on vacation. Because it’s cheaper, our mom says, even if it is a little chilly and dark. Scott and Cynthia live with their mom across town. We haven’t lived here that long, we never live anywhere long, we move all of the time. We come and go with no explaining, and all the people I know come and go with no explaining either. Maybe the only thing I can explain in my life for sure is my name. When people ask how we got our funny names, and they always do, I say, with extra patience, Our dad is Claude and our mother is H’lane and it goes Haud and Claude and Clane and H’lane, get it? Then I say I also have a sister named Ki and a brother named Random, and they’ll ask, Key like in lock and key? and I say no. Ki means life force, it’s Japanese. Random like, by chance? No, duh, Random like Random House.

Today was Passover and earlier we had a seder, all us kids and our moms and Susan’s sister Serena and her little kid Shiva. There were bitter herbs and there was supposed to be a lamb bone but we didn’t use one because we are all of us super-vegetarians, even though I wish we weren’t. There was an argument about using the egg, too, and we used it but didn’t eat it. The little kids got grape juice and we got grape juice mixed with wine. I’d never been to a seder before. I know that we’re Jewish but I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean if we don’t have passovers and Hanukkah or go to temple or say prayers at sundown. So Jewish is this religion but we’re not religious like that. God is all one, H’lane says, and so does the label on Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap. God is nowhere, God is now here, H’lane says. Jesus was righteous and so was Mohammed and so was Buddha, and Bob Marley is a prophet. H’lane is always saying, The forest is God, listen to the forest and listen to the mountain.

She will say this with her eyes closed and her hands clasped together, palms flat, after taking a big bong hit. She will breathe the smoke out in a big cloud and raise her arms up slow over her head and then she’ll bring her palms together in front of her again.

She did this in the kitchen tonight when we had the seder, my mom all baked out on pot while we all scurried around holding bowls and plates and looking for spoons and chopsticks. Susan said, Who wants rice and who wants groats? and I picked groats and dove for the pot before Matt could. There was miso soup and tofu and vegetables too. Jude sat on the floor crying in his weird voice because he is deaf and dumb, holding a plate and tilting rice off it onto the floor, and Melena helped him stand up with his plate steadied. He’s deaf and dumb but he’s not retarded. We all ate at the table in the living room, which is low to the floor and has cushions around it instead of chairs. The smaller kids kneeled, wobbly, clutching spoons in their fists and picking dropped bits off the table. Ki sat on a cushion holding a bowl in her lap, eating very seriously with all her attention divided between one chubby grubby hand keeping the bowl from tipping over and the other hand getting a spoon too big for her into her mouth.

I liked the ceremony of seder, all of us there together. Susan made the blessings, one in Hebrew and one to Buddha and one to the goddess. H’lane doesn’t celebrate any holidays usually. She says Christmas is bourgeois and Thanksgiving is just dead turkey day. She says, Thanksgiving is a day when a large portion of the human planet will gather to celebrate the slaughtering, killing, cooking, and eating of the earth’s creatures. Is that any way to honor the goddess? she asks. It is a strange reality some of us create and live in, she says merrily, eyes all glazed and dopey.

Ki tucked herself into my lap after she ate and busied herself with my shoelaces. She’s two and a half and I love her so much. Her head beneath my chin smelled like dirty kid and sun and weeds and the incense that H’lane and Susan always burn. Make some tea, Melena, Serena said, and Melena did it, scowling and bringing the teapot carefully to the table. Matt and Haud quibbled over the last carob brownie while Andrew read under a lamp and Susan and H’lane started talking about their dumb guru. This is when we kids left for the school bus to have our slumber party. When they go on about Yakimoto Takagushi Scrotomushi Poopilashi and Stephen Gaskin and the I Ching and the Grateful Dead they’ll just go on forever.

