Author Archives: carlastockton

So Long, Frank Gehry

When I was young, Reader’s Digest, a subscription to which my 9th Grade English teacher included in her yearly syllabus, ran a feature called “My Most Unforgettable Character.”  It was the monthly’s most popular feature, and I wrote a few character sketches and thought one day I would submit one to the magazine.  I never did.   Truth be told, I don’t think I ever really met my MOST unforgettable character until 2005, when I took a job as a guide on a New York City tour bus.

In that job, every day was a new adventure.  I was lucky.  Everyone I met was reasonably personable. Well, almost everyone. One time a pair of gang kids tried to hijack the bus I was on, but finding a police person was easy back in the days when crime was still against the law.  In a trice, the cops took the interlopers into custody, and our tour commenced without further incident.  The event stands out in memory because it was unique.  I came to hate the working conditions and the attitudes of the owners, my bosses, but the people I worked with, like the people I entertained, were, for the most part, people I enjoyed being around.  Some were, of course, more colorful than others, and none was as remarkable as Sarabeth.    

Sarahbeth was my favorite person in the bus world. She was saving up for gender reassignment – her birth name was Stanley — but divorce from a greedy wife, mental illness in a daughter whom neither Stanley nor Sarabeth would ever abandon, and frequent gender transgressions that led to Stanley’s being fired, which left Sarabeth with no money for the surgeries.

Instead,  Sarahbeth made powerful self-assertions by wearing, in all weather, Bermuda shorts fashioned in bright orange sweatshirt fabric, frowzy blouses and tops that plunged below the prominent and rapidly graying chest hairline, and neon-colored sneakers.  Her hair and mouth were a whirling forest of bright tangerine curls and a soft, pillowy hot pink triangle.

“I’m a lesbian,” Sarahbeth explained to me the first time she asked me out to dinner. I was flattered.  No one I had ever met was smarter or funnier than this person, both qualities I have always found irresistible in a man.  I had no interest in being romantically involved with a woman, even a woman who was, anatomically at least, still a man.  I didn’t want to hurt Sarahbeth’s feelings, and though I turned down the invitations to dinner, to movies, to theater, we often sat together as we waited between buses, and I never tired of listening to the stories she told. 

The personal stories were harrowing, beginning with a lower East Side childhood, and the professional stories were infuriating.  This person had tolerated more than anyone’s fair share of abuse by the system over the years, and if I had had more imagination or a better apartment, I would have invited her over for sleepovers. 

My touring repertoire grew astronomically, thanks to Sarabeth’s knowledge of the city.  Having studied architecture, she was conversant with the nuances of styles of the eclectic buildings of the city. As an astute political observer,  she understood underpinnings of Tammany, why Robert Moses was more tyrant than savior.  She explained to me why the Breslin-Mailer campaign to create the great city-state, a movement I enthusiastically worked for, was basically moronic.  Having studied labor law, leaned heavily on her when we had labor disputes. When the company abused us, it was Sarabeth who spoke most eloquently and with the most erudition. She knew the score.  She understood what we were entitled to and what was being kept from us with malicious, greedy fury.

There was no bathroom for our relief.  For a while we were allowed to use the rest rooms in the Hilton Garden Inn, which was less than a block from our post, and the management there even encouraged us to buy goods in their gift store and food mart by giving us a twenty percent discount. 

One day Sarabeth farted and sighed loudly in a stall in the women’s room at the Hilton, and a tourist seated next to her, the woman in the next stall, securely separated by a metal wall and a locked door, freaked out at the sound of a male voice sighing on the tail of a roaring fart. She complained to the Hilton management.  After that, all guides were banned from the place.  No more comfy lounge seats, no more cheap candy bars, no more toilet. 

I left the buses to edit a book for the friend of a friend. The book was set in our City, but the author knew little about NY and wrote locations that were amiss, and a protagonist, who was supposed to be from Iowa but was more accurately an Englishman in New York.  To do the work, I went to London for a few months, and when I returned, Sarabeth was gone. 

