90210
What’s in a name? That which we call a town by any other name is still a town . . . or a city. A place somewhere on a map.
My first impression of Beverly Hills came from the picture of Will Rogers on the cover of the city’s phonebook. Will Rogers, the highest paid Hollywood film star during the 1930s had served as mayor of Beverly Hills. I read that slim volume like a textbook, noting names like Lucille Ball and Jack Benny, who besides being current television celebrities, they lived next door to each other on Roxbury Drive. Incorporated in 1914, the population of Beverly Hills was around 30,000.
In Beverly Hills, Mom and I lived in a six-unit apartment building. Built in 1939 on the boundary of Beverly Hills and Century City, we lived close enough for Mom to walk to work and for me to walk to school. A cramped one bedroom, I felt embarrassed to invite friends over. When anyone gave me a ride home, I got dropped off a block from the apartment where nearby houses attested to residence rather than transience.
Again, Mom had moved us at the end of a school year, leaving my “summer vacation” spent without friends until school started in the fall.
Mom and I stayed that summer with her friend Vera Lee and her family in Hollywood until Mom found the apartment in Beverly Hills just before school started.
Vera Lee’s younger brother John, a senior at Hollywood High School, and Vera Lee’s mother, Mrs. Kreminek, had welcomed us as if part of their larger Catholic family. Mrs. Kreminek was boisterous and endearing, generous with hugs. Vera Lee was a vivacious, smiling, confident person who wore her ample weight under well-tailored suits.
All I did that summer was watch television and eat Mrs. Kreminek’s cooking. One TV channel had a program called “Million Dollar Movies,” and the station each week replayed the same movie ten times, during different time slots. I watched my favorites again and again. And movies like The Helen Morgan Story and I’ll Cry Tomorrow offered glimpses of how alcohol affected other people’s lives.
Trying to make sense of my life, I didn’t know a soul who lived outside that apartment, so characters in movies filled my adolescent brain with images that offered illusions of what looked like success, happiness, and a good life.
“It’s a tight fit, boys.”
Before school started, my mom went to some fancy store on Rodeo Drive and bought me three outfits. It was the kind of store where a sales clerk fetched items from behind a counter. While I preferred a loose fit, my mother said clothes that fit my body made me look slimmer.
I would never have chosen to wear to school what she chose for me. Three outfits, ill-fitting and unflattering to wear again and again every week! One, a red plaid jumper fitted at the waist. I felt zipped into a straightjacket. Two? I can’t remember number two. Three, worst of all, a lined blue tweed pencil-straight skirt, a white long sleeve blouse, and a blue velveteen vest to be worn over the blouse, making a completed outfit. I was mortified. I could barely breathe.
Though my mom believed she did me a favor getting me into a Beverly Hills school––El Rodeo, with students first through eighth grade––all I could see at the time was what I didn’t have. I didn’t live in a nice house. I didn’t have cute clothes. I didn’t have a family with a mother and a father.
What I did have included disadvantages and obstacles to overcome. I was surrounded by apparent wealth, kids of celebrities, and attended a school where in my class of 119 students everyone was Jewish, except me. As if I had landed on a new planet, I felt like The Little Prince, a curiosity fallen from an asteroid.
“All grown-ups were once children ... but only few of them remember it.”
Mom worked at the law firm Wymann, Finnel and Rothman, offices on the top floors of the most impressive building on Wilshire Boulevard. She was Mr. Finnel’s personal legal secretary. Mom had come to this job the same way she had her two previous jobs. Vera Lee had been her predecessor both at the County Clerk’s office in Las Vegas and next at the law firm, Brown and Mattucci. Mahlon Brown was also a Nevada state senator.
Vera Lee’s professional recommendation certified Mom was the best. Highly skilled, my mom lacked the confidence Vera Lee possessed, as well as Vera Lee’s desire for a place of permanence. Vera Lee moved from Las Vegas to California after being date-raped. A devout Catholic, she had her son later that same year, working right up until her delivery, with no one at the office knowing except my mom.
Years later, Mom wrote me a letter saying that she never valued her amazing jobs. Which helped explain why employers could not induce her to stay once she was ready to leave. Mom landed excellent jobs, including that job in Beverly Hills, because of her exceptional secretarial skills. Besides exquisite shorthand (she won the shorthand medal in high school), she was fast enough to be a court reporter. Her fingers flew across an IBM Selectric typewriter keyboard. She dressed impeccably in Italian-knit suits, she was brilliant and, she knew how to keep secrets. Personal, as well as professional.
Fastidious—my mom expected perfection. Fastidious—traced to its Latin roots means: irksome, instead of the mere attention to details. Mom drove me crazy when I would ask her how to spell a word. Irksome, how she knew everything or at least had convinced me that she did.
