Aftermath of hitchhike trip--marriage still unworkable, so life had me becoming another street person while awaiting college to start up again!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39706081-twelve-dead-frogs-and-other-stories-a-filmmaker-s-memoir

Stories excerpted from my memoir, TWELVE DEAD FROGS AND OTHER STORIES, A Filmmaker's Memoir.

EIGHT-DAYS SMARTER

It was around May 28th when I arrived back to the Bay Area, and it felt like I had compressed a lifetime into those eight days on the road. By the time I retraced my steps back to my house at the end of the street in Berkeley I was exhausted, but, at the same time, somehow energized. Fortunately, I had been able to fall asleep in the athlete’s car (“The Dog Bite”) for several hours before reaching Los Angeles. And I had jerked between sleep and consciousness during several of the rides that had brought me up the coast, so I knew that I had been dozing off, getting a little rest.

Back in town, I rounded the same corner as I had done eight days before, and I climbed the stairs to my second-floor apartment, crisscrossing cement stairs with metal railings, the same obstacle course that had forced the piano movers to hoist our piano above waist-high a few months earlier (it hadn’t looked like just two guys could handle that much weight, but after a few shaky backward steps they somehow succeeded). In my dazed state, memories from the past––like that one––bounced forward, invading present-tense. The past, present, and future all seemed to merge as one. This was how it had been for eight days straight.

I crossed the upper deck, reached the doorknob, touched it (home at last!), turned it, and walked into my kitchen. Mary-Ann hardly reacted any differently to my arrival than if I’d just been out shopping, or to an art class for a couple of hours. She kept moving, making herself some coffee. I was still soaring with all the thought pieces I had constructed on the road, mainly just trying to unravel questions from a higher realm, such as, “Why am I here?” and, “Where do I belong?” Mainly I was terribly exhausted from the traveling. I just wanted to sleep for a few days and recover. At any rate, I was back to give the marriage a try.

PART 4***** RESHUFFLED DECK

THE NEW CAR (1968)

Before the hitchhiking trips I had purchased a car, a new Mercury station wagon (well, new the year previous), thinking that having some luxury in our marriage would somehow help the situation improve. We couldn’t really afford it, but I had borrowed the down payment from my mother, who probably realized at that point that we were having our problems. And while my outer senses enjoyed the new car smell, soft padded seats, nice radio, dependable motor, I felt terribly uncomfortable driving such a middle-class monstrosity to my school. How could I be just another poor struggling art student with such a luxury car? In fact, I always parked it as far from campus as I could stand to walk, knowing how embarrassed I’d be if anyone I knew ever saw me driving it. It wasn’t me, I thought, not anywhere near the me I wanted to be.

I put an ad in the paper to sell it, hoping someone could afford a couple thousand down and take over the monthly payments, and was happily surprised to get several calls. An older gentleman, one of the first who answered the ad, was very interested, so I arranged a time he could see the car and do a test drive. We met at the pre-appointed time and place, and he seemed to like the station wagon immediately, saying that he needed a nice dependable car for his daughter at college. While we drove around he asked me why I was selling it. I told him that I had hoped having the new car would somehow help my marital problems disappear.

I remember we talked quite a while about our lives, and lost track of time in the process, without ever making mention about the sale of the car. I explained to him how I just couldn’t live a lie. I told him that if I didn’t feel like I belonged there in that marriage, I would have to end it, no matter how much pain and confusion would result. He shook his head, made it clear that he was much too comfortable in his marriage of twenty-five years to consider being truthful at that late date. He seemed to think that if he started telling the truth he would unravel his entire world.

Finally getting on the subject of the car, his daughter need for it, etc., we stopped at some parking lot and got out so he could examine the body for dents or whatever. He must have been fairly short in stature because when we parked and got out, standing outside of the car, all I saw of him was his head bobbing up above the top of the shiny car roof. Holding a very serious look on his face for several seconds, he finally exclaimed, “If I had to do what you’re doing I’d kill myself.” Without further discussion, he bought the car.

A poll taken in 1996 by the television program, exposed how a large cross-section of the American public lie daily in numerous areas of their lives. How many people will tell a cashier when he or she has undercharged? How many people are dishonest in reporting their income on tax forms? How many people cheat on their mates? How many people live a lie just to maintain their status quo?

