Granddad

Like an aged film
The moment comes
It's okay
I've seen this one before
“I've got some bad news” = death
Who? What? When?
We talk on
Following yesterday's script
Rewind
I FEEL!
Control slips
I sit in my box
Can't digitize my emotions
For satellite transmission
Memories cloud my air
With pixilated tears
The act goes on
I say my lines
Curtain called
Goodbye, goodbye Granddad

I was in India when my Grandfather died. He died alone in his apartment in Santa Cruz and wasn't found till many days later when his body began to rot. But I was far from the stench, far from family, on my solitary aimless travels, alone in my hotel room in Kerala. I was waiting for more friends to show up and in the meantime just hanging out in town, going to the book stores and drinking too much coffee. So I thought it would be a good time to ring up the family. I called my dad and he dropped the news. He had just found out himself the day before yesterday and he and my uncle were heading down to Santa Cruz the next day to wrap things up. Even though I was thousands of miles away, I was one of the first to know. My brother and sister were still in the dark, and the emotional weight of Granddad’s death hit me hard.

Fuck it hit me hard! The tears of the intervening oceans captured my eyes. Shut up in my cheap Trivandrum room, I ragged with sadness and loss and wrote out my pain. He was part of the chain that made me who I was and got me to India in the first place. Granddad had been in India some twenty years previous and I had had been looking forward to finally having something to talk about that might interest us both. He’d gone to Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, and for the rest of his life wore the Hindi sacred saffron orange. I wanted to see the things he had seen and more, be able to make some more real connection with him. I really wanted to hear his stories beyond the bullshit that he was usually spouting off about. Out of everyone in the family, I was the most sympathetic to his selfish, self-centered ways, but I accepted him in spite of them. But despite that I never expected to be so torn up by his death. Maybe it was because my early childhood memories had been in such sharp focus.

I remember when I was maybe four or five, he had this huge argument with my mom and she kicked him out said he could never come back. I have no idea what the argument was about, but it was loud, confusing and frightening. And then for years he was gone from my life, just this vague presence only rarely referenced. Then after my parents divorced, our dad would take us sometimes to Café Flore to see him. He always had these little plastic pouches that he'd pull out and give us each a sticker. I'd drink my Calistoga and we'd sit with him while his friends (or as I later learned, his acid customers) came by to pay their respects. And as I grew up, that was pretty much the only place I saw him. Once hanging out with a friend in the Castro, I joked that he was always at Café Flore and sure enough, we stopped by and there he was. Even now, if I go there, his presence there is strong for me and I half expect him to be sitting at his table, pulling things out of his bag and going on about the Goddess in his soft sing-song voice.

For much of my life, he was this clownish, pitiful, charlatan character that was largely irrelevant. What I knew about him was inferred from snatches of conversation and wrapped in his myth making. I knew he was adopted, the supposedly illegitimate son of his "uncle". The guess was that his mother was probably Native America or at least half, but the people who would have known were long gone. He fought in Europe in WWII and had a medal. Going through his effects years later, there was only a photo of war buddies and a hand of cards that must have meant something. Maybe a big payoff? , He never really wanted to talk about his war experiences though, as long as I had known him. But for the rest of his life he carried a "lucky" cricket-clicker like those used on D-Day. But I did hear the story once that after the war, he swore off meat, shaved his head and moved to San Francisco. And to me that sounds like a man that had miraculous escaped some horrific circumstances and was both traumatized and transformed. In the fifties he had a job delivering Coca-Cola, and fell into the Beat culture, or the at least it’s outer fringes. He wrote poetry and got a few published, I think, in various, obscure, small-circulation beat magazines of the day. Somewhere in this time period, he knocked some girl up and the baby, my aunt, was "adopted" by his mom. I think it was soon after this that he met my grandmother through his mom. His mom lived in the same small Central Valley town as my grandmother and thought to introduce them. My grandmother moved up to San Francisco and I think she started nursing school with her sister, but it wasn’t for her. She was hooked into my grandfather though and they'd go drunken sailing with her sister and her brother-in-law. Soon enough they were married and she was pregnant with my dad, maybe even in that order. They lived in some little cottage in Bernal Heights and lived the high life, drinking, smoking and partying it up. As my aunt got older, she'd come up to San Francisco to visit her "uncle" who was gradually revealed to be her dad. Of course, my grandmother was not very happy about the whole situation and I imagine there were some big, drag-out, alcohol infused fights. My uncle was born, and soon after, granddad got a writing residency in Mexico City. So the whole family moved down there for a momentous year, and he wrote as the illusion of a family life eroded around them.

When they moved back to San Francisco, the marriage sputtered on, but I think it was already largely in tatters. Eventually, he was ready in Timothy Leary's terms to "drop put". My dad had already left home at 14-15 and was finding his way into proto-hippy circles. My grandfather began flirting with new-age religions, and that was the final straw for my grandmother. She took my uncle, first moving to someplace in the Tenderloin and eventually to Georgia, with her new husband. I think it was around this time that my granddad went back to Mexico, following the hippie trail to Yelapa.

Yelapa is about an hour's boat ride from Puerto Vallarta and was a virtual island with no streets, no electricity and no phones. However, it did become an important hideout for the hippie elite, such as Dylan, Fonda, Nicholson, Hopper, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Xaviera Hollander. And there he made his home, organized the first full-moon parties and lived the soft life. At some point, he had acquired two names and two social security numbers (perhaps in the war?) and was able to collect government checks in both, so he had more then enough to live quite well in Yelapa. Then he began to swim in the same water as John C. Lily, reputed to be the best LSD brew-master, and began to quietly deal on his trips up to San Francisco. But while he was never much of a grandfather to me, he did become a grandfather figure in the village of Yelapa.

He still carried his tin cricket-clicker and developed a little ritual to satisfy the curiosity of the local children. Once a day, and only once a day, he would hold the clicker towards a child and click it twice, saying "Que tenga buena suerye/May you have good luck". The mystery of who he would click at and when pleased the children immensely, and they began to call him "Chicharra" for the sound of the clicker. He acquired yet another name and the role as the village clown/trickster, loved by generations.

Then when he was in San Francisco, he tried to play the role us grandchildren and give us each a reflective prism sticker. But it didn’t work nearly as well on us. We were sophisticated City kids, not easily impressed, and always picking up the uncomfortable prickliness between him and our dad.

Of course, it was also in the guise of Chicharra that he attempted to seduce whatever young hippie girls where in town with his spiels on the Goddess, the spiritual power of Tantric sex, or whatever new idea he had. He had this photo that he’s always hand out, of himself standing on a rock in front of the Yelapa waterfall with his arms out-stretched as some benevolent god. And he always had some slick plan on how his self-published newspaper "Hola Amigos" or his vast archive of San Francisco '60s alternative magazines was going to make him rich. He was always going through the motions of self-promotion, able to charm the stranger, but never always at some distance with the people that knew him well.

And with his death, all those chances to make some real connections were lost forever.