Kingdom Come, CA

KINGDOM COME, CA.

A NOVEL

BY

JUDY STRICK

© Judy Strick 2014

What wish could have been so important, that the very making of it would wind up destroying my family?

And now I can’t even remember what I had wanted so much on that lovely afternoon by the sea, the last afternoon of my childhood.

CHAPTER ONE: APRIL 18, 1978- SANTA MONICA CA.

Let’s go back thirty-four years, to a balmy spring day, sunny and warm, with just enough breeze to ruffle the palm trees along the palisades.

We Wellmans, four of us then, had gone to the Ocean Park pier on the occasion of my eighth birthday. I had picked the pier instead of Sea World or Knotts Berry Farm, my other choices. The decision had been prompted by a third grade urban myth making the rounds on the playground: The Ferris wheel in Santa Monica was said to have magical powers, and from the top of the ride you could see all the way to China. And if you held your breath and made a wish at that very moment, your wish would come true. I was enchanted by the idea. Eight year olds still believe in magic.

And so I chose the pier.

I’ll never stop ruing my choice. If only I had wanted to see Shamu jump through a hoop, or longed to ride on the rollercoaster at Knotts Berry Farm, if only I had not wanted to make a wish.

If only I had never been conceived

There are several pictures of that day, taken by a strolling photographer in a clown suit: a group shot, all of us squinting into the sun: Adele and David in their tie-dye and denim and their two adorable kids. And a solo shot of yours truly, Ruby Louise, mugging it up for the camera. I’m wearing seersucker shorts and a t-shirt with big red letters-‘Birthday Girl’. A red helium balloon is tugging at my wrist and I’m grinning a big loopy grin. My new teeth are too big for my face and my curly hair is blowing and I look like a chrysanthemum.

In that photo my brother was not the center of the photos, or for that matter, of the day. My brother was very cute. He was only five. All five year olds are cute. Not so eight year olds with bony knees and big teeth, but it was my day. I was the one getting all the attention, and I loved it: hot dogs and candy apples, cheap plastic prizes my father won for me at coin tosses and dart games, breaking waves and cawing seagulls making background music, and the calliope playing mechanical Strauss waltzes.

And then it was time for the big event- the Ferris wheel, where dreams came true.

We waited in line, hand in hand, my father and I, while my mother, her big halo of wiry curls, waited with my brother behind the ropes at the entrance to the ride. Abe was crying; he wanted to go on too. No way, my mother had said. A squirmy kid like you, you’ll fall off and kill yourself."

So it was just my Daddy and me; much to my delight. I was nuts about him. He was tall, and cool for a father, with his long hair and his Frank Zappa t-shirt, He squeezed my hand and winked at me. I was excited and a bit scared; looking from down there, at terra firma, the top of the ride seemed very high up.

It was finally our turn and a shiny red gondola arrived. My father helped me aboard and bowed. I giggled, charmed and embarrassed. A chrome bar was locked in place to hold us in. The brake was released with a loud clunk, and we floated slowly up into the air. I clutched the bar, at first a little nervous, and then I surrendered to the whole experience, drifting u-u-u-u-up, our car swaying each time we stopped to take on passengers, honky-tonk sounds floating by like bright confetti. My Daddy and me- no snotty little kid to suck up the attention.

And I looked around. The sounds from below were more muted, blended, like a hum. The whole of Santa Monica bay and the curve of the beach stretched like a diorama up and down the coast; tiny toy sailboats dotted the water, and the horizon line, a million miles away, faded into the sky. I was bursting with happiness and the total rightness of my life at that very moment.

Then the Ferris wheel clunked to a stop, and we were at the very top. And in the distance, at the end of the horizon, I saw land. The red gondola swayed back and forth, then stopped moving and we hung suspended in air.

Look Daddy, there’s China.

I closed my eyes, and made my wish, crossing all my fingers and concentrating.

What did you wish for? my father asked.

It’s a secret.

And so it remains, to this very day, even to myself. I have no idea if my wish came true.

But I do remember that when I opened my eyes at the top of the world on that lovely April afternoon and looked around, I was so filled with the sheer joy of existence that I leaped to my feet, threw my arms in the air and shouted at the top of my lungs, WE’RE BIRDS. And I flapped my arms as if I were flying, and my exuberance set our little gondola rocking back and forth crazily at the top of the enormous wheel and I clutched at the bar terrified that I would fall out and splatter on the pavement below.

Then a bullhorn shouted out for the world to hear, HEY KID! DOWN ON TOP!

Humiliated beyond words, as only an eight year old can feel, my cheeks burned with embarrassment as my father grabbed my arm and pulled me down.

