A Little Trouble with the Facts Read Online Free

after agitprop, my mom, and me, was movies, the old black-and-whites. His own dad had taken him to the flicks once a week when he was a boy. It was the one aspect of his childhood in “the old country” (i.e., the East Coast) that he wanted to pass along to the next generation. And secretly, I thought he also liked to get a glimpse of the glamour he’d left behind, as directed by George Cukor, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawkes: His Girl Friday, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Sabrina, Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, Week-end at the Waldorf . On the way home to our squat, we’d play the characters in the movies. He’d be Walter Burns and I’d be Hildy Johnson. I’d be Sabrina and he’d be Linus Larrabbee. He was Nick to my Nora.
    Sure, he had a handlebar soup strainer and a Nehru-collared paisley shirt. But I always figured my dad for a classic screen idol. With his aristocratic roots, his broad-cut chin, and his Roman nose, he could easily land a big-bucks blockbuster. I’d be right there beside him, a curly-haired Shirley Temple costar. We’d leave this ragtag troupe behind and take our act to Tinsel Town. From Castro Street to Mission, we planned plots set on city streetscapes, drawn from his high-contrast past: debutantes’ lily-white hands ringed thick with diamonds, streeturchins turned men of industry, old ladies coughing blood into their hankies and signing their mansions off to their cats.
    Back at the squat, though, we went silent. My mother, who was otherwise too slack, was strict about one thing: the East was the past, and we didn’t mention it. Maybe she didn’t want to miss everything so much, because she’d left so much behind. But my father wasn’t so stony. He saw that my eyes glittered with the lure of New York celluloid and he fed my fervor. At night, when I was tucked under my homemade quilt, he dragged in his old steamer trunk and plucked out pictures. His top-hatted pop at the “21” Club; his mother in a Garbo-style gown at the Russian Tea Room; even a picture of Mom chasing pigeons near Central Park’s Belvedere Fountain. One night, he brought me an old volume of Vanity Fair, and I read it cover to cover. Then I read it again, and again, and again, like a girl on a fantasy merry-go-round, all bells and lights and whistles and no brass ring.
     
    San Fran was swell but we couldn’t stay. My mother gave me the news at age ten: “Back to the land” meant swapping our flush toilet for a creaky outhouse, city sanitation for a compost heap. My mother’s cheery tone didn’t hide the truth from me: we were the worst pack of downwardly mobile, good-for-nothing hippies that ever passed the hat.
    So one morning, we packed our props into the camper van and pointed our compass north. My dad strapped on an old duffel and climbed onto his Harley Road King. He was going to take the scenic route along Pacific Coast Highway and meet us there by midnight. Mom and I got into the van and watched the cityscape morph into evergreens and we arrived at our damp new cabin on the Eugene farm just in time for sundown.
    The wind whistled balefully through the plywood wallboards and midnight came and went. It was the longest night that I ever knew, waiting wide-awake for the rumble of his motor upthe dirt road. I counted the slats in the ceiling, reread my Vanity Fair, and counted the slats again, so I wasn’t awakened when I heard my mother’s endless wail. Somewhere along the Lost Coast, Dad had stopped for gas. When he turned back onto the road, an oncoming trucker didn’t make out his bike’s night beam and he was killed in a white-hot flash.
    What words can I assign to that loss? I never had them. I don’t know if I ever will. But I knew how I felt about Eugene. It had been a trip in the wrong direction. We didn’t belong back on the land. We didn’t need to be deeper into the dirt. I decided that first day that the farm, the West, the hippie life, wasn’t ever going to be the way for me. I never got good