The trip was fabulous.
Except for the one day that I knew – going into it – would be beyond awful (and
was) and the flight back. But that turned out to have a silver lining.
Also read
A God in Ruins cover to cover and found out Don Carpenter is having a semi-renaissance of sorts – discovered a triptych of his Hollywood novels on a bookshelf at City Lights. Not my favorite Carpenter novels, but I can admire the craft.
Most interesting thing about memorials is the gap between the public speeches and the private disclosures. Thus I found out that I was not the only person whom Rik had insulted in those last three years. Apparently, he humiliated Alicia every chance he got – “You’re just mediocrity personified, aren’t you?” he asked at one point – and accused Tom of being a child molester.
Nonetheless, I gave an appropriately gushing speech to the 150 or so celebrants gathered at the ever-so-posh St. Francis Yacht Club with its stunning views of Marin, Alcatraz Island, and the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Rik taught me the true meaning of love,” I said.
In a very real sense, this is absolutely true.
I described how after my mother’s final mental breakdown in NYC, Rik took me in. Annie was there too, of course, but Annie would have had no qualms about letting me go into the foster care system. No, it was Rik who saved me. And it couldn’t have been easy. At the time, Rik and Annie were both graduate students. They had a six-month-old baby (Alicia) and were the only white folk living in a housing project on 125th Street and Broadway called Grant Houses, a hotbed of drug-dealing, gang violence, and various other sordid activities you can find out for yourself by watching
The Wire. Throughout his life, Rik maintained that the residents of Grant Houses were the nicest people he’d ever met in his life – which, of course, was total bullshit. Some wonderful people lived there, I’m sure, but some horrible people lived there as well. White-washing is another form of racism.
Rik’s form of
love – a very unfamiliar version to me – was to spread the mantle of his protection over me to the extent that he was capable of doing so. That remained Rik’s expression of love throughout his life. Even before his dementia, he was often very caustic in actual conversation.
I was the last person scheduled to speak. Afterwards, the microphone got passed around. A number of Rik’s former graduate students and colleagues rose, shared recollections. Early in his career, Rik did some pretty brilliant work in cell biology. He was the first scientist to note that a fertilized egg shows shifts in electrical conductivity. He went on to prove that these were associated with changes in calcium channels – which may not mean much to you reading this unless you’re a cell biologist yourself. But which is actually pretty interesting.
As a scientist, Rik was unusual in that his interests tended to jump around a great deal, which the University of California at Berkeley found intensely frustrating in one of its tenured professors because it meant that despite his early promise, he could not be depended upon to do the type of niche mining that wins Nobel Prizes.
The last person to do the open mike thing was one of the K________ brothers. “You know, I have to mention the fact that despite his brilliance, generosity, etcetera, etcetera, Rik could be something of a – well –
dissembler is the polite word, I guess,” this K________ brother said. “For instance. He was constantly telling me stories about being a kind of
consiglieri for groups of people who were trying to protect themselves from the police. How he advised them. Gave them counsel –“
From the audience, I laughed and said, “Oh, that was almost certainly grounded in his Grant Houses experience. There was a
huge police presence at Grant Houses. For good reasons, as I recall. But I remember Rik did organize community meetings there. So in a way, he was telling the truth. And in another way, he was bullshitting.”
Once the microphone was turned off, the K________ brother made a beeline to me.
Here’s what I knew about the K________ brothers.
Hazel, their grandmother, had two children – a son (Rik) whom she adored; a daughter (Karen) whom she was more-or-less indifferent toward.
There was also a husband (Jacinto, called “Jay”) who was a very big muckety-muck during World War II in the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA.
When Karen was very young, she ran away to get married.
Her family lived in Chevy Chase, and she married in a town somewhere on Chesapeake Bay. Did Karen and her new husband consummate the marriage? Had they been fucking like little bunnies before the marriage? Knowing Karen as an elderly woman, I find this scenario unlikely, but of course, old people are constantly surprising you by how unlike their younger selves many of them become.
The very night of the wedding, Karen’s new husband decided to take his boat out on Chesapeake Bay.
And he drowned.
Karen disappeared.
For days? For weeks?
All I know is that the S_________ didn’t know where to begin looking for her, but of course, it was Rik who eventually found her.
After a while, Karen got married again. And had three sons: Steven, Kevin, and Trevor.