Take it easy, birthday girl; it’s a long way down. And by the way, that was Catalina, not China.

And I looked down and we were so high up that the people below looked like tiny Weeble dolls, and I got dizzy and my stomach turned.

I white-knuckled it all the way down, clutching at the chrome bar, sitting very still, feet pressed together, arms at my side.

As soon as we hit bottom, I leaped out of the car, glad to be alive. My mother stood at the exit, holding my brother’s hand. Abe was eating an ice cream cone and smiling happily. I ran over and gave him a hug. He blinked in surprise. The hug was very out of character for me, at least with him.

The breeze smelled like salt and tar and cotton candy.

And then we went on the bumper cars, and after that my father won me a pink plush teddy bear on the ring toss.

My world, lost for a teddy bear. For the five minutes it took to win the damn thing.

It happened on the way home, as we pulled off the pier, onto Ocean Avenue. My father was driving the new car, a red Chevy Malibu station wagon that still had a new car smell. I was sitting behind him. My mother was up front and my brother was behind her, in the seat beside me. He’d pitched a fit when my mother wanted to fasten him in the safety belt. It makes me throw up, he’d shouted, kicking his feet, and pounding his fists against the seat back.

She finally gave in. Okay; this time only. You damn well better not fall out the window.

Well for Christ sake Adele, roll up the goddamn window if you’re so worried, my father groused. This was our first car with safety belts. Nobody was used to them.

Put your seat belts on, the rest of you people, my mother had said with mounting irritation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, my father grumbled, ignoring her.

You too young lady, she said to me sharply- not at all my idea of the way you talked to a birthday girl.

I grudgingly did as I was told, and the minute she turned around I unfastened my buckle and stuck my tongue out at her back.

Abe was still crying as we pulled out of the parking lot.

I want the window open, he was wailing. Five year olds, they drive you crazy sometimes.

The car bumped along the wooden planks of the pier, until we hit asphalt near the top of the ramp. That was when I accidently let go of my red balloon, which floated away from me, in front of my father’s face.

I don’t think, even if I had held onto the balloon, that my father could have done anything to avoid the speeding black Pinto that had run the red light as we were pulling onto Ocean Avenue, into the intersection.

I remember nothing of the accident; I didn’t hear the explosion, don’t remember the fire. The last thing I can recall is reaching for the string on my red balloon.

My brother Abe died in the crash. He was thrown from the car, and broke his neck. The driver of the Pinto died too. His car burst into flames; the gas tank had exploded.

I was burned in the subsequent inferno. My father suffered major injuries, my mother walked away unscathed.

The entire Wellman family died that day; but some of us continued existing. All families deal with disaster in their own way I suppose. We Wellmans dealt with it badly. We never quite got all our mourning over with; we could not face the pain. Instead we tried our damnest to wipe out the past. We cut ourselves off from the friends we had known when there were four of us, and passed ourselves off as a family of three. When the subject came up, I told people that I was an only child. My parents did too. We never mentioned my brother; we had an unspoken pact. And still do, to this very day. What’s done cannot be undone. End of story.

It was not my fault that my brother died and I lived. Thirty-four years later I must remind myself of that. I could not have known what would happen when I chose the Santa Monica Pier; I could not have helped it when my red balloon flew into my father’s face. I was not responsible.

Doesn’t matter - the guilt will be with me, deep in the recesses of my memory, until the day I die; like my scars and my throbbing shoulder.

And the unusual way I have chosen to live my life.

CHAPTER TWO

2012: KINGDOM COME. CA.

A fierce storm blows in late in the day, before the sun sets. But there is no sun on such a day, and you can smell the electricity in the air. We’re in for a wild ride...

There’s nothing I like better than standing in my meadow with the wind howling, the sky darkening, and all the wild creatures scurrying for comfort: rabbits for their warrens, mice for their holes, birds for their trees. And I’m out there alone, nobody around for miles, and I’m waiting for the rumble of thunder, the smell of rain. And it’s just me and the wind and my meadow, and I hold my arms out and I dare the lightening to come. I inhale the charged particles as thunder rumbles in the eastern sky. I’m just another creature; not thinking, experiencing.

My meadow.

I suppose you could call me a loner in that I live alone in these hills and like it that way. I’m not unsociable.

I have friends, whose company I enjoy. I just happen to be a very private person.

