Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (11 page)

Back at home, I found Dad waiting in the front room. He’d returned while Patti and Ken were picking me up. After Ken calmly explained to him what had happened, Dad crouched down and looked me in the eye.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why did you get off the bus?”

I rushed into Dad’s arms. He started to scold and lecture but with my head now buried in the folds of his flannel shirt, I could no longer hear what he was saying. I knew we were going to move again. Pressing my ear against his chest, I breathed in his familiar smell and I didn’t care.

THAT NOVEMBER,
the San Francisco that Dad and I knew ended. Within the span of two weeks, a pair of violent tragedies pierced the heart of the city. On November 18, the Reverend Jim Jones, founder of the People’s Temple and a major political force in local politics, led a mass suicide of his followers in the jungles of Guyana. Over 900 people died, mostly poor black San Franciscans, including 270 children, all poisoned by cyanide-laced grape Kool-Aid. The Jonestown Massacre, as it came to be called, was the largest single-day loss of American life in peacetime until the events of September 11, 2001.

Nine days later, on the morning of November 27, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were gunned down in their offices. At first there was only confusion in City Hall. Reporters suspected that the People’s Temple had dispatched assassins to kill the mayor, just as they had killed California representative Leo Ryan when he flew into Guyana. Then Supervisor Dianne Feinstein appeared, well dressed but ashen faced, and broke the news to a crowd of city workers and reporters: “As president of the Board of Supervisors, it’s my duty to make this announcement: Both Mayor Moscone . . . and Supervisor Harvey Milk . . . have been shot . . . and killed.” The crowd, which included several seasoned war reporters, erupted into gasps and sobs before Feinstein continued, “The suspect is . . . Supervisor Dan White.”

A conservative Irish Catholic, White had been elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977, the year of Anita Bryant’s cries to “save the children,” by campaigning as a “defender of traditional values.” Before the morning of the murders, White was up all night eating cupcakes and drinking Coke, a detail that would be used by his lawyers.

Word of the deaths rippled across San Francisco. City schools announced the news on loudspeakers. At French American, my third-grade class spent the afternoon writing condolence letters to Gina Moscone, the mayor’s widow.

At home, Dad learned the news watching television. He immediately burst into tears. “First Jonestown,” he wrote in his journal. “Now this.”

By early afternoon, crowds had assembled at City Hall. Among the flowers and pictures, someone placed a handmade sign: “Happy, Anita?”

White’s lawyers defended his actions by arguing that his diet of Cokes and Twinkies had pushed him over the edge. The jury, scrubbed of gays and other “new” San Franciscans, was moved by the recording of White’s teary confession, hearing in it the cry of a broken man. Though he’d crawled through the basement window of City Hall, shot George Moscone four times, reloaded his gun, and then crossed the hall and pumped five bullets into Harvey Milk, the last at point-blank range, Dan White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, the lightest possible sentence.

When news of the verdict reached the streets of San Francisco, thousands of protestors descended on City Hall, smashing windows and torching a row of police cars. As a man ignited the last police car, he shouted to a nearby reporter, “Make sure you put in the paper that I ate too many Twinkies!” Police retaliated later that night by taking their billy clubs into the Castro.

Dan White served five years, one month, and nine days in prison. Less than a year after his parole ended, he took his own life, using a garden hose to funnel carbon monoxide into his parked white Buick sedan.

10.

I
FIRST SAW
545 Ashbury at night. The previous tenant was a friend of Dad’s who, coming off a painful breakup with his longtime live-in lover, sold us the apartment’s contents for an even $200. He was eager to move to South America with as little as possible, he told us, and wanted to be rid of the “bad energy.” On the balcony he had kept his dog, a musty Irish wolfhound named Molly who’d chewed the doorknob down to a ragged nub. Molly’s gray fur lined the wall-to-wall carpet of the balcony bedroom.

“This will be your room,” Dad said. “We can replace the doorknob and vacuum the rug. Won’t you like to have a balcony? Like a real princess!” In giving me the only real bedroom in the apartment, Dad was giving me the gift of privacy and space, a gift he himself hungered for but which he knew was important for a growing girl.

We moved into the Victorian apartment in January 1979. In the picture of the Grateful Dead posing with the Haight-Ashbury street sign, ours is the balconied building to the right of the band, the one that looks like it’s wearing a witch’s hat. Photos like this would later turn our corner into a mecca for soul-searchers the world over, crowding the street with beggars and camera-snapping tourists. But as the 1970s were coming to a close, 545 Ashbury was ours alone, a beautiful new beginning.

Our first year in the apartment, Dad worked to make it ours, painting the walls of my bedroom my favorite color, lavender, and building me a pine loft bed for my ninth birthday. Each night, I climbed the rickety ladder, lay down on my cut-foam mattress, and looked through the eye-level windows onto Ashbury Street at the many street dramas unfolding, as if on a stage.

