Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      I AM LIVING once again in the town where I grew up, having returned here several weeks ago in a state of dull torment for which the Germans probably have a word. There is green, green moss on the bark of the elms we shinnied up as children, when this was a railroad town. A thousand memories have returned in the past few weeks, odd and long forgotten, triggered by the sight of ancient houses, the smells of eucalyptus and the sea. They emerge as in those pictures we made when we were young, where you crayon circles and squares and patches of bright color until no more white paper shows, and then crayon over this with black until no more color shows, and then etch a picture with the tip of a paper clip—but by then you’ve forgotten where you put each original color, so that spidery Miró objects appear: red-violet trees, green horses, blue stars.

      An old woman I’ve known all my life, named Angela diGrazia, calls hello from her garden, just across from the little white church on the hill. My brother started a fire in her kitchen wastebasket when he was four. Her old man and my father and the other men in the neighborhood, most of whom worked in the railroad yard, gathered once a year to stomp grapes, from which they brewed potent, battery-acid wine. I can remember her old phone number—GEneva 5-1432—but not her husband’s first name. I wave to her but do not stop, partly because I’m late for my appointment, and partly because our conversation is always the same. First she complains about her back and the gophers, and then exclaims that there’s never been any doubt about my paternity, although in fact there was, on my part. My brother told me every chance he got that mom and dad were not my real parents, and I believed him, partly because no one else in my family but me had wildly curly hair. “I remember the day your parents brought you here to live,” he’d say with an air of wistful reminiscence. “Your mother was wearing yellow pedal pushers. And your father was a Negro.”

      Wildflowers bloom on the marshy fingers of earth that run down below the steps of the church. When the hillsides turn brown in the summer, millions of flowers appear in stripes: California poppies, leopard lilies, monkey flowers, buttercups, grass of Parnassus—brilliant white stars—and black jewel flowers. Black jewel flowers are dark garnet red, not known to exist any where else on earth but on these hillsides. You can still see San Francisco, Alcatraz, and Raccoon Strait, but when I was a child, the hills were shaggy and bare. My father took us on walks behind the hills, naming birds for us—juncos, robins, meadowlarks—and one evening at dusk we came upon a gypsy camp, their cars and wagons in a circle. The gypsies showed us small clay nudes—but maybe I’ve made this up. My brother doesn’t remember, and my father has passed away. My brother and I caught tadpoles and frogs in the streams that cut through these hills, and my brother used to bring me to his fort up here behind a cluster of cypress trees, and make me undress for his cronies, who in exchange gave him baseball cards.

      The old railroad yard is now the site of offices and condominiums, and I am headed there to see a hypnotist. My mind is an unholy puppet show. It is not on my side, does not have my best interests at heart.

      There is the matter of forgetfulness, how in my early thirties I already exhibit a worsening feeblemindedness; and how my mind is full of the forgotten, events that happened long ago and over the years that bred and feed my urbane derangement. And how I have told most of my stories so many times that it has become a way of forgetting.

      One thing I know for certain is that my memories are not the same as those of my brother or mother or father; we all have our own version of what really happened, of how it really was. It is a Rashomon history. If you took our four versions and laid them one on top of the other in bands, as they do in sound mixing, you would end up with a song of my family.

      I pass the field where we as a town burnt our Christmas trees on Twelfth Night. There would be a hundred trees or so, pine and fir piled like a massive haystack beneath the night sky, moon and stars. Then whoooooosh, it was lit and began to burn fast, really fast, crackling, snapping, with a roar somewhat like the surf, and it smelled like the essence of Christmas, a sharp thick smell like a pungent rain-clean forest, and we hooted and cheered at the roaring wild orange flames in the night.

      My best friend all those years was a Catholic girl named Mady White who lived half a mile away, whose family I adored because they said “mann-aize” and “toelit” and “warsh,” and because on Fridays they served tuna-noodle casserole or English muffin pizzas. Mady’s mother wore her hair in a French knot, and you could push her pretty far before she would resort to the universal cry of motherhood, “You go to your room right now, and you go home, Nanny Goodman.” Sometimes she would let us eat popcorn and tomato soup for dinner on Fridays, but unlike my mother she wouldn’t feed the hobos. Once she gave a hobo who came to her door The Power of Positive Thinking. Hobos still arrived in town when I was a child; they’d get on the trains up north, thinking they’d arrive someplace from which they could go someplace else, but our town was the end of the line. So they would come by our houses looking for chores, chopping wood or raking leaves. My own mother would bring them glasses of cold apple cider while they worked, and send them packing with a brown paper bag of salmon salad sandwiches.

      My father went to see a hypnotist a year before he died. He and my mother were visiting friends in New York, and one of them recommended hypnosis to help him quit smoking again. “It was