I suppose you could chalk up my current lifestyle to survivor’s guilt, of which, as you might well imagine, I have a shitload. But I keep my survivor’s guilt tucked in my back pocket alongside the vivid flamingo-pink scars, which meander across the left side of my upper body like a nasty patch of florid mildew. The first time, after my many surgeries, when I fully saw my scars, I fainted dead away. Those scars are kept perpetually hidden from prying eyes, my own included. I haven’t seen my own naked body for thirty-some years. I imagine you might be skeptical- how does one avoid one’s body? Easy: half-mirrors, averted eyes. One does not see what one does not want to see. My looks are not my ticket to the big time, although mercifully my face was spared from the flames. I suppose you might call my aesthetic ‘drab’. I’m neither made-up nor styled. My eyebrows are unruly, as is my hair-not frizzy like my mother, but curly and ordinary brown. I cut it myself. It’s always flopping in my face. I also have freckles across the bridge of my nose, which I could do without. As for the rest of me, although I am long and thin of bone, I dress to conceal, not exploit: baggy clothes, muted colors. I never bare my torso, my upper arms or my shoulders; not even in the hottest of summers. I‘ve never owned a bikini, or any kind of bathing suit for that matter, since I was a child. It’s not a sexy look, but it’s mine. Nobody knows what’s lying beneath all these layers. Nobody here knows about my painful past, my deformity. Not even Charlie Waunder, who happens to be my best friend.

After the accident, after I saw my scars, I used to pretend I could make myself invisible. I have succeeded.

I came here, to Kingdom Come, California, in 1999; a few years after graduating from Art Center College in Pasadena, where the classes were small, the grounds were open and wooded, and there was plenty of personal space. I could never have dealt with a large college. I’ve never been good in crowds, having been isolated through most of my adolescence, in and out of hospitals in the post-accident years, home schooled after that. My drawing skills saved me. They allowed me to escape to my own world wherever I was. If I was in pain, emotional or physical, I drew my way out of it.

Art Center was a school that was small enough for me to handle.

The art world was not. After I’d graduated I moved to downtown L.A. where the art scene was happening. I rented a tiny, crummy loft near Little Tokyo and the museums and lived la vie artiste. I affected a black period- I wore only black, top to toe. I hung out with artists, and wannabe artists and art history majors. We went to gallery openings and cadged the free eats and booze; we met in wine bars, low-life bars, espresso shops and taquerias. We ate a lot of cheap Chinese food, we embraced dives.

I had a few good friends, interesting people. We used to spend boozy, stoned nights nattering on about the meaning of life, the importance of art, the dim-sum at the Empress Pavilion, who was sleeping with whom.

I wanted to be an ‘important’ painter. I wanted a one-woman show in a good gallery. Who didn’t? I tried. I was willing to play the bottom-feeder game. I forced myself to go to openings, and performances and schmooze and connect with poseurs and dealers and collectors and other artists who were schmoozing and connecting. That was when I started to hate crowds. The noise and the cigarette smoke and the pot smoke and the sweat and perfume and the posturing, the press of people made me feel trapped. The scars on my shoulder throbbed constantly, because I was always nervous. I had to drink myself half-blind to get through each opening.

Furthermore, I was sick of being afraid of my neighborhood; sick of the city, and of the druggies and the crazies, sick of stepping over derelicts night and day, sick of the smell of piss wafting from every alley, past every wizened tree. I was continually cranky from traffic noise and the hum of the city, chronically irritable and depressed. I was a rat in a trap of my own choosing.

And finally, an epiphany: I awoke one early morning, roused by a screaming lunatic in the street below my window. He was bellowing, CRAZY PUSSIES ARE CHASIN’ ME! CANNIBAL PUSSIES ARE EATIN’ ME UP!

And it came to me in a flash; I could live anywhere and paint my paintings. As long as I gave up dreams of success: acclaim from strangers, museums knocking at my door, openings of my own - all the things that statistically would never happen anyway.

And the truth is this; I don’t need to make money from my art. I just need to be able to do it. If I don’t paint I go crazy with boredom and emptiness. It’s all I’m good at, all I can do. As simple as that.

I’m in a fortunate, if emotionally ambiguous, financial situation, living on blood money, hush money. And while I’m by no means rich, I’m comfortably provided for with a trust by way of the Ford Motor Company, which settled well, quickly, and quietly. They were still trying to protect their brand name and suppress the Pinto’s burgeoning reputation as a death trap. The settlement had moved my whole family into a new social class. We survivors deserved it I suppose. We’d been brutalized by the tragedy in varying degrees. I went from being a normal happy eight-year old with a case of sibling rivalry, to being an only child, subjected to years of hospitals and skin grafts and doctors and IV drips... so much pain; and of course the permanent disfigurement. The doctors did the best with me that they could. I look, nonetheless, like a creature from a horror movie.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Whatever...

We all suffered profoundly.

