kids. Jane had said all the things to their parents that my mother couldn’t or didn’t say—the big Fuck You (or, in 1969, You racist pigs ). As a result, Jane was no longer welcome in their home. If Jane hadn’t been estranged from her parents, if she hadn’t been worried that they wouldn’t accept her decision to marry a leftist Jew and move to New York City, she wouldn’t have been coming home alone on March 20, 1969. She wouldn’t have advertised for a ride on the ride board, and she wouldn’t have ended up with two bullets in her head, stretched out “puffy and lifeless” on a stranger’s grave in Denton Cemetery the following morning, her bare ass against the frozen earth, a stranger’s stocking buried in her neck.
Dear Jane,
It makes little difference whether it is two nations or two people with conflicting opinions, not much can be done to settle the dispute unless some form of communication is established. It is in this hope that I am writing this letter. I’m sure there is no question in your mind (and in mine) that the contacts we have had in the past year or so have been very disturbing and anything but pleasant. I also recognize the fact that differences in opinion between daughter and parent is a normal situation and fortunately time reduces most of those mountains into mole hills. I’m sure that will be true in our case. But the last few times we have been together have been traumatic emotional experiences that have accomplished absolutely nothing. I have no intention of maintaining that kind of relationship.
So wrote my grandfather on March 4, 1968. But things between them did not improve—indeed, as Jane’s relationship with Phil deepened, and as she elaborated her plan to elope and move to New York, things worsened. A year later she was dead. Time did not get its chance to reduce “mountains into mole hills.” Instead her death froze these mountains into mountains, and froze her father into a state of perpetual incomprehension about her, and about their relationship.
RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE turned out to be a helpful lead. Emily had, in fact, loosely based her travel plans around Brown’s book, which details how one might make money in the East Village by performing relatively painless sexual stunts, such as throwing grapefruits at a guy’s balls.
DURING THESE years my mother and I went to the movies together quite often. It was an easy way to spend time together, sitting in dark places, staring in the same direction. On weekend days we would drive across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, find a good art-house theater, pay one round of admission, and then sneak from film to film: her trick. But a problem recurred—she couldn’t tolerate scenes that involved the abduction of women, especially into cars, and she couldn’t watch women be threatened with guns, especially guns pointed at their heads.
Try going to the movies with this rule, and you will be surprised at how often such scenes crop up.
I left home at seventeen, for college, and for New York, where I soon discovered the deep pleasure of going to the movies by myself. Yet whenever such a scene arose I immediately felt my mother close beside me in the dark theater. Her hands spread across her face, her pinkies pushing down on her eyelids so she can’t see, her index fingers pushing down on her ears so she can’t hear.
I felt her this way acutely when I went to see Taxi Driver at the Film Forum in Greenwich Village several years ago. I was excited—it was the first screening of a new print, and a classic I’d never seen. Waiting in line my excitement dampened a little upon noticing that I was one of the only women, and certainly one of the only solo women, at the theater. The crowd was solid boy film geeks, probably NYU film students, who had apparently come prepared to treat the screening like a performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show , screaming out in chorus the movie’s many famous lines seconds before the
Dear Jane,
It makes little difference whether it is two nations or two people with conflicting opinions, not much can be done to settle the dispute unless some form of communication is established. It is in this hope that I am writing this letter. I’m sure there is no question in your mind (and in mine) that the contacts we have had in the past year or so have been very disturbing and anything but pleasant. I also recognize the fact that differences in opinion between daughter and parent is a normal situation and fortunately time reduces most of those mountains into mole hills. I’m sure that will be true in our case. But the last few times we have been together have been traumatic emotional experiences that have accomplished absolutely nothing. I have no intention of maintaining that kind of relationship.
So wrote my grandfather on March 4, 1968. But things between them did not improve—indeed, as Jane’s relationship with Phil deepened, and as she elaborated her plan to elope and move to New York, things worsened. A year later she was dead. Time did not get its chance to reduce “mountains into mole hills.” Instead her death froze these mountains into mountains, and froze her father into a state of perpetual incomprehension about her, and about their relationship.
RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE turned out to be a helpful lead. Emily had, in fact, loosely based her travel plans around Brown’s book, which details how one might make money in the East Village by performing relatively painless sexual stunts, such as throwing grapefruits at a guy’s balls.
DURING THESE years my mother and I went to the movies together quite often. It was an easy way to spend time together, sitting in dark places, staring in the same direction. On weekend days we would drive across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, find a good art-house theater, pay one round of admission, and then sneak from film to film: her trick. But a problem recurred—she couldn’t tolerate scenes that involved the abduction of women, especially into cars, and she couldn’t watch women be threatened with guns, especially guns pointed at their heads.
Try going to the movies with this rule, and you will be surprised at how often such scenes crop up.
I left home at seventeen, for college, and for New York, where I soon discovered the deep pleasure of going to the movies by myself. Yet whenever such a scene arose I immediately felt my mother close beside me in the dark theater. Her hands spread across her face, her pinkies pushing down on her eyelids so she can’t see, her index fingers pushing down on her ears so she can’t hear.
I felt her this way acutely when I went to see Taxi Driver at the Film Forum in Greenwich Village several years ago. I was excited—it was the first screening of a new print, and a classic I’d never seen. Waiting in line my excitement dampened a little upon noticing that I was one of the only women, and certainly one of the only solo women, at the theater. The crowd was solid boy film geeks, probably NYU film students, who had apparently come prepared to treat the screening like a performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show , screaming out in chorus the movie’s many famous lines seconds before the
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