Adjacent to my room and separated by a pair of French doors was the living room, which doubled as Dad’s bedroom and office. He set up a writing desk in the rounded windows facing Ashbury Street, which he separated from the bedroom by hanging a large square of yellowed Irish lace, stretched taut between four sticks of bamboo. He built a makeshift bookshelf against the wall, stacking orange and gray milk crates separated with horizontal plywood boards that gave me splinters whenever I ran my fingers over them. Over the years, he filled these with layers of books: review copies from small poetry presses and rare and dusty paperbacks he picked up poking through his favorite city bookstores.

The double door frame of Dad’s room led directly into the dining room, which was dominated by a twelve-foot-wide spool table. The spool was our dinner table, our meeting table, our drawing table, our
everything
table. I’ve seen similar tables sealed but ours never was, and over the next fifteen years the crumbs from a thousand meals collected in the table’s many cracks and grooves.

A swinging door separated the dining room from the kitchen, which had a bright window over the sink but could fit no more than two people at a time, uncomfortably. The kitchen was painted caramel, with an avocado green refrigerator, a chrome sink, and across from it an ancient oven. The oven had no vent and the walls were streaked with grease, especially where they met the ceiling. But the grime was offset by a large, cheery star someone had cut out of cardboard, spray-painted silver, and hung high over the oven. Seen through the open kitchen door, it seemed to watch over us.

We’d spend close to fifteen years living here, the longest we’d live anywhere.

Because there was so much within walking distance of 545 Ashbury, we stopped driving the car. Dad parked it two blocks from our house on Oak Street and there it remained from the spring of 1979 into the summer of 1980. Because he neglected to update the tags, parking tickets quickly and thickly collected under the wipers. Walking to the Panhandle, I could see them fluttering in the wind, a swarm of white moths, until one day we discovered the car had been towed.

“What a relief,” Dad sighed. “That car was nothing but trouble!”

We never paid to retrieve the bug, nor did we bother to get a new car. Dad would never get around to teaching me how to drive; I wouldn’t learn until after my fortieth birthday. Not that it mattered. More than half a dozen buses and streetcars were within walking distance. For a nickel, I could get anywhere in the city with a transfer that lasted the whole day. Now that I was older, I could navigate public transportation on my own.

Riding the bus to school every day and to my friend Kathy Moe’s on the weekends, I became fluent in the language of Muni. Though technically faster than the 7 Haight and 6 Parnassus, I knew it was never worth taking the 71 Limited home as the after-work crowds inevitably slowed service. I knew that I could board the N Judah in the middle of the car before the Dubose Tunnel then exit the streetcar just after, thereby skipping the fare when in a pinch. I learned how to get to Fisherman’s Wharf from Union Square on the cable car without paying. And if I was waiting for a bus or a trolley from behind a hill, I learned to listen for the sound of the electric current, like the snapping of a giant rubber band, from the cable above or the track below. This sound would announce the bus’s imminent arrival, like an inverse echo. I loved being able to read the Muni lines this way. It felt like eavesdropping on the internal workings of the city’s body.

One afternoon, after getting off the bus from school, I reached into my pocket for my key and it was gone. I searched my backpack but found nothing. I rang our bell but nobody answered. I moved my finger down to the round white button next to #2, and after briefly hovering, pressed hard.

Robert Pruzan lived in a tiny studio across the hall from us. I didn’t know Robert but I knew his garden, which I’d discovered my first afternoon at 545. Exploring the back stairway alone, I followed a dark and narrow basement corridor ending in a latched door. After unlatching the door I entered the most extraordinary oasis filled with rare and exotic blooms: orchids and lilies and jagged bonsai. I loved playing in the garden. Our electric and gas meters became knobs on a time machine. By setting the dials to the prehistoric age I would arrive next to a swamp, where I’d run from screeching pterodactyls and hide beneath the fronds. An avid horticulturalist, Robert tended gardens all over the city and was famous for his landscaping behind the Haight’s Shady Grove Café. He worked to prevent the thinning of Buena Vista Park, and later inspired the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Robert?” I yelled into the whistling intercom.

“Yes?”

“It’s Alysia. From apartment one. I left my keys at school!”

After buzzing me in, Robert greeted me at his apartment door with a smile. He was small and trim, outfitted in tight jeans, t-shirt, and vest. With his neat beard and mischievous laugh, he possessed an impish quality. I wasn’t surprised when I later learned he’d played the fool in a 1969 Roundabout Theater production of
King Lear
.

“Why hello, A
-lyyy
-sia. Come on in!”

After a quick exchange, Robert walked me through his apartment to the back stairs so that I could check if my back door was unlocked. It was bolted shut, so we returned to his apartment, where I waited until Dad came home. Robert had spent much of the 1960s in Paris studying mime with a protégé of Marcel Marceau and had a delicate, precise way of moving through the narrow confines of his studio. Between my repeated calls home, Robert showed me his collection of rocks and shells, theatrically explaining the provenance of each. When I told him I was hungry, Robert fed me vinegar-soaked artichoke hearts from a jar, the only snack food his refrigerator would yield. Together we watched
Entertainment Tonight
on his flickering kitchen TV until Dad’s return.