Consistently, Sarabeth had argued that the conditions atop the buses were unfit for guides.  We had no place to sit.  We were required at times to perform chores – like helping the elderly up the stairs or carrying baby paraphernalia or lugging luggage up the stairs – that put undue strain on all our muscle groups.  We stood for long periods of time, jostled mercilessly about.

Sarabeth’s back and health could not take it.  She suffered pneumonia and bronchitis and then was injured and re-injured until she finally had no choice but to undergo surgery.  Like many back surgery patients, Sarabeth did not survive. The company, which never appreciated what an asset Sarabeth was, was relieved. Tethered by Sarabeth’s knowledge of the law, they had felt forced to retain her. Further, her illnesses and back troubles cost them money by way of pay they were impelled to dole out and by insurance rate hikes her claims inflicted.   The blood suckers were free at last. 

We tour guides, who loved Sarabeth, lost a precious friend.  New York City lost a champion.

Pride

  In the third week of my second year of college, I decided I had to drop out. I told the registrar at the University of New Mexico I was pregnant so I could collect my tuition money and run away to New York with my boyfriend.  We were both gold-green and scared. I was 18, still living in books, and he was 20, just a kid from the rez near Santa Fe.  We’d heard that even in New York there were laws against illegal cohabitation, and we were worried we’d be arrested if we tried to shack up.  Where would we live?

Mid-flight, halfway across the country, I remembered that my grandmother had a cozy little apartment in her Queens home basement that we might rent if we were married.  So, soon after we landed, we wed.

Grandma’s and my relationship was historically fraught.  Her life had tortured her, and even I understood that that gave her license to torture me.  Before her whole family was forced out of Vienna, the city she loved, before the Nazis murdered her two most beloved brothers and a revered sister, before my grandfather’s illness took all that was left of her endurance, she had buried her favorite daughter, her much-adored first grandson, and even her long-awaited, highly prized son to freakish illnesses and accidents. She took solace in the Cutty Sark and beer she kept close to her in ample supply. As she drank, she descended into dark, evil moods that riveted her to her couch in an unlit corner of her living room. 

In those days, Grandma was a big woman, and her presence was terrifying. She would sit on her couch by herself, sullenly knitting or crocheting, a bloated, glowering Mme. Defarge, muttering her complaints mostly about me, her third surviving grandchild and a massive disappointment.  She smoked a pack of unfiltered camels a day, so her litany of my shortcomings – too fat, too lazy, too blonde, too stupid to be 6 or 7 or 8, 9, 10—was punctuated by the rasp of expectorating sputum. My only defense? I called her Grandma, which she hated, instead of Mamma, as my cousins did.

By the time I needed her apartment, however, she and I had forged a truce.  I was, after all, a married lady, and I worked hard to maintain my professional demeanor, never missed work, cared for my new husband with all the deference and respect expected of a proper 60s wife.

But not for long.  Mickey and I said “I do” in October.   He nearly died of hepatitis in December, and I finally understood why we hadn’t yet conjoined.   Turned out he’d been living la gay vida loca all over NYC.  Yes, I had had a clue.  I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the information.  Besides, I loved him, loved his company.  His friendship was the most precious relationship I had ever had, and I never wanted to lose it.  The illness forced him to leave.  He was miserable in New York and wanted to be near his mother. He moved to Santa Fe in January, and I remained in Bayside, terrified to share the explanation with my grandmother. I didn’t want her to stop loving him.  But mostly I feared her derision.

One night I got home late from work in Manhattan, and I was lounging in bed, watching the Million Dollar Movie, when I heard a knock at my door.  I opened it to find my grandmother bent over in the cold, holding a batch of cookies she had baked earlier.  I was surprised to see her and just as surprised by the cookies – she rarely baked, and she never allowed me to eat bread in her presence, let alone cookies.  But I smiled and thanked her.

She coughed for a full minute and a half before she collapsed into a chair at my kitchen table.  I brought her a glass of water, and she nodded. 

