My Mother's Son (Part 4)
After my father was out of the picture in 1966, no longer dragging me to the barber every two weeks, I began to let my hair grow longer, doing my utmost to approximate the look of The Beatles. When necessary, I would carry out a slight trim myself, standing in front of the mirror in our bathroom, wielding the scissors with caution and using photographs of The Beatles from magazines as a guide. Because I was living in America, the length of my hair was a constant problem. I was mocked, disparaged, threatened, sworn at, spat at, called a fag and a queer, and, on one occasion, punched in the face. My mother, who did not care how long I wore my hair, was told by one neighbor that any boy with long hair was scum, to which my mother replied, "Well, I figure that if the length of my son's hair is all I have to worry about, then I'm pretty lucky as a parent."
Toward the end of my high school years, my hair was longer than ever, falling below my shoulders. Because no other boy in the school had hair as long as mine, I was a prime target for loutish displays of abuse. In one brazen instance, my PE teacher grabbed my hair from behind, and growlingly threatened to pull it out by the roots if I did not get it shortened forthwith. Everywhere I went, I heard, over and over, "Are you a boy or a girl?" To make it worse, that question, usually shouted at me by a brawny dullard with a crew cut, was always asked as if it was the height of cleverness. The more abuse that I received, the more I became determined not to cut my hair.
I was frequently compelled to express my own views as the 1960s progressed. My mother worried that my youthful expressions of earnest dissent were too adamant and too trenchant, but I was headstrong, and I would not be stifled. Whenever I dared to put forward my thoughts regarding America's many undeniable defects, I was likely to receive a tart rebuke from the American with whom I was conversing, along the lines of, "Well, if you feel that way, why don't you go back to England?" (Clearly implying that if I disliked America, the problem had to be with me, and not with America itself.) The knee-jerk bellicosity of America was most succinctly enshrined in the quarrelsome words, "America, love it or leave it."
As a teenage night owl who never accepted the advice of "early to bed and early to rise," I liked to stay up late in my bedroom, being the only one in the house who was still awake, listening to music and reading. I thrived in the complete privacy that came with sitting up late. I relished the surrounding mood of quietness, the delectable freedom of having no interruptions, and the solitary feeling of being alone with my thoughts. Most of my high-school homework (what little I did of it) was hastily done after midnight, in the first hours of the day on which it was due. My mother, who was an early bird (getting up even half an hour past dawn was, to her, "sleeping late"), would sometimes chide me, and forcefully extoll the bounteous rewards of being up with the lark on a fresh morning, but I was an unrepentant slugabed, starting each day in drowsiness and unwilling to change my ways. I continued to keep late nights (followed by late mornings) into my early twenties, but as I got older, I finally had to relinquish my craving for the solace of nighttime and fit myself to an earlier schedule.
After the difficulties of my teenage years, my mother and I continued to have a number of ups and downs in our ongoing relationship. Sometimes we were of like mind and closely in tune with each other, united in thought, feeling, and spirit, while at other times we were barely able to connect with each other at all, but regardless of our highs and our lows, the natal bond of Englishness that had linked us from the beginning of my life was always there to sustain our relationship, always running much deeper than any of our disputes or fallings-out. I was always my mother's son. When I was moving through the years of my twenties, my thirties, my forties, and beyond, that uneven pattern of ebb and flow, back and forth, push and pull, advance and retreat, still prevailed between us, binding us together as we each grew older.
In August, 1969, on my sixteenth birthday, my father dropped off a birthday card for me in which he wrote of his hope that, when I was older, I would "understand" his actions toward the family from whom he had walked away, but I was not swayed by his slippery words. I already knew that I would never "understand" any of his heartless actions toward us: not that day, not the next day, not when I was older, not ever at any time, not even in a million years. After reading the card and fuming, I went over to his house and angrily knocked on the front door. My father opened the door, staring at me with a bug-eyed, open-mouthed look of speechless unease, befitting to a poser who had been caught out, as his wife hovered behind him. I threw the card down at his feet, saying, "Here, I don't want this, you can have it back!" I then turned on my heel and departed, feeling reasonably certain that, once and for all, I had made the strength of my feelings unmistakably clear. I never spoke to my father again.