Since I often lost my keys, I got to know Robert pretty well. It seemed like he was always around. I later learned he lived off a family inheritance, never having to bother with an office job, and spent days in the curtained darkroom he’d built inside his closet, developing and printing photographs he’d take roaming the city streets—Gay Pride parades, Harvey Milk rallies, street fairs. Many of these pictures were for the
Bay Area Reporter
, one of the city’s gay weeklies, where he worked as a photojournalist, but most were for himself.

The walls of Robert’s apartment were covered with framed portraits of notables he encountered and often befriended: the writers James Baldwin and Thom Gunn, the disco diva Sylvester. In the corners I spied his cameras and wide-eyed lenses and long-legged stands, all looking like pieces of a disassembled robot.

One afternoon, a few weeks after meeting Robert, I was playing dress-up. I pulled on a long white sparkly gown and dug through the remains of Dad’s collection of scarves and jewelry from the days when he still did drag. Around my neck, I draped the heavy jeweled Egyptian necklace inlaid with amber and teal stones. Around my wrist, I snapped a cuff bracelet overlaid with faux brass leaves. On top of my head I fastened a long strip of lace. I studied my reflection in the bathroom mirror and, satisfied with my transformation, searched for Dad, whom I found loudly typing at his desk, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside him. He smiled at me appreciatively but, fingers on the keys, soon returned to his typing. I then remembered Robert and crossed the hall.

I knocked on his door, listening to the muffled sound of opera until he answered. He looked me up and down, the opera now blaring behind him in the doorway, and his face broke into a toothy grin.

“Well, look at you! Okay if I take your picture?”

I nodded enthusiastically.

San Francisco, year unknown. Photo by Robert Pruzan. Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

He turned into his apartment to fetch his Nikon. When he reappeared, he led me to the carpeted hallway that connected our apartments. I posed, chin up, my arms outstretched dramatically, left one up, right one down, both hands clasping the banister stairs. A few days later, he handed my dad an eight-by-ten print of our session, a picture he called “Alysia in Communion Clothes” and which Dad later published in one of his magazines. Looking at the photo now, I notice my Snoopy watch visible under my glittery sleeve and am surprised to see how small I look against the staircase banister, much smaller and more self-conscious than I felt myself to be at the time.

In the late 1980s, a new landlord forced Robert out of his rent-controlled studio. We lost touch and his fabulous garden was overtaken by weeds. Before then, I called on Robert so often, big-eyed and wanting, that I must have been a pest, but he never gave me that impression. With his Nikon and later his Polaroid, he patiently documented my best dress-up sessions and even took a picture of my cat the day we brought her home from the pound. Robert always made me feel welcome in his apartment, as though I were the most fascinating nine-year-old in the world.

IN THE EARLY 1980S
, Dad had no shortage of writing work. His position as columnist and editor at
Poetry Flash
brought offers for book reviews and interviews with local gay papers, a magazine based in LA called
The Advocate
, and several poetry periodicals across the country. But while this work steadily improved his reputation, it provided little money. The social exchange between writers and editors, which valued ideas over economic concerns, helped build a culture that thrived on, and appreciated, art and thinking. It was one of the great things about this era of San Francisco. But we still needed to pay our bills.

To supplement his income, Dad started doing market research from a tiny cubicle in San Francisco’s financial district, a job he’d keep for years. In especially lean months, he shaved money off our rent by vacuuming the halls of our apartment building. This work led to a few jobs cleaning high-rises across town. I remember climbing Nob Hill to a particularly ornate building. While Dad got to work, I lay down on the wall-to-wall carpeting and propped myself up on my elbows so I could finish my homework. Looking out the window, I admired the views of downtown, which was in the process of being “Manhattanized” by Mayor Feinstein. The buildings of the Embarcadero were lit around the edges and looked like Christmas presents. In my ears, I could hear the roar of the vacuum. I turned to Dad as he awkwardly wrestled with the extension cord of an industrial carpet cleaner, and I felt a mixture of amusement and pity. “Are you okay?” I asked before moving to help him untangle the thick, veiny cords.

I later learned that he took these odd jobs to help pay for new literary ventures. Now that we were living alone and spared roommate drama, Dad brought real focus to his creative work. As editor of
Poetry Flash
, he tapped into the incredible diversity and vitality of the city’s poetry scene. He oversaw several special issues including “West Coast Black Writing” (September 1979), “American Indian Poets of California” (October 1980), the “Grand Piano” reading series (February 1981), and “Gay Writing” (March 1981). Then, in January 1980, he launched
SOUP
, laying out its mission in the debut issue:

To be in the soup! I found myself in it when I started writing editors: “Gee I like yr mag but why don’t you stress history, ideas, politics more; tackle deep & scary subjects; publish more of so & so.” They’d reply: “Sounds like it’s time you start your own mag.” So here it is.