The First Rift

My dad was a musician, and I grew up east of Los Angeles with late-night jam sessions and jazz players from across the tracks, beating bongos and smoking  Mary Warner my parents tried to coverup with sandalwood incense. My dad gave up music and we moved to Newport Beach, California where only one dark-skinned person attended my high school and she was a foreign exchange student. She said the biggest difference between the US and Brazil was how we treated our dogs. We practically set a place for them at our dinner tables.

My friends were kids of famous folks who owned yachts with names like the Wild Goose. My high school parking lot looked like a Jay Leno collection. When my peers went on vacation, they came home with photos of ocean-facing villas, majestic courtyards, lantern-lit gardens, swimming pools, tennis courts, spas, and stargazing platforms. My family’s vacations included our station wagon and a picnic basket.

After graduation, my 700-mile solo VW van expedition up the left coast of California to a state college greatly contrasted my neighbor’s departure whose father sent her by limousine to the airport where she met their private jet that flew her 3000 miles to Vassar.

I drove for five days listening to the Grateful Dead and camping in the redwoods. I protested the war in Haight-Ashbury with a guy who looked like John Lennon, and picked up hitchhikers all the way to Humboldt State University in the heart of cannabis country before it was legal.

At Humboldt, on the screen in an auditorium the first day of an anthropology class, I stared at a slide of a nearly naked family squatting around a fire in front of a community of stick houses with straw roofs. The next image was a closeup of a man with a painted face, feathered headdress, and a cassowary quill through his nose. My professor was in the photo. The realization that these people were hunting with bows and arrows in modern times, while my greatest stretch had been moving to a hippie commune, blasted my curiosity to the moon. That was the moment my family’s dream of me becoming a secretary evaporated. All those typing classes gone to waste.