“You’re the writer?” asked the K________ brother.
“I am,” I said.
“I’ve heard about you from time to time.”
“Likewise,” I said.
“Do you know the story of Jay during World War II?”
“I don’t,” I said.
He nodded. “Jay invented the field of operational research.”
“But wasn’t he trained as a chemist?”
“He was. He was a smart man. Had a steely mind for details. And it occurred to him that by
knowing how much fuel a German submarine had to use, how many men were on board, and how much they would have to eat, and projecting that on to a grid, one could more or less predict where the German submarines would be and send one’s own forces out to destroy them. And Jay’s theories and predictions became the basis for a successful search and destroy operation.
“But that was the problem: It was
too successful. Jay did the math and realized that his theory could only account for the destruction of submarines at a 65% success rate but that the submarines were actually being destroyed with a 90% success rate. Something else was going on; something that Jay wasn’t being told about.”
“Alan Turing!” I said. Because, of course, I’d seen the movie. “Enigma!”
He nodded. “
Exactly. And, you know, Jay was being given lots and lots of publicity for his successful submarine strategy. Mom, Rik, and Hazel got round-the-clock Secret Service protection. They were the public face so that no one would suspect that Enigma was happening. And when Jay found out, he got
furious and threatened to reveal
everything.”
“Wow,” I said. “So Jay was Alan Turing’s beard!”
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Interesting? It’s a John LeCarre novel!”
“Isn’t it though?”
"Katherine told me she finally found Jay's Congressional Medal of Freedom when she was cleaning out the Spruce Street house. I think it was shoved inside a copy of
Trout Fishing in America."
We beamed at each other. On impulse, I held up the memorial program and blotted out the lower part of his face. “Pretty amazing,” I said. “You have Rik’s eyes.
Exactly Rik’s eyes. Really, really
blue. Really, really luminous. Hazel’s eyes.”
He smiled at me.
Steven, I thought.
He’s Steven.###
I can’t think of the last time I’ve been that attracted to someone. He just has this interesting craggy face and those
eyes and a vulnerable mouth and this amazing body. Reddish hair.
What are we waiting for? I thought.
Let’s leave for those Lydian caves on the Turquoise Coast right now.We circled around each other throughout the rest of the memorial trying to fall back into deep conversation but being thwarted by various family members and familial obligations. We’re not related by blood, but he was Rik’s nephew, and I was Rik’s niece, and we’re both Alicia’s cousins. Pretty wild.
I racked my brains trying to remember what I knew about Steven, but could only come up with one factoid: In 1977, he scandalized the entire family by lying about his age and joining the army. He was 17. The family consisted of hippies, academics, and pacifists, so that was the
worst thing the family could possibly imagine anyone doing – even worse that when his younger brother, the securities analyst, got indicted for insider trading 15 years later. And I think the younger brother may even have ended up visiting the Big House for a couple of months.
I’m pretty sure Steven served in the first Gulf War, too.
We sat next to each other at the family brunch the next day, too, but again it was too crazy and people-filled for much interaction. But I know he was tracking me. Katherine and I were having a fairly intense conversation across the table and I began one of my impassioned rants about the True Nature of
LOVE, and he touched my shoulder lightly and said, “Spoken like a true writer.”
And he was very forthcoming with the tidbits I made a point of extracting from him at ten minute intervals: Not married. Came close twice. No children. Has been very
involved with children because the last woman he lived with had children –
“So why did you break up?” I asked.
“She never could seem to understand that I wasn’t her former husband,” he said drily. “That she didn’t need to react to
me the way she’d reacted to
him. And that gets old. That was in 2012.”
Lives in metro D.C. Works in the government. Fifty-one years old. Doesn’t look it, but is clearly affected by the
Is That All There Is? syndrome.
We exchanged contact info.
Truthfully, I have no idea if he was attracted to me or not. I am older than he is – and I’d have to say there’s really a
huge difference physically between someone in their fifties and someone in their sixties. Physical decline really starts to accelerate in that seventh decade.
But clearly, he
liked me. There’s a basis for friendship.
And for me, it was just really exciting to find out that I could actually be attracted to someone in that way. I honestly thought I’d never feel that way again.
###
Many, many more True Trip Tales to tell, but for now I want to go out and take advantage of this fabulously gorgeous day and then I need to crank up the Revenue Producing Machine.
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