In the school bus the candles throw dancey shadows in the corners. Haud takes the flashlight and makes his hands into a cup over the top and his hands glow pink. Andrew has the other flashlight and he puts it under his chin to make the light shine up eerily over his face and says, I am the true mastermind mwa ha ha ha. There’s a little wind moving the tree branches outside and Scott goes, Did you hear that? I’m going to tell a ghost story, he says. There’s this couple in a car that’s stopped on the side of the road because they’re out of gas. The man says, You wait here, I’m going to look for a gas station, and he leaves and disappears into the darkness. I’ve heard this one about a million times, Andrew says, sighing loud. Go back to your book, egghead, Cynthia says. What’s an egghead? I want to know. Scott goes on impatiently. The man doesn’t come back and doesn’t come back and doesn’t come back. All night. The woman sits in the car and hears the tree branches scraping the roof of the car, and the rain goes drip drip drip. In the morning the woman gets out of the car and what she finds is the man hanging from a tree over the car and it was his feet scraping on the roof all night, and his throat is cut and that’s what made the dripping sound all night. We heard that one at camp, Cynthia says. Camp was so great, she says, eyes closed in ecstasy. There were boats and crafts and ghost stories around the fire. Are there horses? Haud wants to know, and What did you get to eat? I want to know. Marshmallows, Cynthia hollers, jumping up on the bed and making the whole bus rock.

Matt and Haud wrangle over who gets the top bunk and Melena is already asleep curled up in a little ball, and then Matt is asleep too and snoring. Haud in the top bunk kicks at the ceiling. I have to figure out how to sleep near Scott but not near Andrew in the big bed, and I get Scott on one side and Cynthia on the other side of me and Andrew on the other side of Scott. We sing a Beatles song quietly, Rocky Raccoon. Andrew says, Quit hogging the covers, and Scott kisses me quietly under the blankets and his mouth is warm and too wet and I like his breath on my face. This is my life in 1978 in Northern California.

2

Nothing in My Life Moves in Straight Lines

It’s some day of the week but I don’t know which one for sure because there’s no reason to keep track of them. Melena is at my house and we’re coloring in a Mayan calendar coloring book that I wish was a Barbie and Ken coloring book but H’lane won’t let me have a Barbie and Ken one. It’s summer now. I haven’t seen much of Matt and Melena and Andrew and Jude because they got to go to a summer camp and me and Haud didn’t, and they got to go to Mexico and we didn’t. I spent the summer reading at the library. Sometimes H’lane took us to the river, and sometimes she took us to the movies. I read D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and all of the Little House on the Prairie books and the Madeleine L’Engle books A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door. Melena and I are talking, our heads bent over the book and our hair falling over our faces like curtains, sloppy and tangly.

Melena wants to know where me and Haud moved from, where were we before we came here and met her and Matt and Andrew and Jude. Where we are now is called Monte Rio, a little town along the Russian River not far from San Francisco.

I have to think for a minute when she asks this because why we are here and how we got here is a thing that is never clear to me. We move all of the time and it’s been like this my whole life. H’lane says it’s because she’s a gypsy. I have pictures in my head of all the places I’ve ever lived and some of them don’t make any sense to me. I don’t know how to explain any of this to Melena because then she will think we are weird. Which is true. We are weird. But so far it seems like Melena’s family is almost, not quite but almost, as weird.

First we lived in San Francisco, I tell Melena, reaching over her to get a pencil called magenta for my coloring. We lived in San Francisco, where I was born, and Claude and H’lane were together then. I was born just before the Summer of Love, I tell her. What’s the Summer of Love? I don’t know, I say, shrugging, it’s just always what my mom says. My mom and dad met doing acid in North Beach with the Beats. What’s acid? she asks. What’s Beats? Where’s North Beach? I’m not positive, I say, but I was born in March and I’m a Pisces. I tell Melena what Pisces is.

H’lane does astrology and she says Pisces is a heavy trip, she says I was born under heavy stars. She will sit cross-legged on the floor with a blanket spread over her knees and a needle in one hand, wearing little round glasses with gold rims that she uses to see things up close. With her glasses on the edge of her nose and her nose wrinkled to keep the glasses up, she embroiders the signs of the astrological calendar onto the blanket. She shows them to me, saying, This is Cancer the crab and it’s a water sign. This is Leo the lion and it’s a fire sign. Pisces are the fish chasing each other, and that’s you, Clanie. I should have waited a few days to have you, man, you were born under some heavy trips. You’re a Pisces which is a mutable negative water sign. This means you are unstable. You have your moon in Capricorn and this means contradiction. You have your intuition in the house of time and will and responsibility. You have your emotion in the house of karma. You have your Venus in Scorpio and this is intense, Scorpio is the image of sudden death and inexplicable violence. You have a lot of planets in retrograde.

