Excerpted from A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia
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The rift between my mother and I intensified as the accusations escalated. On an almost weekly basis, I was accused of being a tart, of being on an official police list of prostitutes, of desiring my father sexually. This wasn’t entirely new. From the time I was eight or nine, my mother would often say alarming things to me apropos of nothing.
In Southern California, I was finally able to get some breathing room. I imagine that the person who suffered most at this juncture was my brother. Alone in New Jersey, John had no choice but to keep my mother going, despite the worsening of her condition and her increasing symptoms. Less capable of doing things for herself, she knew my departure was a condemnation of some sort, an indication that something was indisputably wrong. She took my defection badly, and as punishment, tossed my small library of paperback books— literary classics, agit-prop, and supermarket pulps: Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, V.C. Andrews, Stephen King, Asimov, Leon Uris, Ayn Rand, Herman Wouk—from my bedroom bookcase into the trash.
While my father spent his time at CalTech completing the designs for the Mauna Kea submillimeter radio telescope, I attended Blair High School, one of California’s fabled, troubled institutions. Its open-air-plan, abutting the Arroyo Seco Parkway—considered the country’s first freeway, and a close neighbor of a hulking power plant—suffered from the lack of oversight and rampant neglect associated with white flight from the public school system that came along with mandatory busing and desegregation in the 1970s.
School seemed less and less important. I ditched class with friends whenever I could, cruising in my best friend’s 1970s red Mustang along the Linda Vista neighborhood’s wide avenues lined with orange trees, lounging about in houses that were mid-century modern, or Spanish-style adobe, bingeing on fast food or beer. When it rained, we would drive into the foothills of Altadena for the snow-topped San Gabriel Mountains on a seventy-five-degree day in January to haul back the frozen rewards of nature, in order to peg the hot waspy guys with snowballs. I always marveled at these entitled, polo shirt-wearing surfers. What had they done to deprive themselves of the elite private school education almost all middle-class aspirants opted for? What infractions might they have committed? Perhaps their parents had simply chosen expensive cars over children’s educations, as one friend would report.
Meanwhile, my mother’s condition continued to deteriorate, to the point that she could no longer determine her child’s identity. Suffering from Capgras syndrome, a delusionary psychological state, she would call to tell me she thought my brother was an imposter: I don’t think John is John anymore, she would confide in a worn, tired voice. He has hair on his legs. Or she would surprise me by announcing how she saw me on television that day. Was that you on Channel Seven? she would ask.
It soon became apparent to my father that he needed to help my brother move out to California. No sooner did he begin to help my brother, then my mother decided that she was ready to move to California, too. This came as a surprise. No one expected her to give up her law practice, ever. But she might have sensed that without my brother’s close presence, she would not be able to cope. The work had clearly become too much for her, the untreated illness an insurmountable burden. She might have also sensed that she was on the brink of an annihilating abandonment. Without her family to confide in about her delusions and hallucinations, how would she survive? Her family was her anchor, if nothing else. It was not clear to me why no one tried to get her help.
Years later, my father would confide in me that it was too difficult to have anyone committed then against his or her will, particularly a capable lawyer. Without her consent, treatment would have been impossible.
24 Divisidero
My father finalized his divorce from my mother the year that I left for college. I rented a room in a third floor Victorian flat on Pine Street, two blocks from Divisidero Street in the Western Addition, a primarily African American neighborhood then, one now experiencing gentrification with the development of high rises. At seventeen years old, I was the youngest member of my household comprised of S.F.S.U. students, aged twenty-five to thirty-two. I reveled in my mature off-campus city lifestyle, away from the fogbound dorms. My rent, a mere $135 a month, was less than half of what it would cost to share an absurdly small room on campus with a same-aged student. And, as the younger “sibling” of my adult roommates, I was taken to parties, art shows in South-of-Market warehouses, and night clubs.
Mass transit made the commute to school easy; I traveled through the Western Addition on the 24 Divisidero bus for Market Street and Castro, where shiny metal escalators descended underground into the Castro Street Muni station, allowing me to complete the second leg of my journey on the M train. In the late afternoons, as the fog rolled over Twin Peaks and I waited to board the bus for home, I would observe leather-clad men descending upon the local bars and restaurants under the cover of rainbow-colored flags, an exciting, transformative scene.
1982-1989
I remained in loose contact with my family, distancing myself as best I could from our saga. I don’t remember exactly how or when my brother came to live with my father. What I do remember is that my father had finally taken my mother to court to fight for custody of my brother and had won.
What happened to my mother after my brother moved to Pasadena is mostly a blur. I remember hearing about how she was staying in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles when she was robbed of a family inheritance, thousands of dollars in gold Krugerrands that she carried on her person in a small black purse. I also learned that Mom lived in hotels or short-term rentals in the San Fernando Valley.
