Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (46 page)

And then Mary Jo met Renee Sotile. They met at a club one night and struck up a conversation. Renee was a band manager with a day job as a news camerawoman. As a band manager, she was the kind of woman who could make sure that angry bands actually showed up on time for their gigs. She seemed to have her act together.

“
Can I have your card?” Mary Jo asked at closing time.

“
Sure,” Renee winked, clinking beer bottles. “As long as you give me yours!”

Renee scheduled an appointment for a teeth cleaning with Mary Jo. A few days later, Renee showed up on time for the appointment.

Mary Jo diagnosed Renee as a healthy young woman who had brushed, flossed, and taken care of herself. She had big blue eyes that impressed Mary Jo as sweet and endearing. Even in the dental chair, the eyes signaled neither anxiety nor distress.

“
You seem unusually calm,” Mary Jo scraped away the tartar and plaque.

“
Well, you’re not gonna hurt me, are you?” Renee gurgled and giggled through the dental instruments.

“
I’m glad you trust me,” Mary Jo removed the instruments.

Renee relaxed her jaw. “You can trust me, too,” she blushed.

As the appointment came to an end, Mary Jo scribbled something on a piece of paper alongside the dental records. She then handed Renee the prescription. “Here’s my home phone number.”

Renee called Mary Jo and invited her to drive north to see Joan Jett play in San Francisco. They drove to the city and followed Joan to the wine country for an encore.

Renee and Mary Jo took their time driving the 500 miles home. As the oldies station on the car radio played the 1974 rhythm-and-blues love song by The Stylistics, “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” Mary Jo reached over to hold Renee’s hand:

When they reached West Hollywood, Renee pulled into the driveway of Mary Jo’s apartment. “I’m gonna miss you,” said Renee.

“
Me, too,” said Mary Jo. “That’s how I feel.”

The engine purred.

It was the late spring of 1994.

At the age of 34 going on 35, Mary Jo knew that she’d finally found the right one. Unlike her previous girlfriends, each of whom had possessed their own gifts and talents, “Renee was a rock. She was reliable. She meant what she said. She could be trusted.” Mary Jo could take only so many emotional punches, and Renee didn’t seem likely to throw any.

Renee had other qualities that Mary Jo came to appreciate more than ever. Unlike many of the other social outcasts whom Mary Jo had befriended in the underground music scene, Renee had a stable foundation. She came from a solid family. They loved her. She loved them. She didn’t use drugs or abuse alcohol. She was kind to others. She prayed. “Basic stuff,” said Mary Jo.

It was the same stuff that Mary Jo had learned from her parents and from the nuns way back in grade school. She had hated being in school back then and being forced by the nuns to wear an uncomfortable uniform and painful shoes. But the nuns had taught her the basic stuff.

“
I realized how long I’d been compromising,” she recollected. “How crazy my life had become with its whirl of bands, gigs, parties, and relationships. How far I’d traveled to find myself. And how ironic it was that I’d almost lost myself in the process of finding myself.”

Renee brought Mary Jo back home to her foundation. Mary Jo could disagree with Renee, but that didn’t compel Renee to leave or to look for comfort from somebody else. Her bedrock was too stable for that. With that kind of stability in the bedrock, Mary Jo and Renee could kick up dirt and stones now and then and yet still land together back on firm ground. They could roll on the rock.

11. The AIDS Epidemic

Jigsaw puzzles fascinated me as a kid. I started out with the small ones and worked up to the big ones, spending hours in glorious contemplation at a card table in the playroom. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than finding the connecting links among the hundreds of scattered shapes and colors. Each puzzle offered so much promise at the start, when it was easy to frame the neat parameters of a border around the remaining jumble of pieces that would assuredly contribute to the whole. It was even more gratifying to fill in the middle sections, because that required an understanding of the personality of each individual piece and its relationship to the other pieces. Best of all was the very end. There was no prouder moment than snapping into place the very last piece, stepping back, and observing how that one last piece almost single-handedly created a thing of beauty, because there could be no beauty as long as any single piece had been left out of the picture. That final snap was like no other snap. I couldn’t rest until the very last piece was firmly in place. It was simply too fulfilling to stop working. It gave me a profound sense of peace to make order out of the chaos of pieces.

Until Stan stole a piece just to drive me crazy. He slipped it into the pocket of his drab green bathrobe one day in 1970 and slunk off to the fallout shelter when I wasn’t looking. He was 18. I was 8. He succeeded in tormenting me. Everything fit but that one last piece. The puzzle was the best one I’d ever done. It had everything: blue skies, white clouds, snowcapped mountains, forested foothills, gurgling river rapids, and spring blossoms in the windowsills of an Alpine chalet. And a great big hole where the missing piece should’ve been.

I searched and searched every corner of the playroom and toy room, bereft.