H’lane is doing her embroidery while we color, and Ki chews on a pencil and then on a rice cake I give her. The embroidery is always beautiful at first, rivers of green and purple and blue and violet silk running into each other ‘round the two fishes swimming opposite. But, and there’s always a but about my mother, she also puts pot leaves and mandalas and what she calls cosmic cats in the design too and this makes it look all hippie. My mom’s wild mane of hair falls over the blanket on her knees and over the brown-green carpet covered in cat fur and crumbs of old food. Her dirty gnarled feet poke out of her Indian print skirts. She looks like a matted, witchy, witch.

What was San Francisco like, do you remember it? Melena asks me. I don’t remember being a baby, doy, but I remember Haud being a baby, bouncing in a swing that hung from the ceiling. We stayed in a storefront where we lived with some other hippies and people called Diggers, and they all had tangled beards and shouted all the time. The noisy rivers of tie-dye people in San Francisco in the Haight. Rooms in the city with high ceilings painted in laughing cherubs, and in the rooms men wearing women’s clothes, and the sound of their voices speaking high and whispery. Was the Diggers a commune? Melena asks. Yeah, and I lived in other communes too, the Hog Farm one, the one in Covelo, the one where Haud was born in Forest Knolls.

So we lived in San Francisco, I continue to Melena. But then we moved because the cities were going to go up in flames. Claude and H’lane said the cities were going to burn in the aftermath of the movement, the Black Panthers fighting with the Diggers, the men fighting the women, people in the streets throwing rocks. America is eating its young. So we moved to some communes in the country and this I remember, snow on the ground and eating from cans. It was near Covelo and it was just called The Land. Us kids ran around naked in the dirt in summer, and I learned my first curse words. We said fuck and I even knew what fucking was and saw people doing it. Scary and gross.

I remember my mother and father were still together and then they weren’t, and my dad left to go to another commune in New Mexico with another lady. I remember this hazy and not in a straight line. Nothing in my life moves in straight lines. We would be in California and then we would be in New Mexico, and then my dad had a new old lady and my mom had a new old man. One of them would be there and then gone and then there and then gone again, and then the other one would do the same. Claude’s new old lady was named Mal and that’s how I have a brother in New Mexico named Random, and H’lane’s new old man was named Bruce and that’s how I have Ki. Random lives with his mom and I’m not sure where our dad is, New Mexico too, I think. Ki lives here with us and we don’t know where her dad is. Matt and Melena and Andrew and Jude, they don’t know for sure where their dads are, although Matt and Melena’s dad might be in Peru, Machu Picchu. Because Matt and Melena and Jude have one dad and Andrew has a different dad. How come there’s so many of us kids with our parents spread all over the place having different kids everywhere they go? I ask H’lane. H’lane says, Free love, man. Be fruitful and multiply across this earth. I haven’t seen my dad for a few years.

H’lane says, Clanie, make us a pot of rice and go see if Haud is around. I sigh heavily and put down my pencil and roll my eyes at Melena, who rolls hers back. She follows me to the kitchen, which like the rest of our house is small and dark and a little damp, being right on the river. I measure two cups of brown rice and four cups of water into the enamel rice pot that I have to wash first because it’s been sitting in the sink with the other dishes. Melena doesn’t say anything about the dishes or the crumbs or the cat fur or your mom’s a slob, and I feel hopeful about making friends with her and that is a new one.

We run outside banging the screen door and yelling for Haud, who comes half-running half-stumbling down the hillside near the house, his clothes and hair covered in pine needles. I was eating poison oak, Haud says triumphantly. If you eat the littlest red leaves you build up immunity to poison oak and you won’t itch. Won’t the inside of your mouth get it? Melena asks skeptically. Haud shakes his head vigorously like a dog throwing water off its coat. I say, Let’s go see if we can play Jeffrey and Patrick’s records. The three of us walk around the corner of the house to the little cabin where Jeffrey and Patrick live and bang on the door. They’re not home so we sneak in. Haud pulls a chair over to the counter in the kitchenette and stands on it to reach a bag of sugar in the cupboard and we take turns pouring white sugar into each other’s mouths. H’lane won’t have any sugar in the house and she keeps the honey jar hidden in her room so we won’t sneak it but we do anyway. We play records, jumping around wild being different Beatles. I get to be Paul. Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease, the Beatles sing, come together.

Jeffrey and Patrick come into