*****

For almost another year after my hitchhike trip I tried to co-exist with Mary-Ann, but probably knew deep in my gut that it was hopeless. Maybe it was the highway patrolman’s words, warning, “Your life is gone when you divorce,” that kept me there those following months. I don’t know.

I made an effort to help around the house, tried to be a good husband and probably was. But more and more my school life and home life felt stretched apart, as if I functioned in two separate universes. The final result was that I found myself emotionally withdrawing from the relationship, in spite of any desires to the contrary. I’d never been particularly successful at taking a stand against “authority figures” (my father, for instance) and my wife, four years older, had become just that. In one instance, I had suddenly learned that when a marriage is unbalanced, as ours obviously was, the very lives of the children you profess to love can be put at risk.

HIT AND RUN (1968)

One February evening around sundown (about three months before my 8-day hitchhike trip), Mary-Ann decided that the kids and I should join her in a little stroll around our Berkeley neighborhood. In addition to the descending darkness there was a thick fog rolling in, that kept everything at street-level in a partial haze. Her two kids from her first marriage, ages seven and six, ran ahead of us as we walked across Telegraph Avenue, heading down Ashby toward our Russell Street turnoff. When I saw them skip up ahead, past the driveway of what was then the Berkeley Co-op’s parking lot, I called out to them to stay with us, but they kept going.

“I don’t think it’s safe for them to run ahead like that,” I said to Mary-Ann.

“They have to grow up sometime,” was her un-challenged response.

Not having the fortitude to contradict her at that moment. and not willing to wreck the nice evening with an argument, I watched helplessly as our kids disappeared up the street. I tried to let it go, but inside I fumed a bit, thinking that she wasn’t really being as careful as I would have liked. In my opinion, the kids seemed too young to be running around in the dark. But they were her kids more than mine, so I conceded to her right to trust her own judgment over mine.

As we walked by the trash bin behind the flower stand at the corner of Telegraph and Ashby, we noticed a bunch of discarded flowers, good ones, in pretty colors and with nice long stems. At Mary-Ann’s prompting I dug some flowers out and piled them high in her outstretched arms. Then we slowly continued on down the block. Even at that moment, looking over at her talking cheerfully about this and that, with that pile of flowers high up to her chin, I felt a deep danger, as if at any moment a safe could drop on my head. Although my level of anxiety was becoming greater by the minute, I didn’t mention these fears. I just strained for any signs of the kids up ahead, but saw and heard nothing.

After walking another half-block, I spotted some flashing red lights up ahead, right in the middle of the street, and immediately felt choked up. As my face flushed and my pulse quickened I looked over at Mary-Ann, who was still bubbling along in a carefree state, enjoying her walk. It was as if I was viewing an image from a movie with the sound turned down low. I could see her face, but didn’t hear a word that she was saying. Was I the only one who could connect up the dots? Didn’t she have any suspicion about what those red lights might mean? With each step my dread became stronger.

The closer we got to the flashing lights, the more I became convinced that one of our daughters had been hurt. Traffic was beginning to clog up. I’m not sure that my eyes were even seeing properly at that point, because my worry and guilt had already become overpowering.

Suddenly the air was full of flowers. That’s all I saw. Stems and colors spinning in front of my face, above, below, everywhere. From some corner of my brain I heard a high-pitched scream, first loud, then receding––probably Mary Ann’s voice as she ran up ahead. I was so distraught by her sudden panic that my eyes refused to reveal what lay ahead. Although my vision seemed blurred, everything moving in slow motion, somewhere inside my head I knew very clearly that my worst fears had been realized. My wife had obviously recognized one of her daughters.

Stopping myself about twenty feet away, frozen to the sidewalk, I watched as Mary-Ann bent over the crumpled semi-conscious body of her daughter, who had obviously been struck by a car. I learned later that she had been hit on the side of the head and hip, and was knocked twenty feet through the air.

If I had just been stronger, I thought over and over again, I could have saved her from this tragedy. What was wrong with me! If I had just had the guts to stand up to her mother. I talked to no one, kept to myself, awaiting the verdict. Our fates were intertwined. But somehow, through some miracle even the doctors couldn’t understand, she was fine. Hardly a scratch. No concussion or other brain damage. No broken bones.

Thinking about it now, it doesn’t seem possible that a child could have escaped injury without intervention by an astral force, a guardian angel or something. Somehow, we parents were both spared by powers beyond what the rational human brain can comprehend.

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