• • •
My mother bought herself an Austin America in 1970, a car made by the British Motor Corporation, with a diminutive design (closely akin to the design of the Mini in appearance and proportions) that had been modified especially for the American market. One day, as I was walking home from high school, a small yellow car, not of American origin, came rolling down the street from behind and stopped next to me. Sitting in the driver's seat, smiling widely and with her hands on the steering wheel, was my mother. She was driving home, having just purchased the car, and was quite tickled with it, which was not usual for her, as she had never cared much about automobiles, one way or the other. The Austin America, though, was a British product, which made all the difference to my mother. She became attached to that car, but found its upkeep and repairs to be costly, so after a few years she let go of it and bought a Toyota Corona.
In January, 1971, I went on a field trip with other members of my high-school Humanities class to see a major exhibit of paintings and drawings by Vincent Van Gogh, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Walking reverently from room to room in the museum, being afforded close-up views of "The Potato Eaters," "The Starry Night," "Bedroom in Arles," "Sunflowers," "Wheatfield with Crows," and other works by the ill-fated Dutch artist was profoundly moving: a breathtaking, overwhelming encounter with imperishable truth that, at least for one afternoon, burned away all the tedious falsehoods and frivolous distractions that unrelentingly conspire to defile the experience of everyday life.
My mother also saw the exhibit, going there with a friend, and was deeply enthralled by Van Gogh's art. For the rest of her life, she loved his paintings, buying prints of them to hang on the walls of her home, never tiring of their heartfelt beauty. She also liked the works of Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Pissarro, Degas, and other Impressionists, but after seeing that exhibit in 1971, the work of Van Gogh would always hold a special import for her.
• • •
Halfway through my senior year in high school, I became mired in a thick depression that weakened my balance of mind, pushing me toward suicide. I could no longer see any reason to keep fighting my daily battle. I was angry at my father, fed up with school, desolate over a broken romance, weary of America, and worried about being called upon to fight in Vietnam (which I would have flatly refused to do, even if it meant incurring a grievous penalty). My unwillingness to bend my soul into an acceptably American shape had rendered me an outcast, leaving me in despair, stranded in a lonely region of stubborn rebelliousness. I ended up leaving home, breaking away from my troubles in a rash, ill-advised act that caused unintended anguish to my mother. On a cold winter morning, I journeyed by bus from Pleasant Hill to San Francisco and stayed there for six months, first at Huckleberry House, a shelter for runaways, and later with a hip, young husband and wife in the Sunset District who offered me the use of their spare room.
When I finally returned to my family, in the weeks before my eighteenth birthday, a painful rift had opened between my mother and me, a rift that, even after I was back home, could not be entirely smoothed over in the long term, and would never fully heal. We both tried to adjust to each other, but there were still flare-ups between us, with most of them being my fault. I had been through, and had seen, a lot while residing in San Francisco, some of which (such as being walloped on the side of my head one afternoon, on a crowded sidewalk, by a crazy vagrant who sidled up as if he intended to be friendly) had disturbed me, adding to my ingrained discomfiture, and I was estranged from most of my former schoolmates. While I was gone, my mother, believing that a move would be good for her and good for her children, had purchased a new townhouse in the adjoining city of Concord. After selling our suburban home in Gregory Gardens, the home in which we had lived for eight years, she moved us into a new home, bringing an end to one chapter of our family chronicle and commencing another.
