I remember how revolted I felt half the time that day, holding her soft warm hand on the beach. I secretly wanted to take it and hurl it to the sand beneath the wheels of the oncoming lifeguard’s jeep. But oh, God, the trust with which she kept holding it out for me to take! Without someone to take her by the hand, she cannot find her balance. And I guess it’s that simple; it’s what we do in families: We help, because we were helped.

Now I can hardly bear to look at the picture. My stomach aches with a miserable sort of poignancy.

Sometimes people who’ve read my work send me photos of their families, and I tape them to the wall in the hopes that they will make me feel more forgiving. Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past? The pictures do help sometimes, and I’m gentle with her, more giving, because if I can’t even figure out spiritually that she is my Beloved, then I’m definitely going tourist class here. The rest of the time, I go around trying to do my Jesusy best, trying to be His tender hands and eyes. And then my mother calls and says something annoying, has forgotten something that was important to — about — me. I begin to fantasize about jabbing her in the head with a fork, like you test a baked potato for doneness.

I love her so much it makes me cry, it makes my heart feel sandy and peculiar, the way your teeth do after you’ve eaten raw spinach. I sigh a lot around her. I grit my teeth. Sometimes — and this is the truth — I growl, like a dog who is warning you not to step back onto its tail. When I’m not with her, I go around feeling like the world is a gigantic baby with AIDS, and I try to bring some humanity to that in my lurchy and imperfect way, like a candy striper with corns and PMS. And I do pretty well until I have to spend time with Jesus in His distressing guise as my mother. Then the whole thing starts to come apart like a two-dollar watch.

So there is nothing more touching to me than a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, and you can see what a mess they all really are. Frozen in the amber of the photograph, you can see all the connections and disconnections, the stress and the yearning. And you can see the pride in their lineage — in that long broad nose, say, that went from grandma to dad to baby. It’s there on their faces for all to see, and you can see how they love it — that big nose. It is their immortality.

There are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate people you ever saw, poster children for the human condition. I like that though, when who we are shows. Everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the world, and it’s so touching when what is real and human shows. I think that’s why most of us stay close to our families — no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull — because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask so much. And that gives us license to try on that most radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-forgiveness, the stepping out from underneath one of the fatwas.

The friend who took the picture of my mom and me on the beach is 50 or so, and utterly devoted to her big family. In this one picture I saw, she is eating soup at the kitchen table with her daughter, who lives on the streets in San Francisco, who drinks and is almost feral now and very angry with her mother, although she accepts the $1,200 a month her mother gives her for rent and expenses. The mother and daughter have the same long, wide noses, but different eyes — the mother’s small and light brown, almost amber, the daughter’s so pale blue that you wonder if they were darker until all that booze washed the dyes away. “Look at this,” says the mother, showing me the photograph.

We study the picture together. “Tell me what you see,” I say.

“I see love like she’s under my roof, drinking my soup. I see love like she’s warm and we’re talking like human beings. I see love like we are two survivors on this leaky, perilous ship, together in a warm room.”

I used to carry a picture of myself in my purse, taken by my mother when I was 3. I’m all dressed up in my mother’s long, fancy gloves, and I seem very spaced out. My mother perfectly caught the soft, inward face of the 3-year-old girl, marveling at her good fortune, in ecstasy over her lacy gloves. I liked to open my wallet and see this child I used to be, who was not used to facing the world, and that sensuous baby face bathed in wonder looking out at me.

My parents had a long, hard marriage; and in our family pictures, all through those years, we look like we’ve seen sorrow, with faces that are weet and sad and bleak and glazed. Sometimes we are wearing the masks of a family who is moving forward. There are many pictures of my mother where she has made herself as beautiful as she can be, and yet when you study those old pictures, you can see that we look like paper dolls of peasants wearing bright American clothes. Still, my mother has gathered all her pride around her, and her pride is her family. I used to look through our photo albums and yearn to be one of those families who got their family pictures taken on ski vacations, or on the beaches of Hawaii, or even in studios with painted clouds as the backdrop, as if the family got lowered down in front of it and can be lifted up again en masse when the photograph is done.