Before following John to Los Angeles, she had become rail thin, having pretty much stopped eating. Because of her appearance, he confided in me, she struggled to find someone who would rent her an apartment or even allow her to book a room in a hotel. My brother’s weekly visits with my mother were typically punctuated by her desperate pleas not to be left behind.
When my father would arrive in his white economy Mazda GLC to pick up his son, Mom would wedge herself into the open car door, demanding that he allow her to come home with them. The three would then agonize for some time in the middle of the street before my father could persuade my mother to step out of the way and let him take John, leaving her standing there.
Perhaps this was around the time of “the nudie nightie incident,” as my brother refers to it, when my mother was found wandering in a confused state around her Encino apartment building at night. After this, my brother recognized the need for my mother to get psychiatric help. At sixteen years old, John was too young to get the police involved, so he convinced my father to help him call 911 and have my mother declared a danger to herself and involuntarily committed. She was taken to UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital where she finally received proper treatment for a formerly undiagnosed mental illness.
After her release, with the help of cousins living on the Westside, she found an apartment in Beverly Hills. Continuing to struggle with no sense of place or direction, she routinely flew between Los Angeles, Texas, and New York, landing on her sisters for months at a time until finally, after she had lost her bags in the Dallas Airport, she collapsed. Catatonic, she was again involuntarily committed for several months. Upon release, she then went to live with her parents in Zimbabwe, where she finally stabilized.
“Your mother suffers from manic depression accompanied by the feature of paranoia,” was how my father explained it to me. The diagnosis served in some small way to contextualize the past. “Neurotic” had never done justice to my mother’s symptoms: the bouts of senseless laughter, sleepless nights, paranoid accusations, disturbing hallucinations. However, I would not learn about the full scope of my mother’s illness until I was twenty-four years old.
Miracle Baths
In the second year of college, I was lucky to find a part-time job to supplement my $450 monthly stipend sent to me by my father. Through a friend in my English class, Linda Landels, a returning student at thirty-three years old, I came to work for two Nebraskan transplants, women and romantic partners in their late twenties who had moved to San Francisco at the end of the 1970s to pursue the dream of an alternative lifestyle.
I booked appointments and folded towels at the first spa in the city to garner a reputation for its healing arts, as opposed to those known for sexual activity. A forerunner of the day spa, Miracle Baths was a vibrant place to work. Everyone bestowed great admiration upon the owners, Penny and Kathy. One blonde, the other raven-haired, they dazzled us all with their bohemian, thrift store know-how: the 1950s clutch purses, vintage cars, kitschy outfits, cowboy leather jackets. Endowed with Midwestern DIY decorating skills, shuttling between city and country homes—albeit modest ones—my first real employers, “lipstick lesbians” as they called themselves, struck me as model feminists. Women I dearly sought to emulate.
Unafraid of the rigors of work, for the first five years of their entrepreneurial adventure they toiled around the clock, six- or seven-days a week, twelve hours or more per day. The spa’s rates were affordable, giving credence to the term “community sauna.” Sadly, they did not invest in buying their property and would later lose out to a bigger, brasher gentrifying force, one capable of buying the building and replacing the spa with a store merchandizing unforgettably frivolous items like soap-on-a-rope. Even more dispiriting was the loss of life endured by the community when several of the staff members and close associations passed away—Jerry, Jose, Marshall and Tommy, one after the other—from the scourge of a then-insufficiently researched and cruelly stigmatizing HIV virus and its virulent later stage of untreated symptoms, AIDS.
My mother is a witch
While my mother worked to piece her life back together, I bloomed precariously into young adulthood: traipsing about a picturesque, easily navigable city; studying poetry, philosophy, interdisciplinary arts; frequenting night clubs in the Tenderloin; and falling in love unexpectedly with a budding female poet while my mother continued her battle with an illness for which the treatment was rudimentary at best.
These were difficult, unhappy years during which I resisted my mother’s presence in my life. She was still fairly manic. Her persistent calls, her alarming and indeterminate living situations, threatened the tenuous stability I had carved out for myself. I knew my mother would call me every day, several times, if she could. I knew how depressed I would become.
San Francisco State did not turn out to be the hotbed of social and political activism that it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. While I took women’s studies classes from celebrities like Angela Davis, overall the atmosphere on campus after the election of Ronald Reagan was downbeat, with an ever- increasing crop of students interested in obtaining MBAs. For two years, I successfully dodged my mother. She never did get my phone number in that time. I moved so often then, keeping it from her was not exactly difficult.
In my third year, I remember being seated at my small black desk in the bay window of my Hayes Street apartment at my electric typewriter, reveling in the ecstatic California sunshine. This was my mother’s typewriter I had somehow inherited, the Selectric with the missing “g.”
“My mother is a witch,” I banged out, in the midst of typing out a poem, when the phone rang. Having grown weary of my disappearing act, my brother had given her my phone number.
Hearing my mother’s voice on the line, I knew then that I would always be her daughter. I knew I could no longer run away.