Another Kind of Continuity
Has anyone noticed I’ve gotten stuck in the memoir writing? One
end of the string ravels out in the early ‘seventies when I settled
down with Charley and without any more wild adventures to relate, the
story sags. The second strand, which flashed back and started with
my birth and early life, ran up to puberty and got tangled and snarled
up. Boring on one end and harrowing on the other, is that enough
of an excuse for writer’s block?
Actually I’ve told stories here that seemed to me to be ho-hum and
humdrum and got comments indicating that some readers thought
otherwise. Likewise, I haven’t had a lot of trouble relating
harrowing stories about things such as rape, arrest and incarceration,
and burying my stillborn child. The tale of a troubled
adolescence shouldn’t be that daunting.
I don’t feel daunted. I just feel stuck. I tell myself
there’s really nothing to worry about revealing in the stories of life
with
Charley. The statute of limitations has long passed.
While I’m not exactly eager to relive my teenage years, at least I can
assume that I’ll get back some of those readers who unsubbed from me
after I was done telling the biker stories about sex, drugs and rock
and roll.
But
seriously, folks, I haven’t stopped thinking about my life. I’m
just having trouble keeping continuity, following the threads I’ve
started. My memories jump around. I guess for a while at
least, the memoirs are going to jump around, too. If or when it
comes down to editing this shit for publication, it might be a
problem. Right now writing down the memories is the problem, and
here is my solution for now: my memories have been coming to me in thematic
bursts so I’ll write them that way.
One theme that has been on my mind is soap opera.
Soaps
I was probably listening to radio soaps in utero. I do remember
hearing the organ music and some of the distinctive intros such as the
woman’s voice calling, “Stella, Stella Daaallas,” coming from the
little yellow celluloid table model radio on the high shelf in the
kitchen. (Was it really celluloid? That’s what my parents called
it. It sure wasn’t Bakelite. It had a greasy feel,
distinctive acrid smell, and nasty taste, like all early
plastics.) That was in the little house on Fox Avenue in San
Jose, where we lived until I was six.
I didn’t pay much attention to the soaps then — or, at least, I didn’t
sit down and listen to them. The radio was turned
on every waking moment, as I recall. Most of the time it was
music
– everything from Gene Autry to Bing Crosby, Spike Jones to Harry
James. Sometimes at night my father would move the radio down to
the kitchen table so he could hear it better when he tuned it down into
the short wave band and listened to police calls. Once in a while
he’d hear an interesting one, and we’d pile in the car and go watch the
excitement. But I digress. The soaps, it seemed to me, were
just ordinary conversation like I heard between Mama and Daddy or
between them and the neighbors, not of much interest. I’m sure I
absorbed a lot of it, even though I was doing other things while the
soaps were on. They were designed to be that way, accessible to
women as they cared for their kids and did household chores.
At that time, while we lived in that house, the radio shows I liked
best (and now recall most clearly) were comedy, variety, and adventure shows, and the kids’ shows: Burns & Allen, Fibber McGee, Arthur Godfrey,
Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston, Edgar
Bergen and Charlie McCarthy (Those last two, I should probably state
for some of my young readers, was really one program. Charley was
the dummy and Bergen was the ventriloquist.).
Then
we moved into the big house my parents bought at 968 Delmas
Street. It came with a radio, a wood-veneer console that was taller than I
was. It looked a lot like this one, only MUCH bigger. The
round dial in the middle of the upper part glowed green when it was
turned on. The speaker area at the bottom was covered in a
loose-weave cloth through which I could see some of the tubes
glowing. It would seem to take forever to warm up, especially
when I was waiting to listen to The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, Lux Radio Theater or Groucho Marx
in the evenings. I used to stretch out on the living room rug in
front of that radio to do my homework. On days I was home from
school, I’d sit there and listen to the soaps with my mother.
That was the first I remember actually listening to soap opera. I got to know Ma Perkins,
Helen Trent, Nora Drake, Young Doctor Malone, Young Widder Brown,
John’s Other Wife, Just Plain Bill, Lorenzo
Jones, and One Man’s Family as if they were neighbors or my
family. I absorbed the mores, the ethos and the mythos as if they
were realities, too. They became cultural realities, because my
mother and I weren’t the only ones whose minds were molded by them.
I had more exposure to daytime radio, and later to TV, than most of my
peers because of my prolonged periods of illness. My fantasy life
was fueled early on by the tragi-romantic plots of Life Can Be Beautiful, The Guiding Light, The Brighter Day, As the World Turns, and Search for Tomorrow.
