Girl in a Band Read Online Free Page A

figured out that one of his short-term jobs was selling pencils. Turns out only ex-cons got those gigs.
    At some point my grandmother and her children ended up making a permanent home in Kansas. This is where my parents met in their early twenties, in a little city called Emporia, where both of them were in college.
    My father, Wayne, was a native Kansan, from a big farming family, with four brothers and one sister. He was fragile as a boy, with a middle ear disorder that kept him from enlisting in the military or getting drafted. He was the first child in his family to attend college, his dream being to teach someday at the university level. To help pay his tuition, he taught elementary school in a one-room Emporia schoolhouse, first grade to sixth grade, everything from shapes and colors to spelling, history, and algebra.
    My parents were married during college, and after graduating from Washington University in Saint Louis, where Keller was born, it was on to Upstate New York and Rochester, where my dad began writinghis Ph.D. Three years later, I came along. The story of how my parents met came out only during cocktail hours, the details always sketchy. My dad was scatterbrained, my mother liked to say, adding that his habit of making popcorn in her house without putting the lid on when they were courting almost made her rethink the idea of marrying him. She always said it with a laugh, though the point she was trying to make, maybe, was that my dad wasn’t as down-to-earth and responsible as he appeared.
    The names in our family—Keller, Eno, Coplan, Estella, Lola—always make me wonder whether there’s some Mediterranean in the mix. There is also the de Forrest side from my mom’s mother, who was French and German, but there’s an Italian strain, too, flashing eyes and Groucho brows mixed in with all the Kansan flatness. Kansas is where my mother’s ninety-two-year-old sister—the source of everything I know about my family history—still lives in a farmhouse at the end of a long dirt road. She’s a woman who during her life I never heard utter even one self-pitying word. Her stories are pretty much the only ones I know. My parents told me next to nothing.

2

    ONCE WHEN SONIC YOUTH was on tour in Lawrence, Kansas, opening for R.E.M., Thurston and I paid a visit to William Burroughs. Michael Stipe came along with us. Burroughs lived in a little house with a garage, and the coffee table in his living room was crisscrossed with fantasy knives and daggers—elegant, bejeweled weapons of destruction. That day, all I could think of was how much Burroughs reminded me of my dad. They shared the same folksiness, the same dry sense of humor. They even looked a little alike. Coco, our daughter, was a baby, and at one point when she started crying, Burroughs said,in that Burroughs voice, “ Oohhh —she likes me.” My guess is he wasn’t somebody who spent much time around kids.
    My dad’s academic specialty was sociology in education. In Rochester, he’d done his Ph.D. on the social system in American high schools. He was the first person ever to put a name to various school-age groups and archetypes—preps, jocks, geeks, freaks, theater types, and so on—and then UCLA had hired him to create an academic curriculum based on his research.
    One of the conditions for my dad taking the UCLA job was that Keller and I were able to attend the UCLA Lab School. That school was an amazing place. The campus was designed by the modernist architect Richard Neutra, with a large, beautiful gully running through it. One side was grass and the other concrete—for hopscotching or Hula-Hooping or whatever. The gully flowed up into an untamed area where a covered wagon and an adobe house sat beneath some trees. As students, we fringed shawls, pounded tortillas, and skinned cowhides out among those trees. Our teacher drove us down to Dana Point, in Orange County, where we