She looks at me. “I can’t believe I’m telling all this to a little kid. What are you, thirty? Ha-ha!”
Whenever I ask her about the School and how the Old Man wanted us to be new, special kinds of people, she says, “That was his bullshit. To me, you were just a baby. And you know, you don’t plan to fall in love, you just do. I had a special bond with you. It’s weird how that happens. Someone puts a kid in your life and next thing you know you’re like a…” She pauses and looks at me.
“Like a mom,” I say. She hugs me and tells me I was always special to her even though Chuck wanted us to be the new kinds of people who aren’t children of their parents but children of the universe which if you think about it just means we were no one’s children.
“What two-year-old is independent?” she says. “You were a little baby. You all were.”
Bonnie’s parents are Grandma Juliette and Grandpa Nat. That’s what they tell us to call them from the first time we visit them at their house in the center of the city, just off Fairfax and Wilshire Boulevard. Grandma Juliette is a tiny woman with an electric smile in red lipstick and red boots whose face shakes as she opens the door and says, “Look at the punim on this one!” She squeezes me tight. She is in the doorway next to her golf clubs in the house where Bonnie grew up. She and Grandpa Nat bought the house in 1956 after a trip to California from Brooklyn, when she sat in a sunlit garden and thought, We’re never going back.
Grandpa Nat is in the living room watching golf. He lights up when he sees us. “Bonita!” he says and stands up to give Bonnie a hug, singing, “Bonita … Chiquita … banana.” He turns to Dad and says, “Hey, Jimmy, so good to see you,” leaning in to give him a wet kiss on the lips. “You taking care of my girl?” He’s tan and handsome with a broad face and piercing blue eyes, wearing a golf shirt and white shorts that show off legs strong from years of golf and handball. He and Dad like each other. There seems to be an understanding they share. Life is hard, let’s enjoy what we have.
Bonnie told me that Grandpa Nat’s family came from a place called Pole-land “before the war,” the one Grandpa Frank fought in for Dutch and America. They left aunts and uncles and cousins there. They were all killed by a very bad man named Hitler. Some of them got out before the war but others could not be convinced to leave so they ended up losing their homes, then working in camps then put in trains then in furnaces. Grandpa says there were six million of them who died because of the bad man, Hitler. It’s too big of a number to think about all at once. I try to imagine, like the bunnies, the sound made by six million claps of thunder rising up into the clouds leaving a tear in the sky so big it could be seen from anywhere on earth.
It’s great to have a new grandpa and a new grandma, these funny and kind people who treat me like a grandson. I wish I could have all the aunts and uncles and cousins I could’ve had if it weren’t for that crazy man Hitler who hated Grandpa Nat and his family so much.
Grandma Juliette is my favorite. She doesn’t care if I hear dirty jokes. If someone says, “Mom, where is the fuckin’ ice? I’ve been looking all over for it,” she puts her hands over my ears and says, “Don’t you ever say the word ‘ice’ in front of my grandson.”
Bonnie’s sister Nancy is a large woman with brown hair who moves exactly like a little girl in a woman’s body. She is a singer with a high voice that she says is a “soprano.” Jeannie is Bonnie’s other sister. She’s short and funny and just joined the Police Academy because she’s going to become a cop. Even though she’s so small, I can see why because there’s something tough about her. When someone teases her, she doesn’t give an inch.
They have another sister named Joey who died when she was only nineteen years old. Her eyes turned yellow and they took her to the doctor and three weeks later she was dead from something called hepatitis. They cried and cried and Bonnie says it taught them that family is precious and you should enjoy it while you can and make it bigger if you can and I feel so lucky to suddenly have more family.
Bonnie says she doesn’t believe in God. Neither does Grandma or Grandpa. She says religions get carried away. People believe too hard and start to “buy their own bullshit.” She says it’s been the cause of more death and suffering than any other force on earth. Her eyes get small and she pounds her fist and I wonder if she’s mad about Synanon or God, Chuck Dederich or Hitler. They seem to be fused together in her mind as examples of what happens when people believe in something too much.
All I know is that we lived in the School like an orphanage and Grandpa Nat lost all those people he loved and maybe it’s okay to believe in things as long as it doesn’t mean people have to be alone or dead.
* * *
WHILE DAD AND Bonnie are at work, we go to summer camp which takes us to the beach or the zoo or a park where we drink from giant coolers of red fruit punch. Sometimes we play baseball. A coach comes and teaches us to field grounders and get under fly balls, how to bunt and slide and lead off from first base so that the pitcher can’t throw you out. Dad picks us up at the end of the day and takes us to Toes Beach at sunset where we bounce in the waves, riding up onto his shoulders as he throws us into the surf. The water is cold when you first go in but Dad tells us to just run at it and dive, to let the cold hit you all at once so you can forget about it. We cling to him as he heads deeper into the ocean until our feet can’t touch the bottom. We use him as a home base, swimming away into the deep water, then swimming back to hold on. He seems to know that’s what he’s there for, piling us into his truck even if he’s dog tired after twelve hours on his feet in the middle of a six-day workweek.
Toes is not the best beach in the world. It’s nothing like those tanning spots for teenagers in Manhattan Beach that we drive by, or the surfing coves in Malibu that you see in magazines, nothing like the long stretches of spotless sand from all the movies about California. No tourist would visit here. There are enormous red-and-white smokestacks spitting black clouds of pollution into the air from the oil refinery to the south. Just to the north is the mouth of Ballona Creek, which is where all the storm drains from the city empty into the ocean with their cigarette butts and dog shit. The 747s taking off from the runway at LAX seem close enough to touch as they fill the sky with a rumble, casting massive dark shadows over the sand. But we don’t care. It doesn’t matter. We care about the taste of salt in our mouths, the white foam in our hair, the soft waves as they pour over us and Dad, shirtless and tan in the sun, standing still like an anchor in the water.
Afterward we go to Might-T-Mart to get raspberry frozen yogurt which we eat in the car before we get home so Bonnie doesn’t know and we can still have ice cream after dinner. “It’ll be our secret,” Dad says with a wink.
There’s a nook in front of the big window where the sun hits a patch on the ground and you can sleep in it on lazy afternoons if you don’t feel like doing anything. Bonnie will put Linda Ronstadt on the stereo and move around the apartment singing in one of her night robes.
You can sing. You can not sing.
You can sleep. You can not sleep.
You can eat. You can not eat.