Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (18 page)

My next
Mad
magazine–type job was a real kettle of piranha fish. It sounded completely legitimate, and that’s why I did so well the first few weeks. I had to sit on the phone in a room with seven other prattling salespeople, call various companies, and in a chirpy, this-is-your-lucky-day voice, offer the employees two days and three nights at a fabulous resort in Las Vegas for two, for the mere pittance of
39.95! One of my early paychecks was
706.09, and it felt swell to be able to spend hours at the swap meets and flea markets, pulling Nick in a little red wagon, on the lookout for grimy treasures disguised as trash: serene masks from Africa, handpainted silhouette fairies, exquisite lace shawls wadded into a ball for two dollars and fifty cents. I’m such an innocent geek that it took me awhile to realize it was a time-share situation, and when the poor slobs got to good ol’ Lost Wages (using up their hard-earned vacation time), they were treated to a three-hour hard sell for a time-share condo in the middle of the desert, complete with little slips of paper they could trade for a free dollar keno ticket and a frightening fake-shrimp cocktail. I felt real bad about the semi-deception, but my daddy was sure impressed with my paychecks. He loved the idea that his little girl was making good. I would show him the aging trinkets I found at swaps and garage sales, gleaned from the bottom of someone’s barrel, and he would commend me for my keen eye. Underneath it all, I ached to make him proud of me.

My daddy is the guy who turned me on to the glory of collecting junk. He took me to the Saugus swap meet when I was barely in a bra, and we poked through people’s old, dusty, rusty stuff, hoping to score a masterpiece for fifty cents. He had the highest hopes of anybody I know, and my mom always said that I was born with his optimism and ridiculous hope for the future. It must be genetic, because at the time his pipe dreams appeared to be just so many frustrated, bungled attempts at grasping for that star-spangled, gold-plated brass ring. Not only did he miss it most of the time, he crash-landed so hard that we were constantly in debt and eating potato soup. It was delicious but redundant.

In his early days in Lancaster, O. C. Miller ran a gas station, where he cut off the tip of his finger slamming the hood of an Edsel, and he wasn’t able to play guitar or banjo anymore. Good-bye highfalutin dreams of show biz. He fixed vacuum cleaners and big American cars, then got a job bottling Budweiser, thanks to Mom’s heroic, valiant attempts to settle him down and coax him into normalcy. Those blasted Budweiser labels littered our house, their backs waiting to be covered with my childish stick figures and girls’ pointy-nosed profiles or Mom’s notes for recipes. I even passed boy-notes on them in school. Still, Daddy schemed and dreamed, gambling our modest fortunes on several gold digathons down in Mexico, convinced there was treasure in them thar hills. He actually did find a thick, long vein of gold way, way down past Mazatlán but didn’t have the cash or connections to have roads built to get to the mother lode. I still have a snapshot of him astride a put-upon mule, his feet dragging the ground, a look of obstructed, fading glory in his green eyes. He brought back a small canning jar half-full of nuggets, which he would gaze at bleary-eyed after they pulled our perfect house in Reseda right out from under us. And we had just gotten wall-to-wall. Mom wouldn’t speak to him as we packed our worldly goods and headed for a cheap apartment in North Hollywood. But by then I was swimming in rock and roll and dying to get back to the Sunset Strip where I could cavort with the Iron Butterfly. It was a sorry scene.

Oren Coy Miller was born in 1914 in North Carolina to a hotheaded, Napoleonic Pilgrim Holiness preacher and his downtrodden, saintly wife. In his rebel youth O.C. was already working in the coal mines, going down, down, down, bringing home the bacon to subsidize ten siblings while his banty-rooster father roamed the hollers, dragging sorry souls to Christ. He had a mess of sisters who were devoted to Jesus and were always out to trap his soul behind those heavenly, pearlescent guilt-stained gates. He ran the other way until the very last minute. Daddy was so damn gorgeous by the time he was twenty years old, looking so much like Clark Gable that people started calling him Hollywood, and he stayed an aloof, tempting playboy until he met my stunning mom, Margaret Ruth Hayes, ten years later. She has since told me it was a serious mismatch but she had been determined to entrap the guy-most-likely-to-remain-a-bachelor-forever because of the enticing challenge.

He called me, his only child, “punkin’ ” and “birdlegs” and took me swimming at his divorced friend’s fancy house in Sherman Oaks. When I think of the fifties, I always see Emil Decker’s twinkling,
Technicolor, sun-drenched swimming pool, I smell the exotic, pungent chlorine, I feel the dripping wet suit clinging to my scrawny prepubescent ribcage as I fly through the air off the springy diving board. I was usually alone in the pool while Daddy played poker with Emil and his buddies. I could hear big laughter and shuffling cards, clinking ice cubes, and Dean Martin’s lazy promises of
amore
while I paddled around in the sparkles, wishing I could look just like Jayne Mansfield with her sucked-in tummy and stiff white pageboy.

When I was a little girl I did Daddy’s nails for a quarter. When I got older I did the job for free while we watched
Bonanza
, using an emery board and a nail clipper to bridge the gap between us. Our fingers were exactly the same, long and thin with weird, flat thumbs. I fiddled with his hands and he was content. O.C. was from that wretched phase of men who weren’t allowed to show their love, their sorrow, or their pain. They were very much allowed to be pissed off. He would look down at me from six feet tall, a towering, mysterious male smelling of dangerous sweat; his crinkly green eyes slightly curious. I would look back up at his contained rage and curiosity from my confused, pubescent female perspective, wondering what he thought of me and why did his temples pound so? Did I have anything to do with it? I never did doubt his love, even though he wasn’t able to warm me up with it like I secretly dreamed he would. Mom made sure I knew my daddy loved me but spared me from his all-too-human, foibled, frustrated, furrowed brow.