“My brother was a faygele,” she said apropos of nothing.

“Hunh?” I wasn’t sure I had heard what I thought I heard.

“Like your Mickey.  He liked boys.  That’s why they took him first.  The Nazis.  To the death camp.”

I sat next to her, and she told me about my great Uncle Ferdinand, a gifted musician, a small hump-backed man, who painted and made his living as a bookbinder.  The Nazis relocated him to the popup ghetto along with his professional musicians brother and sister-in-law with whom he boarded. Then, the three were sent to Mali Trosinac. 

“The Nazis hated the homosexuals.  And anyone who tried to protect them. The brightest and the best they took from me.  Ferdinand, Max, and Paula.” She sighed, and her head dropped to her chest.  I thought she would fall asleep.  Then her emphysema cough startled her upright. She lit a cigarette and talked on into the night. The more she talked, in German and in English, the more elegant her prose became. What a facility she had for narration.  I was spellbound.

“Listen,” she said as she neared the end of her story.  “I know what it was like for you with all your brothers and sisters. You the oldest, you in charge of so many personalities. For me, it was not so different. Everywhere we went when I was a child, we, too, stuck out like a seamstress’s thumbs swollen with pinpricks. “

“You, Mamma?”

“Well, you know. I was the youngest.  Of ten.  Whether you’re six or eight or ten, you’re too many.  You’re always special.  Like my Ferdinand. And your Mickey.”

Gender Confusion

Ever wonder why Baby Boomer women are not all hip to gender dysphoria and its complex new requirements? Most of us have had our own bouts of confusion. Being female had so many pitfalls. What Freud called Penis Envy came from varied experiences, most of which proved that we would never be equal to the men who orchestrated our worlds. . . .

There we were, stuffed into Mark’s MGB – Mark in the driver’s seat, Michael in the passenger’s, and I curled onto the shelf in front of the back windshield – headed east across Route 40.

Somewhere between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Iowa City, Iowa, I got my period. . . . and my first glimpse of what might have been a moment of mild gender dysphoria.

It was April 1966; I was nearly 18.  My boyfriend Mark and I were on our way to celebrate in NYC.  Our plan was to drive to the city, spend a day, and drive back to Albuquerque in time for the last months of our second semester at the University of New Mexico. 

In many ways, the trip was more like an acid trip than real life.

It came about late one Friday night. We were at Mark’s with another friend, a guy named Michael, who had a mad crush on Mark.  I was just beginning to catch onto the vibe that Mark was actually more interested in Michael than in me, but I was still a virgin in every possible sense of the word, and while the information processing through me induced anxiety, I didn’t acknowledge its significance.

Mark and Michael were probably stoned, definitely mellow, They had either eaten small portions of shrooms or drunk large draughts of Romilar CF.  As one who hated feeling high, I was the designated straight man, so to speak, listening to a staticky jazz station on a transistor radio.  A woman’s voice covering Sinatra’s New York anthem caught my ear, and I dissolved into homesickness tears.

Mark and Michael stopped ogling each other to ask why I was crying, and the next thing I knew, we were stuffed into Mark’s MGB – Mark in the driver’s seat, Michael in the passenger’s, and I curled onto the shelf in front of the back windshield – headed east across Route 40.

“ First stop: Iowa City,” Mark announced. “Robin’ll be happy to see us.”

Robin, my counterpart in Iowa City,  had been Mark’s girlfriend when he was a freshman at the University of Iowa before his mother tugged him back to UNM, where, thanks to his Zuni ancestry, tuition was free.

A small fact that Mark failed to disclose was that his little car wasn’t actually his.  It was registered in both his and his twin brother Kent’s names.  He hadn’t told Kent what we were planning, so technically we were committing Grand Theft Auto. But had that occurred to any of us that night, we would not have cared.  We were on our way to New York City.