• • •
In September, 1972, I became a part-time student at Diablo Valley College, a local community college, attending classes in English, Humanities, Art History, Music Appreciation, and Film Studies. They were all subjects in which I had a strong interest, and I did well in most of them (even serving as a teacher's assistant and showing up on the Dean's Honor List), but I had no grand intentions, and no inclination to pursue a formal degree. I was biding my time, spinning my wheels, trying to stave off the dreary penalty of "adulthood." When I was not at school, I was at home, doing a bit of homework, but more likely listening to music for hours on end, or going out with friends to see performances of rock 'n' roll at venues in San Francisco and Berkeley. It was during this time that I divined my apparent destiny as a struggling writer, an ambition that my mother, who had a broad regard for the arts, chose to support. In any case, I knew that I could never resign myself to merely falling in lock step with the addlebrained crowd, doing what everyone else around me was doing, which meant that I would, necessarily, have to set my own direction.
Although my mother had not been able to receive as much education as she desired when she was younger, she never lost her love of books, and she never stopped reading. On most evenings she turned in early, wanting to have private time in which to read. She was especially fond of Agatha Christie's many mysteries, particularly the stories that featured either the Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, or the shrewd English spinster, Miss Marple. As soon as she had finished one mystery, she began another. (When my mother and I went back to England in 1987, we attended an afternoon performance of Agatha Christie's famously long-running play, The Mousetrap, at St. Martin's Theatre in London.) Alongside mysteries, she also liked the fiction of W. Somerset Maugham, James Hilton, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. She also had a studious bent for crossword puzzles, and would grab a pencil and start filling in the little squares whenever she had a spare moment.
My mother had a sharp mind and always kept up with the current news, so she took a keen interest in the Watergate scandal that blighted, and then destroyed, Richard Nixon's second term as President of the United States. On the occasion of the "Saturday Night Massacre," on October 20, 1973, when both the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General resigned from their duties at the Department of Justice, to avoid having to do Nixon's dishonest bidding, my mother was gleefully offended by the grubby shenanigans in Washington, D.C. When I came in late that night, unaware of what had been happening at the White House, she was still awake, watching television. She laughed and said, "You'll never believe what's been going on." She was engrossed in the daily reports of the scandal as it unfolded in the early 1970s, delighting in all its twists and turns, as "Tricky Dicky," whom she strongly disliked, tumbled into ruin after telling the nation that he was "not a crook," and was forced to step down from the Presidency that he had openly coveted for so long, having been brought to his knees by the baleful weight of his own infamy.
In 1974, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British half-hour television comedy written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, which had first been aired on the BBC in 1969, became available on American PBS stations. I watched it on Sunday evenings, on KQED. I was already aware of the show, having read about it in British newspapers and magazines, and I had seen And Now for Something Completely Different, a film that contained a number of sketches from the television show, so I was excited to finally see the show itself. My mother loved Monty Python's Flying Circus, finding it to be a bracing counter to the slow-wittedness of most American comedies. I was surprised that so many Americans, mostly young people and Anglophiles, took to the show, since so much of its tone and content must have come across to them as confusingly British.
By the end of 1974, more than twenty years after being brought, as a child, from the United Kingdom to the United States by my father and mother, I was no more at home amidst the barbaric lunacy of America than I had been at the start. I was a young person, twenty-one years of age, presumably with a fruitful life ahead, trying to be myself and do the things (writing being foremost among them) that I felt called to do, but I was an outsider: someone who was discontented by, and frequently repelled by, the cumbersome structure of cheap, underhanded illusions in which America was oppressively enclosed. It all seemed unstable and transitory. When, I wondered, would America finally be tripped up by its own excess of ill will? When would the gaudy edifice of America finally give way, tumbling down in a malign heap?
• • •
Decades later, when my mother, who by then had become both a grandmother (courtesy of my brother) and a great-grandmother (courtesy of her eldest grandaughter), and had outlived my father, reached the end of her life at the age of ninety-four, her sudden passing, which came without warning two weeks before Christmas, brought me up short, shattering the shaky bulwark of my heart and hurling me headlong into a murky daze of impenetrable grief, a black destination of unremitting melancholy in which every precinct of my being was suppressed by immeasurable loss. I did not seek to find any particle of acceptance within my sorrow, because I knew that there was none to be found.
R.I.P. Joan Anne Collins 1926-2020