California: From Rags to Dryer Sheets - or Gauze Pads?
We had made our way clear across the country in that nearly compact car. Inside, it was just us two, an aquarium full of fish, blocks of wood to level a trailer, a cooler full of thoroughly warmed drinks and tasteless snacks, a 50-pound bag of cheap dog food, and our five noisy, smelly, shedding, admittedly fully undisciplined dogs. Oh, and there was a small bag packed, too, which stole all the leg room out from underneath my feet and that contained everything (toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, face cloths, and a few clean pairs of underwear) that we needed for quick hygiene checks at thoseuncomfortably busy, dirty truck- or rest stops along the way.
How did all that stuff fit in that little ten-year-old car, I wonder? Anyway, now, it comes as no surprise that this sad, somewhat abused piece of machinery needs new struts and a rack...
At the back of the car were not a few flimsy possessions, dragged in a rickety, old U-haul trailer that we had rented for the duration of the trip. The weight of this trailer caused the tail of the car to dip so far that we continually brushed the muffler dangerously in pot holes and on sidewalks, as we were leaving the countless gas stations and fast-food restaurants at which we stopped during the trip. Many of the sidewalks and entrances and exits to these places in the south were flood-proofed, as we later deduced, and that's why their inclines were so steep. The possessions in the U-Haul, at any rate, included clothes, toiletries, computers and their accessories, pots and pans, some dishes and silverware, 800 pounds of Mom's books, and a well-worn, upright, black-lacquered piano, one that someone had told us, once, had had a soul and needed to be with us always.
As Mom saw it, though, we took only what we needed for a fresh start...
Ahem.
That poor car! It pulled over 3,000 pounds worth of our junk, us, the fish and the dogs, and it managed to hold up pretty well through all we put it through even through that last, tough, mountainous terrain heading directly into California on the I-10, and even through that horrible snowstorm that strandedus on the way back but that's another story, entirely...
For the trip there, at any rate, it's a good thing we had sent the two horses ahead of us!
We didn't have any money to waste on hotels or any of the other, commonly sought-after creature comforts of today's middle class, as Mom puts it, so when she got tired, we'd just pull over to the side of the road to "catch a few Z'sss," or to sleep for a short while sitting up in our cramped quarters, and always parking under a street light at a busy gas station or rest stop, of course. If it was too cold for our ease, we'd cover ourselves with the hairy blankets found under the dogs in the back. Easy!
Now, Mom thinks back in horror on these times, speculating on all the things that could have happened to us then. I'm sure she'd kill me if she ever heard I was planning to try anything of the sort, myself; but, you know what? I think back on these times, myself, as some of the best of my life. They were exciting and full of hope, thrill, and expectation - of things to come, of new discoveries: places to see, people to meet...perhaps money to be made...
We chose a "furnished" house, to begin our adventures in California, up in the green and curvy, sometimes steep (and cold!) hills of Coursegold. It seemed as good a place as any other it was about mid-way between San Francisco and Los Angeles, where I really wanted to be, and the rents were relatively cheap there. It was all good, for a start, and
for the budding, young and rich actress I was surely then destined to become.
The house was cute, albeit a bit old fashioned. It was obviously built in the late sixties or early seventies, and its style reminded us of a ski lodge or cabin up in the Northeast. Mom said that the house had the air of a ski lodge her family once rented in New Hampshire, way, way back when she was a little girl, younger than me. On that fated New Hampshire trip, she recounted to me, Grandpa had managed to smash his knee up pretty badly in an unfortunate skiing accident or "mishap," as she called it. It took Grandpa several codeines, so Mom says, to help him cope with
the pain in the first few days, following the accident...
Only time would tell if Mom's reawakened memory of that New Hampshire ski lodge was a really bad omen...
[Mom would enter "sounds of thunder clapping" here. Well, she did study literature and drama, after all, the silly girl...]
The carpet in the Coarsegold living room was flattened from wear, and the furniture was overstuffed, ripped, and taped, and of gaudy, aqua- and blue colors. The T.V. was one of those old, humongous consoles with the speakers built right in. Mom said it looked like one her family had had, when she was a kid. It never worked right, and cable T.V. was not in the picture, so to speak, as receiving such a service was so expensive up there, in the hills of Coarsegold.