I desperately needed to get away. Spring Break gave me extreme agita, too much time to think. I didn’t know what to do with my growing awareness that Mark was not just a polite young man who respected me too much to ask for you know what.  I had no idea what my feelings were and no clue what I should do if I figured them out.  

If only, I thought, I were a boy.  Or better yet, a man.

I had often felt that I’d have been better off as a guy. I was a big girl – 5’7  “, 185 pounds. When I did dress up, my friends called me a beautiful drag queen, and I took that as a compliment, but I usually dressed as androgynously as my size and shape would allow. For this trip, I had brought my manliest outfits – baggy khakis, oversized sweatshirts, a huge trench coat borrowed from a friend.  I could have been my own brother, a linebacker or a shot putter out of uniform.

So there I was in Kansas – or some proximity thereto – without anything feminine.  I had entered a time in my life when denial was the only state I could bear to be in, so I was able to disavow any connection to womanhood.  How I could have ignored the fact that I’d eventually need feminine napkins and tampons eludes me now, but I was shocked when we made a pit stop, and the mess in my drawers reminded me I actually had an assigned gender. 

“I need to get to a drug store.  Pronto,” I told the boys as I climbed back onto my perch. 

Mark winced.  He was inordinately close to his mom and recognized the urgency in my tone. 

“Fuck,” he whined.  “We’ll. Have to detour off the highway.”

I felt the same rush of humiliation I’d been feeling since my cycles began when I was 9.  I muttered an apology before I closed my eyes and wished fervently for a Deus ex machina to swoop in and free me from the bonds of female fecundity.  Being a woman was embarrassing.  Nothing but trouble.  Worst of all, already undesirable to the boy I loved, I had become downright repugnant.

Had I ever liked being a girl?  Probably not.  My parents punished me for everything my brother got away with. I hated dolls and wanted to be a race car driver.  All the male cousins in our family made my mother and her sisters smile; when the boys were around, the tone in my grandmother’s voice turned dulcet.  When they left, she reverted to her shrewish self.  I was not pretty or delicate, and I could not relate to flirting.  No. I hated being a girl.

We stopped at the drugstore in some small hamlet near the highway. 

“Get me a pack of smokes while you’re in there,” Mark ordered.  “Montclairs.”

“Yeah,” barked Mike.  “And a Snickers bar for me.”

I roamed the store for a few minutes before I found what I needed.  Then, at the checkout, I pointed to the cigarettes, grabbed the chocolate bar. 

“Anything else?” the clerk asked me.

I shook my head.

“That’ll be $5 even.”

I put the money on the counter and, as I turned to leave, I heard him say without any irony in his voice, “Thank you, sir.  Come again.”

Every prickle in my uneasy personality stood up in my craw.  It startled me that I was angry.  How dare he?  Didn’t he get . . . .

I opened the door and turned around.

“Thanks, ma’am,” I said in my softest, most feminine purr.  “See ya.”

Sixteen hours after we left Albuquerque, we arrived at sweet Robin’s, where she gave us blankets and pillows so we could sack out on the floor of her living room.  In the morning, she let Mark use the phone to call his mom long distance. 

“Make it short though,” she pleaded.  “My parents’ll have a cow if the bill’s too big.”

Mark went into her bedroom to use the baby blue princess phone on the floor next to her mattress.  He closed the door behind him, hoping for some privacy.

A female voice shrieking epithets crossed all state lines and burst through the phone into the living room.  Then we heard Mark sobbing.

“He is such a little girl,” Michael sneered.  “He should ’a’ let you make that call.”

When Mark joined us, he said, “She told me if I’m not back by day after tomorrow, she’ll put out an APB.  She already told the tribal cops. She’s not kidding.  We gotta go back.”

Michael snorted.  “You are such a little girl.  What could the cops do anyhow?”

“Arrest us.  For stealing the car.  You know.  Kent can file a complaint. It’s as much his as it is mine.”

“Screw it then,” I said.  “Let’s go back.”

We folded ourselves back into the little toy vehicle and buzzed on over to Route I-80. 