My father’s shoulder was broken, and three ribs; and much worse, he suffered brain damage when his head hit the steering wheel on his way through the windshield. He had not fastened his safety belt. My father; the professor, who had loved nothing more than to stand in front of a room full of undergraduates and talk about the ideas of Schopenhauer, or Heraclitus or Sartre. My father, the confirmed atheist, the intellectual, the scholar. After the accident his speech was affected by the blow to his head. He could no longer lecture. His personality changed; he became a bitter angry man. I always felt that he blamed me.

But my mother had it worst of all. She came away physically unscratched, having snapped herself snugly into her seatbelt on that terrible day, the only one of us who did. She doesn’t even have a limp or a scar to assuage her guilt. She had to pay her price for surviving in a different, much crueler way. She had a nervous breakdown six weeks after I had returned from the hospital. She took to her bed and cried around the clock. She went away for a little rest. She was gone for a month, and my father had to hire a nurse to stay with me.

After my mother returned from the hospital, we never mentioned Abe’s name again.

A memory: The old house in Laurel Canyon, high in the Hollywood hills, with a view to the sea. My mother is standing at the sink, her arms immersed in soapy water; she cries, great loud, wet, shuddering sobs. She thinks I don’t see her. She always cries when her arms are all soapy and hidden in water and she thinks no one is around.

Those were the only times I ever saw her cry.

My parents divorced after I left home for college. My mother moved to a small house in Brentwood, the last holdout on a street of McMansions. She’s agoraphobic now. Her best friend is Anna-Rosa the cleaning lady who comes five days a week to clean, and brings her family for the holidays, so my mother is not alone. And her house is very clean. Her agoraphobia certainly cuts into our quality time together, not that there was ever much of that.

The woman won’t leave her house. She will not set foot in a car. And since, as you might imagine, I don’t trust cars either, I loathe the drive to L.A.. Our main contact is via the telephone. We speak once a week, and then briefly. I come into L.A. twice a year: once on her birthday, and once on Valentine’s Day. I don’t come in for the major holidays; traffic is a pain in the ass. We always spend Valentine’s Day together.

Anyway, after the accident, my family had pretty much done away with attempts at celebrating anything. The big family holiday dinners with friends, and distant cousins, and cousins of cousins- vanished. The friends and cousins vanished.

We three Wellmans went to Lawry’s Prime Rib for Thanksgivings, and whatever winter holidays we were recognizing on that December 25th. After my father found God, we started going to Glatt’s Famous and it was always Hanukah and Passover we celebrated. No more Easter eggs or Christmas trees. No more Kwanzaa.

Holidays are not an issue now for my mother and me. Twice a year seems to work for us both. My mother has Anna-Rosa and her parrot, ‘Ol’ Blue’, whom she loves. She is never alone.

And my father, ah yes. He, after the accident, went into a long dark period of self-questioning, disappearing for weeks at a time, going on a wide variety of spiritual retreats, like someone at a smorgasbord of faiths. And finally, six years after the accident, he renounced his fervent atheism and embraced his roots. He joined a synagogue and dragged my mother to Friday night services. I refused to go.

He left us when my mother declined his demand for a kosher home.

After the divorce he became an Orthodox Jew. He grew a long beard and sideburns down to his collar. He dresses funny. He remarried, a young widow with two small boys whom he has adopted and given his name. She keeps a kosher home. They live in mid-Los Angeles, near La Brea Blvd, in a neighborhood full of affluent Orthodox Jews. He goes to temple every day. The kosher eating has turned him plump. He used to be slim.

I haven’t seen him since he married Shoshanna. We mostly have an e-mail relationship that’s as sporadic as my visits are with my mother. The new wife doesn’t like me. I don’t like her. She and her unattractive children and her God have usurped my father.

That’s okay. After the accident, we were no good at all as a family- my mother crying into the kitchen sink, my father cursing the universe, trying to find a reason for existence, me feeling hideous, and guilty for being alive, hiding my scars and staying out of their way.

And Abe, he’s somewhere in limbo for the Wellmans.

CHAPTER THREE:

So this is how I wound up standing in my own meadow, in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a storm, rhapsodizing about nature.

After my moment of urban clarity thirteen years ago, awakened as I was by the raving lunatic beneath my loft window ranting about rampaging cannibal pussies, that was the moment I realized that I was not tethered to any one locale. I was free to live anywhere I damn well pleased.

And my thoughts inevitably turned to the happiest of my childhood recollection, the cabins we rented every year in once tiny Mountain towns outside of Los Angeles: Blue Jay, Arrowhead, Big Bear, towns that have now become

get-away suburbs, but were then barely villages. I embraced heart-achingly warm memories of dappled sunlight pouring through redwood branches, fresh air, big sky, creeks with cold flowing water up to my ankles, slippery river rocks beneath my feet, tadpoles swimming around my