No working T.V., but a huge piece of useless "furniture" in the living room. Hmm. I was beginning to think we had traveled back in time! Maybe we were playing roles in the new "Back to the Future" movie or something, and we had wound up in the mist-imbued sixties or seventies, the "cloudy" time through which my mother supposedly grew up...
Further enhancing the idea of the time warp we were in was our "connection" to our two computers and laptop. They seemed now, like the T.V., nearly useless, as well. You see: the Internet connection in Coarsegold hardly worked, and it was always days until things were fixed. This was because we were high up on the crest of a hill that was one of the tallest in the area. Black- and hanging ice constantly knocked the traffic and the power out entirely, which amounted to keeping the repair crews from coming up the hill successfully. Either the crews couldn't get the trucks up on the ice, or the trucks were blocked anyway from downed power lines and poles. We were never sure what caused the blackout or the wait at various times; such occurred several times in the three or four months we lived up there.
The worst part about all this, though, was that Mom worked Online at the time. The situation was not exactly conducive to a well-greased working relationship, as Mom's attendance in the On-line classroom, no matter how valiantly she worked at keeping it up, could not be the best, under the circumstances. Our minds were on our survival, though, so we always did the best that we could with what we had.
Another thing that didn't work in the Coarsegold house and this is somewhat amusing - was the toilets. They were constantly overflowing. The landlord, Jim, would send this hippy, I'm-sure-unlicensed, "character" of a guy by the name of "Herb" to us, who smelled of some kind of weeds and cigarettes, and who had a back-woodsy kind of accent - the kind you hear from people portrayed as toothless country bumpkins in the movies. He was funny, but when he would plunge the toilet, he would spray the kuck mess all over the walls and floor, and proceed to walk in it without thinking, and without wiping his farming or muck boots before walking back out again on the carpet that extended throughout the whole length and breadth of the house. He did this a couple of times until we finally had had almost enough of good, old, homegrown Herb.
Eww! I had had a real phobia where germs were concerned, then; Mom said I had gotten that from her, so back then, I hadn't thought much about how obsessive that phobia might have seemed to others...
Herb's unsanitary habits, though, did cause us to wonder more rationally about the myriad of people, whose poop had most probably already been fully smeared - or ground into - that old, worn carpet - and these habits, too, did bring us to question the way Herb smelled. It was like there was an "aura" around him that both looked and stank like an odd mixture of smoke, incense, weeds, and fertilizer of some sort.
"Were we living in an even more rural, backward area than that in Central New York, from whence we came?!," I thought often, back then.
Since the Coarsegold house, with all its dcor and amusing cast of characters, created the illusion for us that we were living in the sixties or seventies, at any rate, while we're on the subject of "Herb," I feel I must mention what Mom called him. She had two pet names for him. She called him a "psychedelic herb," and sometimes referred to him as "Abbie H." She told me a little bit about what all this meant, and gave me a well-rounded history lesson at the same time. All-in-all, she related to me a little bit about the seamier, more experimental side of the sixties and seventies.
I guess some drugs were popular back then, as some other, extremely dangerous ones are now, but Mom says that she was saved from ruin by her more authoritarian father (thank goodness!), who still had what she called a bit of a "hangover" from the more repressive fifties. One wouldn't want to mess with his rules. History lesson number too, but that's irrelevant, at the moment.
You know, thinking about it, I don't know why anyone needs any drug at all to find life entertaining, amusing, and even relaxing. Life and its outrageous cast of characters certainly is entertaining enough; observing all this is akin to watching an unedited movie, which is even funnier than the best comedy out there today! It's a relaxing form of entertainment, just to sit back and watch people; it's even funnier to watch, as if from the outside, one's own reactions to situations and people. The form of entertainment that comes from seeing all of us from the outside, coupled with one ounce of compassion and humor in the spectator, could brighten up every minute of each day for all of us. We should just look and observe what people are doing and not doing... and how they are doing or not doing the same. More importantly, we should remember how we never really did any of it better, ourselves...