When I asked how to spell a word, “Look it up,” she said.
In those intervening moments that I imagined someday I might summon the courage to say what I thought––I need to know how to spell a word in order to look it up. Lugging the twenty-pound unabridged dictionary from bookcase to table, I turned pages to find the first letters of the word in question.
Saying what I was thinking would have opened pages to a book much more complicated than the dictionary. Heavy, heated, and a one-sided conversation would ensue, and I would get buried under reminders of my sloth and ignorance.
“Slovenly,” she would say. I had to look up slovenly.
Arrested Development
Coming from Las Vegas schools, the year I attended school in Beverly Hills left me feeling stupid and ashamed. I made my first C—in Science. Working harder than I had ever worked for a grade, I raised it to a B in the last of four 10-week terms so that I finished the year with a C+. Average was the bane of mankind, according to my mother’s assessment. Nothing so dismal as average.
My mother appreciated art, music, and literature. She collected art books. Famous reproductions like “The Boating Party” by Renoir hung in our bohemian apartment. She had a collection of long-playing vinyl records. She had joined the RCA Record Club, putting together a library of classical music, jazz and some current picks, including Broadway shows and movie soundtracks, albums that she let me choose. From then on, she held onto her records almost as dearly as she did her books.
Her love of music got her in trouble though. Mom got arrested in Beverly Hills for disturbing the peace. A neighbor called the police because Mom refused to turn down her stereo’s volume. When the police came, I stood watching, fearful they would have to handcuff her as she flailed her arms and resisted the policemen’s authority.
As they ushered Mom out the door and down the steps, she looked back over her shoulder, calling out to me, “Go get Buddy. Tell him to get me out of jail.”
Paralyzed by fear, yet more afraid of my mom than the dark night, at first, I had every intention of heading out for Buddy’s place. His apartment, although not in Beverly Hills, was within walking distance if I cut across Roxbury Park. It would take longer to stay on sidewalks along city streets.
Because it was against the law in Beverly Hills to leave cars parked on the street after midnight, I convinced myself that as police patrolled the streets, I too would wind up in jail. Scared and tired, when the adrenalin wore off, I went to bed. Awaking, my anxiety about missing school worried me more than leaving my mother in jail. Either choice left me petrified, weak, and confused.
The poet Mary Oliver wrote an essay called, “Staying Alive.” Mary, like my mom, had what she described as a barely survivable childhood. And Mom, like Mary, took refuge in reading books.
“Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victim of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstance, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.”
Mary Oliver thought of language and books as doors, “. . . a thousand opening doors––to notice, to contemplate, to praise and thus to come into power.”
For me, alleviation of pain and confusion came from school. Going to school offset the powerlessness I felt at home. There were no free-and-reduced lunches at school, much less breakfast. But school provided a break from the fear and gloom and cigarette smoke, all of which for me was everyday life.
The next morning, I went to school. I did not walk to Buddy’s. I walked the opposite direction. I lost myself in a routine day at school where predictable people populated the scenes that pictured to my imagination belonging and stability.
Making that decision, however, included calculating deferred consequences when I would have to face my mom. Whatever I may have thought could help me avoid punishment or how I might deny what I did, my choice revealed that I cared more about disapproval from my teachers––supreme figures of authority and accountability––than I feared what my mother could do to me. I could not bear the thought of having to give explanations for my absence. More than anything else, school represented a place of safety.
Mom got out of jail all right. She was at home waiting when I got there. Her boyfriend helped, I guess, for she would never have called someone at the law firm, not even Vera Lee. I got the tongue-lashing, and I knew I deserved it, but this time she spared me the beating I had come to expect. Good grief, almost 14-years-old, and I still flinched from an upraised arm, a backhand, and remained terrified of the belt.
In that episode, her own guilt may have kept her from blaming me for my failure to help her. She gave me a reprieve. I didn’t even get grounded.
Wishing on a Star
Unpredictable, as always, my mom kept me off balance––tilted. But never a conversation about what had happened or how the experience left each of us reeling. If she forgave me, she never used words, and a conversation that never happened made it harder for me to forgive myself.
“If wishes were horses, beggars could ride.”
How I wished I could have pried open my adolescent brain to at least tell my mother there was no malice, no wish for her to be punished, only distress and denial and fear as my default means of self-protection.
Trauma. The tension I lived with remained unspoken and unbroken.
I wanted my mother to be good. I wanted us both to fit in. I wanted normal. I wanted a home. I wanted what she could not give me.
While I could wish for those things, I was powerless to make my wishes come true.