One of my ongoing preteen fantasies anticipated “reality TV” by several
decades. I used to imagine myself the central character in a soap
opera, fantasizing being followed around by a camera as I played
dress-up in slinky clothes (hand-me-downs from my mother’s boss’s
daughter in college) or had bubble bath orgasms. My soap opera was ahead of its time in a number of ways.
I remember sitting in a booth in the cafe where my mother worked, when
I was twelve or thirteen, discussing recent developments in the soaps
with her boss’s wife and other waitresses, as if the soap characters
were our real-life neighbors. Then after I got married when I was
fourteen (in 1958), I lost track of the soaps. We had no TV, and
by then the last of the radio soaps were off the air. Once in a
while, in someone else’s house, I’d catch an episode of
something. Sometimes the characters were familiar and there were
even continuing plot lines that carried over for years.
The ‘fifties segued into the ‘sixties, I got divorced and remarried,
and I still had no TV. In the middle of the ‘sixties my second
husband and I chose to buy a good stereo system and record collection, and a motorcycle,
instead of a car and/or TV. If we’d been more affluent we might
have had them all. As it was, we had barely enough money to get
by, and more interest in Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Thelonius Monk and Antonio Carlos
Jobim than in any of the crap on TV.
By the end of the 1960s everyone I knew agreed that about the only
thing worth watching on TV was Star Trek. I’d gotten some insight
into the ways in which the soaps of my youth had promoted gender-role
stereotypes (this was the era of the Women’s Strike, the Feminist
Movement and the inception of the ERA). Soaps had reinforced in me the
codependency my mother taught me. Mama always said a woman isn’t
complete without a man. I was learning the insidious power of
that myth, although I wasn’t going through life without a man, but I was consciously avoiding TV.
Shortly after Stoney and I got to Anchorage in 1973, he brought home a
small portable black and white TV, convincing me to let it in the house
by saying it would give him something to do at home and keep him out of
bars. It didn’t work that way and before long Stoney was out of
my life. The TV stayed, but I only watched it infrequently,
usually for a movie. While babysitting for my friend Mardy’s
daughter Shanda around that time, I saw my first episode of Sesame Street. I was favorably impressed.
In the latter half of the 1970s, while I was convalescing from a catastrophic
exacerbation of my autoimmune syndrome after an extended period of
remission, Charley persuaded me to let him bring in my first color
TV. I watched M.A.S.H. and old Star Trek reruns, Doctor Who, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and The
Prisoner, and I got addicted to soaps all over again. I watched
old ones like All My Children and General Hospital, and new ones like
Young and the Restless. I saw Ryan’s Hope from the first episode
up until we moved away from the city in 1983.
Two things made my move to this valley and off of the power grid extremely
traumatic. Most traumatic was the loss of electric light and
running water. I’ve described that here.
Going cold turkey from the TV addiction was a lesser form of
hell. Not the least of that was the soaps. For a while
then, I was clinically depressed.
Then I began to recover, to regain my sanity. Charley hooked up
an old car radio to a 12-volt car battery, and public radio became my
primary link to the outside world for the next fifteen years. It
was how I experienced the wrecks of the Exxon Valdez and the
Challenger. I’ve seen the video clips of them only two or three
times, instead of the two or three hundred viewings imprinted on the
consciousness of most of America.
A couple of years after we moved in there, Charley moved out.
With him gone, I had a phone line put in. Charley hadn’t wanted a
phone, and he still doesn’t have one in his cabin. He was back in
Anchorage for a while, before coming back to the Valley and settling
within a few miles of us. He dropped in for a brief visit today,
but I digress.
When Greyfox, Doug and I moved into this place on the power grid in
1998, the place came with a TV. I never went back to watching any
of the old
soaps, being wary of them from previous experience. I did,
however, watch Passions for a while with Doug. We both became avid fans, to Greyfox’s amused
contempt. Doug has always been a heavy sleeper, hard to awaken, but he’d wake up after only a few notes of the Passions theme song. Also, I managed to become a TV news junkie, and
developed short-lived addictions
to Jerry Springer and Martha Stewart. Enough of that is more than
plenty.
I never did get into the “reality TV” habit. I sorta wish I
hadn’t been watching the Today Show on 9-11-01. I could have used
a little more distance from that. When Doug accidentally broke
the antenna wire while shoveling snow from the roof a couple of winters
ago, I saw no good reason to repair it. When our computer went
down for eleven weeks this spring, I got back into listening to Morning
Edition and All Things Considered. I haven’t tuned into them in
weeks. In some cases, ignorance really is bliss.
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