To a certain extent, witnessed without the editing tools of modern filmmaking and technology after all, aren't we are all like crazy cartoons or flattened comic shadows of our more "scripted" selves? Things never work out as planned in anyone's life, and the best-laid plans, anyway, in their rigidity, cause us to miss out on the absolute comedy, the arbitrariness and absurdity of situations and characters that give life its fullness, its roundness, its three-dimensionality. Letting it all just wash over us and move us with tides of its own pace is much more entertaining than planning everything beforehand, or trying to explain it afterwards, down to the most miniscule detail...
So what?: the Coarsegold trip, as some others for us, turned out to be a total fiasco, full of as much chaos as a human being's week-long stay at the local zoo. It was fun, though, and boy, was it ever entertaining!
One time, when the septic system at the Coarsegold house obviously didn't work at all, the hippy dude "Herb" and again, the irony of that name isn't lost on me - came up with his entourage of men to clean things up outside. They said they found something like paper towels all stuffed into the system, and they asked from whence these came. Since we had only been in the house for three weeks at this point, I do wonder, myself, what the answer to that question really was. What was the origin of those - what we all thought were paper towels - then...?
We'd figure that out later, I had guessed, after the mess was cleaned up. For now, I noticed that, printed very clearly on the side of the truck into which the men pumped the filth from the septic system was a sign that stated: "Water Only." I told Mom about this. The sign must have meant that this was not a septic-system truck at all, at least not a fully legal, licensed one. I thought: this could mean that traces of what was in the septic tank, that we and many others dumped our human waste into, would probably wind up in somebody's pool - or worse, in their camper's drinking water, later...
What a thought...!
The landlord, Jim, lived in Hawaii with his father, Ernie (the names remind my Mom of "Sesame Street" characters). The former telephoned, to accuse us of the horrible deed of stuffing the toilets with paper towels. When Mom told him that neither she nor her daughter, meaning me, would ever dream of flushing paper towels down the toilet, he proceeded to tell her that it would be impossible for her to know what her fourteen-year-old daughter, meaning me, would be doing every minute or what she, the daughter, might be flushing down a toilet on any given day.
What a nerve! No, actually: what a silly man, and what an absurd, waste-of-space-in-the-brain thought to have! I couldn't smell Jim's aura from so far away, but I was thoroughly convinced that he and "Herbie" [enter, Disney!] must have socialized quite a lot together in the past...I was also sure that had I, in fact, ever flushed even one paper towel down a toilet, I would never bother to waste my time covering up this ostensibly huge and deep, dark secret from my mom ...What would be the point, really?
Incidentally, I HAVE never flushed anything but toilet paper down any toilet, the ones in Coarsegold and the ones anywhere else, included - just in case you are wondering. Remember that I can't abide germs or any other kind of filth, for that matter.
Watching the supposed "clean-up" of the septic system in the back yard was all pretty disgusting, at any rate, but I haven't gotten to the worst parts yet. The place was absolutely infested with mice, to the point that these critters even moved into our poor car and left evidence of their having ripped all the foam inside the hood - and countless packages of Kleenex from inside the car - to shreds. Mom would find the creatures, dead inside the hood, and, just for fun, she'd leave them there until she had the opportunity to scare little kids with their corpses at gas stations. We had to go often to the gas stations, as we lived so far away from town and we'd have to fill the gas tank more often than not, and, as we'd have to check the oil-, power-steering-, and transmission-fluid levels, as well. Again, the rack was leaking, and the situation was getting worse, all the time. Mom wished we could have afforded to buy a new car, way back then; but we couldn't have. In fact, we're still driving the same, leaky car, to this day...
To get back to the story at hand, though: the kids in other cars at the gas stations in California would, in their turn, find my mother's antics with the mice to be a total "hoot," as she calls it. They'd scream and cover their eyes at first, just like they do at Halloween spook houses, and then, they would beg for more of her creepy dangling of mice corpses before their eyes.