Daddy and I argued about black people and Vietnam. When I started having a left-wing mind of my own, he was stunned and appalled because he was an American all the way. He was a solid navy man whose ship got blown in half during World War II and who survived to proudly tell the harrowing tale. When I insisted on having a black, gay roommate, he threatened to disown me, his growly voice splintering with embedded prejudice. But Mom, to the eternal rescue, placated, cajoled, and explained, “This is a new generation, Oren, things have changed,” and when her soothing words didn’t work, she finally had to give him one of the three ultimatums of their married life—“Don’t ever ask me to choose between you and our daughter, because you would lose.” His temples stopped pumping with angry dad-blood soon after. We quarreled and clashed on a constant basis, but his mighty, whooping laugh, somehow full of hope, always reminded me that we had the same blood careening wildly within.

O. C. Miller smoked two packs a day way before the surgeon general made his nightmarish proclamation, and he continued to do so even after he started hacking great gobs of black goo from his lungs on a regular basis. After many endless coughing spells my mom finally convinced him to see a doctor. He dreaded the day and put it off because he feared “the Big C.” That’s what John Wayne called it before he withered up and rode off into the sunset for the last time.

I have always had a ghoulish fear of cancer myself. One lazy summer night when I was eight years old I had my head in Mom’s lap, sort of dozing while she and my auntie gabbed it up on the front porch. I didn’t have anything to do the next day but skate up and down Jamieson Avenue and change the diapers on my Tiny Tears doll, but what my beloved aunt blabbed to my mom changed that adorable innocence into an obsessive red fear that took years to get over. Aunt Edna was a janitor at a grade school, and that very afternoon an old man had scuttled into the playground with a shotgun, howling and groaning, and within minutes blew off the top of his head. If this wasn’t hideous enough to freak out the impressionable, imaginative eight-year-old, wait for what came next. “Edna, do you think Pam should hear this?” “Oh, Margaret, she’s sound asleep.” “She hears
everything
, Edna.” My aunt went on in a hushed tone that hardened the gruesome facts into stone. “The top of his head went sailing out into the yard and landed on the chain-link fence,” she whispered loudly, “brains were everywhere, and would you believe that a big buzzard flew down and landed on what was left of that poor man’s head?” My mom was appropriately shocked and asked why someone would do such a thing, and in front of the children, too. “Oh, before he shot himself he said he couldn’t live with the suffering anymore. He had brain
cancer.”

The Big C.

I kept the noxious fear inside me until I couldn’t think about anything else, couldn’t sleep, read, play, or watch TV, much less blithely skate down the street or wipe a rubber butt. I saw that old man’s head sailing through the air with the greatest of ease over and over and over again; spinning like a wet red top in the blinding Valley sunshine. Mom thought I was getting the flu until I finally asked, tight and petrified, “Mama, what’s cancer?” She told me gently about the awful disease but reminded me that Aunt Edna exaggerated
profoundly and told me to try not to think about it anymore. “Can children get it?” Can children get it? Can children get it? CAN CHILDREN GET IT?????

Twenty years later we waited for my dad’s tests to come back without saying the (big) “C” word, and all those grotesque fears floated through my mind like the ruined old guy’s head-top, but since I had delved into cosmic consciousness by then, I really worked hard at staving off that ancient, gleaming memory. So when the tests showed that he didn’t have the Big C but
did
have black lung disease, I had an irrational mixture of relief and rage that temporarily twisted my sanity.

O.C. took this meaty news in the same stride he took everything else, with stewing anger and hearty optimism. After smoking two packs a day for fifty years, he put the Marlboros down and never looked back. He had to quit working at Budweiser, since his breathing had become shallow and difficult, though this, of course, did not inhibit his imbibing. He considered drinking several beers a day a healthy practice because of the hops involved. Even after he quit Budweiser, he went to the side door every Friday and got his case of comfort at half price. The TV took on major importance: the trusty
TV Guide
his reading matter of choice. He pored through the classifieds, still on the search for an elusive magic bargain, haggling on the phone for hours with other “collectors” to take his mind off his hurting inhalations. He was forever strapped to an oxygen tank, his tragic lungs failing him more every day. He detested the bedpan, and the fact that my mom had to deal with it shook his manhood to the core. Even when he finally had to get that damned wheelchair, he made it to his card game puffing, panting, coughing, and hacking all the way. He still had a Cadillac, his only status symbol. We always had Cadillacs; never new, but long, sleek, and shiny just the same. Mom wheeled him to the Caddy, packed up the chair, and he grunted and groaned behind the wheel, driving ten miles an hour, determined to get down the street to Astro Aviation where Bruce Baker or Ed Eudie would meet him at the other end, unpack the chair, and wheel him into the far end of the factory where the chips flew and the ice cubes clinked.

On top of the daily grind, O.C. had a mysterious overnight personality change that made Mom’s life temporarily unbearable. All of a sudden, the goulash he had always relished became tasteless and dull, the game shows he usually enjoyed were full of stupid, ignorant sluts who never knew the correct answer, and a streak of unattended
dust made him sputter with indignation. After enduring the onslaught for awhile, praying it would end, Mom started varying the scads of medication Daddy had to deal with every day, and found that a day without prednisone was a day with sunshine. The doctor switched the monster-making drug for another one, and Daddy snapped out of it, never knowing he had been a complete and utter boor.