The merciless big brother finally crept from his underworld. He was sniggering smugly, dangling the last piece between his thumb and forefinger. “I’m gonna finish your puzzle,” he kept teasing in a singsong way. “I’m gonna finish your puzzle.”

“
I can’t believe you did that!” I shouted with such disappointment that he shut up.

He handed over the last piece. He let me put it into place. But it slipped in with more of a thud than a snap. The joy was gone. The fit could no longer be assured, neither in that jigsaw puzzle nor in any other. That was my last one. I walked away.

Stan felt so bad about what he’d done that he helped me glue the completed puzzle onto an art board. The mounted puzzle hung on my bedroom wall for years. At least nobody could pull
that
one apart.

Fortunately, the jigsaw puzzle of Saint Lawrence Martyr Elementary School felt like the perfect fit for me. It had taken a few years for the breath of fresh air that had swept through the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65 to travel from Rome to the California shores; but by the time I entered the first grade in 1968, the nuns had flung open their convent windows to contemporary society. I imbibed the religious training from the by-then liberated, habit-burning, Vietnam-era nuns.

They were a distinctly different breed of nun from the bead-swinging disciplinarians known to my older brothers and sisters in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The nuns of the late 1960s and 1970s no longer concealed the edges of their faces with stiff white wimples. The new nuns replaced their full-length robes with medium-length skirts and traded their long black veils for short transparent sky-blue ones that rested comfortably upon their free-flowing hair. The new nuns implemented bold new concepts, like student government and a student newspaper. They turned our religion classes into discussions of current events, sparking heated debates about the legitimacy of the Vietnam War, the urgency of the civil rights movement, and the utility of affirmative action as a remedy for historical injustice. The new nuns read
The Diary of Anne Frank
aloud in class, atoning for the sins of anti-Semitism, and replaced the traditional hymns at our monthly school Masses with songs culled directly from the countercultural airwaves.

Neatly arranged in the pews by class, about 600 of us kids in our egalitarian uniforms followed the lead of the guitar-strumming nuns on the altar and sang the hymns of the 1960s. By far, the most popular hymn was “Get Together” by The Youngbloods:

The modern nuns denounced the evils of conspicuous consumption and preached the virtues of conservation. Practicing what they preached, they held competitions to see which classes could recycle the most aluminum cans, the most ring-tops from aluminum cans, and the most Campbell Soup labels—all to support good causes, like new overhead projectors for our classrooms.

Conservation was the redeeming spirit of the age. Environmental pollution and a string of shortages had left us kids of the 1970s to grow up saving energy, water, meat, pennies, and toilet paper. Even our very own Jesuit-educated Governor Jerry Brown extolled an “era of limits” and harnessed electricity from windmills and walnut shells.

The nuns enthusiastically invited this world into our classrooms and brought our classrooms out into the world. They took us on bike rides along the beach to rejoice in the wonders of creation. They mobilized us to pick up trash and to paint fire hydrants. They implored us to get involved in our community and to make the world a better place.

The mission of the modern nuns: to build the kingdom of God on earth. Their objective: to train the future leaders of the kingdom. Their strategy: to engage the future leaders in building the kingdom of God on earth right now!

The nuns infused their catechism with patriotism. In early 1976, they organized a school-wide Mass to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial. For this Mass, they substituted liturgical hymns with patriotic songs. Better yet, the nuns enlisted me to play the songs on the piano on the altar, and I couldn’t have imagined any greater honor or privilege.

The youthful congregation sang along as I played “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a third song that best captured the spirit of America as championed by the nuns: an America in which the moral measure of economic success was meeting the needs of the poor. Penned by the Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus, the words of the song had been inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

For me, the nuns stood for everything that America
should
be, in stark contrast to what we had lived through during the previous decade. It was a time when the beauty of America had faded in the eyes of many my age. Heroes had been assassinated at home. Unjustified war had been waged abroad. The moon landing of 1969 had sent shivers down our spines, but even that exalted moment became forever sullied by its comparison to every glaring imperfection in American life. “If we can send a man to the moon,” went the cliché, “how come we can’t end poverty” or “end hunger” or “end segregation” or “stop the war” or do them all? Even the moon landing, the century’s greatest technological triumph, became an instrument of backhanded blame. And then, just a few years after that “giant leap for mankind,” the Watergate scandal sent us an even bigger leap backward. The president and his men had corrupted the electoral process itself, betraying America and everything for which it stood. Many Americans seemed to lose faith in America. To me, it felt like the vibrant spirit of democracy had been suddenly sucked away and supplanted by a widespread spirit of cynicism and distrust. Vietnam and Watergate had proven that our government was rotten at the core. All the crooks were running everything. All the good people were getting killed. Then in 1976, we marked our bicentennial with an accidental president and vice president, neither of whom had been elected. It was a tough time to count our blessings. It became especially tough to answer the question of what it meant to be an American. I was almost afraid to ask.