Mom would, of course, always seek at least skeptical approval from the kids' parents. She'd make sure that whole families (how embarrassing, for me!) laughed as they saw her take out these limp, deceased and stinking creatures from under the hood, and then, she'd dangle them like pendulums from the tail, back and forth, back and forth, in other car windows, while wearing the creepiest grin you have ever seen. She looked like a gruesomely comic witch to me, then, to tell the truth, though I never told her that. During whole scenes like this one, I'd crouch down in my seat to hide from the inquisitive glare of people; but, truthfully, I couldn't resist secretly spying and laughing with uncomfortable glee like the younger kids, when she'd do this...The whole situation was so bizarre that it was uproaringly funny. That's my mom, in a nutshell. Mom's reaction to rodents: a recurring theme in the insane story of our lives together.
Weird. I wonder what this means. Is it good or bad? I haven't decided yet. One thing I was sure of then, though: at least I was getting used to this, this weirdness, in my life with Mom and I wasn't exactly sure I hated it, though I protested outwardly all the way, of course.
Back at home, Mom moved all the pots and pans we hadn't owned ourselves into the garage because she couldn't be sure what was on them - perhaps footprints from scrawny little mice feet or smeared-in poop, though there was no carpet here, in these old pans. We cooked on the couple of our own, old, dented pans we had brought in the U-Haul, and on aluminum foil, sometimes... At least we could eat, but we were never really sure how much of our food was touched by mice feet, and how much of it, in its cooked form, was affected by the occasional mouse droppings that definitely did appear in the silverware drawers.
I got skinny on this trip, by the way, but maybe I can just attribute that to the lanky, awkward teenage phase that every girl goes through at some stage in her life.
Worse still, though, and perhaps worst of all, was that we gradually began to notice that there was BLOOD all over the furniture. Eww; my germ phobia went to town on this particular drawback to the Coarsegold house. I gradually couldn't even sleep in that house for fear of which germs lurked beneath the covers or on the very bed, upon which I would try
to slumber...
Now I know that one time, when the then-surrogate Grandpa, the father of the landlord, in other words, came to visit, he went to the freezer for something, and proceeded to cut himself on paper and to bleed, all over the refrigerator handle and the floor.
We had wanted so badly to continue believing that all the blood on the furniture, floor, and carpeting that we kept discovering came just from a nice, old man who had hemophilia or something of the sort. Many other things that kept happening in that house on the hill, however, gradually led us to believe that there were many more, deep, dark secrets kept in that house by others and that they were of more import (or portent) than simply flushed paper towels, found in the septic tank and sucked up by "Water -Only" trucks...
A neighborhood security guard told us, one day, about the reason we kept finding glass shards outside. A man who had lived in the house threw another person through the front window. Apparently, he was always caught doing something wrong; there was always yelling and beating up at the house to be noted by others. That doesn't yet explain the thousands of nails we found around the driveway - that curiously reminded us of horror films, as we thought
that such could be used to make a car undriveable, and there were all those nights without electricity, after all. How spooky this all was...Anyway, back to the man who had thrown someone out of the picture window in the front of the house...Perhaps he was the one who had flushed paper towels - or perhaps gauze pads - down the toilet in order that he couldcover up a possible murder...
Did he kill someone? Is that why there were drippings of blood to be found all over the furniture? We started imagining all sorts of terrible things - and then we would think that we must just be nuts; but, increasingly, with time, we thought that these imagininings we were having seemed increasingly,even infinitely possible...
For our own safety of many sorts, we decided to move again.
Who would rent a house out, though, with so many problems disgusting traces of horrid things past? Who would, in the age of Aids and hepatitis C, rent a furnished house out - equipped with blood all over the furniture? With all we have seen of rental houses so far, nothing compared to this...My mother has since asked: what has happened to trust, to the contract, or even to human relationships in America today...? Is this freedom or chaos?
More importantly, what has happened to the feeling of home, or to the idea of a person's home being his castle...? Isn't that the way it should be in the land of freedom, the land of opportunity, and the land of privacy and privacy rights? What, though, with all the broken families, the day-to-day violence we hear about on a daily basis, the destruction of property, the legally and illegally installed cameras everywhere, the bogus lawsuits, the...well, never mind. The betterstuff, sadly, just doesn't seem possible anymore. For now, at any rate, I hope the reader is left with a colorful impression of how we lived our three months there, up in the chilly (and chilling) hills of Coarsegold, California...Happy travels, folks!