“No stops except for gas, water, pee,” Mark proclaimed. Everything else would have to wait till we got to Albuquerque. 

Only we never did.

Michael was driving.  It was well past midnight, and we were a few miles out of Fort Morgan, Colorado on a deserted stretch of highway.  It was Mark’s turn to sleep on the ledge, and I was soundly snoring in the passenger seat when a deafening clunk, followed by a throbbing grind woke us up.  The car shimmied, then convulsed.  Michael pulled over as smoke began to pour out of the engine. 

“We gotta get outta this thing,” Mchael screamed, and we all jumped out and pulled as far away from the snorting machine as we could. 

“Shit,” Mark said, laying his head on my shoulder. “My mother’s gonna kill me.  And she’ll blame you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“You’re a girl.”

He was right.  Our escapade ended that night.  Mark called his brother.

“You asshole,” Kent said. “Just leave the car where it is. Greg ‘n’ I’ll drive over ‘n’ get it.”

Kent was a certified mechanic.  He’d know what to do with it.

Mark, Michael and I hitched a ride into town and found a room that Mark’s mother paid for, and we slept till it was time to catch the morning’s first Trailways back to Albuquerque. 

Mark’s mother never invited me back to their ranch.  She never spoke to me again.

“That’s what you get,” she told Mark, “for loving a girl.”

It’s Still Tolling

. . . any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
John Donne 1624

Back in December, 2014, the day after the Newtown Massacre, I wrote about my own experience with a shooter in the building and the trauma I experienced from the anticlimactic event (“It Tolls For Thee,”). At the end of the piece, I lamented, “”This is not going away.  The people of Newtown, the people of Connecticut, the people of the East Coast, and by tomorrow, the people of the entire country will live in the shadow of this day forever. Question is, how can we protect the other Newtowns to come?  It’s already too late to begin, but better late than never. . . ”

Since then, there have been 201 more shootings in this country. When do we say E N O U G H??

Evangelicals, anti- or pseudo-intellectuals on left and right, special interest groups of all kinds, and untold millions of influencers put pressure on our legislators to ban books and art, outlaw drag shows, curb women’s rights, thwart equality for LGBTQ, legislate the teaching of science and history as myth and fairy tale. They succeed. All across America, poor Atlas is having a really hard time keeping the world balanced on his back as it threatens to topple over.

What feels like the final blow, what seems to be the thing that could push Atlas and his precious cargo right into the abyss forever is the problem of guns in our midst. All the marching for lives that matter, all the canceling of professorial opinion, all the revisionist rhetoric on both sides have ignored a REAL problem we ALL face. The one thing that should bind us together: finding a way to end the oppressive hold guns have on all our lives.

Every day parents send their children to school with no guarantee they’ll return. Every day children are forced to rehearse for the possibility that they will be targeted by an angry someone with no better outlet for their anger than kids in a school. Every day we throw up our hands and say, “What can we do?” And we blame the lawmakers and the NRA and the gun-toter machismo that seems to have a stranglehold on our collective sanity.

We can point fingers all we want. We all know who is really to blame. We are. We throw up our hands and sigh, we write thoughts and prayers and Imsosad on social media, we shake our heads and tzikkash, and we even send money to the coalitions of survivors’ parents who are out there trying to make it stop. But we don’t do enough.

We need to follow the example the French and Israelis have set this month. They shut down their countries to make their wishes known, and they are succeeding. Why? Because a country without services is a country at a standstill. A country at a standstill needs to appease those who are shutting it down in order to get it back up and running.

We need to shut this country down. To show our government — from the top down — that we really are at a point where we just can’t take it anymore. If every service provider said simply, I am not going to work until the government finds a way to rein in the violence, to control these weapons of mass destruction, to make our children safe not just from the bullets themselves but also from the anxiety of expecting to be hit and the trauma of the aftermath.

If we could the people could set aside our differences for just a few days and figure out a way to get the whole country on board to stop the trains, block the runways, brake the buses, close the schools, refuse to open clinics for well visits, how long do you think it would take before legislation would be in place to protect our kids?

I know. Dream on. I have to. The nightmare wants to consume me.

I have a grandchild who lives overseas. Whenever I go to visit him, people shake their heads and say, “Aren’t you scared for your kids there?” The State Department issues warnings about the country where he lives, suggesting that it’s not safe to go there. Yet the only people who carry guns there are the military, who stand guard at schools, airports, bus stations, et al., to ensure that no reign of terror succeeds in taking hold. No child is forced to spend valuable educational time practicing ways to avoid being shot by a maniacal interloper.

Every year I beg my kid to come back, to be near enough so my hugs don’t have to rely on Zoom for most of the year. The answer is always the same. “Not until I can feel safe sending them to school. . . . “

Can’t we make that happen?

From Motherless to Motherer

Rachel Louise Snyder’s Women We’ve Buried, Women We’ve Burned

One of my favorite workshops to teach is something I call “Acting for Writers.” It’s a class that investigates how to put ourselves in closer touch with our sense and emotional memory, the way actors do. After all, I explain, actors and writers are artists of the same cloth, who share clear objectives: to tell stories, to entertain, inform, enlighten, even sometimes warn an audience or to unburden themselves of secrets too heavy to hold onto.  In doing so, they seek to be authentic, honest, and believable.

Rachel Louise Snyder could teach my class simply by sharing her work.  What distinguishes that work is the way emotion emerges without being manipulative, the way observations and revelations illustrate how deeply a skilled writer can cut into the very center of human existence and bring it to life on the page.  I never fail to believe Rachel Louise Snyder. I never distrust her.  She is among the most reliable narrators I know. I take in her confidences, and I resolve to keep them in a safe place where they can continue to enlighten me.

So it is with Women We Buried, Women We Burned, Snyder’s soon-to-be-published memoir.  The story of Snyder’s life, beginning with childhood trauma – her mother’s death, her father’s embrace of evangelical fundamentalism – that led to hard-driving self-destructiveness, and then to total self-transformation might seem calculated and farfetched from a less ingenuous writer.  But Snyder’s writing is so stark, so clear, so unfettered by hyperbole of any kind that the saga resonates with irresistible urgency.

Snyder’s narrative journey begins when her mother dies. She hears her mother call out, “I can’t breathe,” and she recognizes even at the tender age of 9 that her mother desperately wants to live but has lost the battle with her disease. Rachel’s father, confused and helpless at the death of his young wife and the responsibility of raising two children nearing their teen years, tells Rachel that her Jewish mother has happily surrendered to death and resides now with Jesus in Heaven. He has almost immediately devolved to a religious self he never was before, and from that moment his young daughter intuits that she cannot trust her father to be the man her mother married, the father she used to know. 

Without warning, Rachel’s father submits himself to unforgiving religion, which he imposes on his family and enforces through the use of corporal punishment.  He loves by force of will and shows affection by exerting dominance. He marries a woman he easily controls, and Rachel’s only defense is willful defiance of everything he stands for. After she is expelled from the Christian school he has forced her into, he turns her out of the family home and refuses to let her back in. 

Endowed of remarkable resilience and empowered by ever-improving survival skills, Rachel wanders through her adolescence and experiences sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll until she finds herself in college, where she gets by, thanks to her superior intelligence and a little help from her friends.  To her surprise, she discovers a love of learning, fascination with history, and, most importantly, commonality with other women – battered and buried women, who have survived or who have been defeated. Then she binds herself to an abiding faith that she can make a difference. 

Ultimately, Rachel Louise Snyder’s story is one of evolving maternalism. The motherless child becomes mother of herself. The self-motherer becomes mother to her stepmother, to her remarkable daughter Jazz, and to the women whose stories without her might never be told.  Her story is a guide for us all.  She models the liberating power of self-acceptance and exemplifies the need for self-love.

I believe her. Every word.