There’s one picture of the five of us together squinting on a porch, as if the world is too bright and we were all dragged outside too early in the day. We’re smiling under a lot of shadows. My mother’s mother, who was just about to go live in a convalescent home, wears a terrifying corsage, a dark baby opossum that died on her breast. The small girl, who’s me, wears a forced smile, and I’m peering desperately up at my mother, like I’m willing to grin for the camera but I really want to lie down in my mother’s lap.

My mother, walking beside me on the beach, sees things in the sand she wants — a sand dollar, sea glass, shells — and points to them like she’s the Queen Mother, and I swoop down like a ballet dancer to pick them up for her.

There are all these pictures of us standing in front of our old cars. There’s one of us posing by our sturdy old Dodge, which my father had just bought for several hundred dollars. My younger brother had just been born and is sleeping in my mother’s arms. Everyone except my father looks so tired, and no one wants to be having this picture taken; you see the dents and the shame in the car and our faces. But my father really loved this car.

He got a great deal on it, and his visible pride gave you the sense that the big slate-blue Dodge would endure; and that we would too. It’s not easy and the sky is dark but when you have this car, you’re ahead of the game. The car is like the hard shell of a snail.

My son Sam got stung this past July Fourth by a yellow jacket on the beach at Bolinas, across the channel from where I was walking with my mother. My younger brother, Steve, took Sam out for the parade this year. They were watching with an old family friend, whom I have known since I was Sam’s age, eating hot dogs, when Sam, riding on my brother’s shoulders, got stung on the arm. He started to panic, but then the family friend split open one of her cigarettes, shook the tobacco into her palm and made a paste of it using her spit. Then she applied it to the bite as a salve, and told Sam it would draw out the toxins. I keep picturing Jesus making mud in his palm with dirt and his own holy spit, rubbing it onto the blind man’s eyes, until the blind man could suddenly see. Sam stopped crying right away.

He and his Uncle Stevo hung out after the parade for a while, and then went to wait at the home of the family friend whose daughter lives on the street. She was going to drive them to Stinson, where Mom and I were waiting on the beach. They apparently walked into a pretty stressful family scene. People had reneged on commitments to bring this or that kind of food, and the niece, who had said she’d bring dessert, had brought potato salad instead, and two or three people weren’t speaking to each other. But Steve and Sam, without meaning to, distracted everyone with the monsters Steve began drawing to amuse one of the toddlers. And then after a while, everyone started getting along; without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the No of all nothingness, magic. Here you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy.

Finally, our friend came along and drove Stevo and Sam over to Stinson. When they showed up, you would have thought they were the Clintons or the Beatles, for the fuss my mother made. This completely drives me crazy: When I had picked her up that morning, she watched me pull up in my car, and then glanced down at her watch as if I was terribly late. She got in, and I drove us up the mountain in a petulant mood. I practiced seeing her through Jesus’ eyes until the thought crossed my mind to speed up a little so I could push her out the door of the car. It’s hard for me to believe He ever got to that sulky, gritchy point with Mary. Of course, I could be wrong.

I was out of the snit by the time we started down the mountain. My mother has seen me at my worst now for 43 years: It’s crossed my mind to leave this county a number of times. But I have just enough visceral sense to know that you don’t get away. It’s in there; it goes with you.

She is wearing an old sweater in the car, even though the day is warm I find this more annoying than I can say. I see myself tear it off her, toss it out the window of the car. I’m too hot, she should take off her sweater.

“Nana!” my son calls out when he sees my mother. We were sitting on the sand by then. “I got bit by a yellow jacket!” She gapes at him, makes sympathetic noises, admires the bite as if it is a bullet hole. “I didn’t hardly cry,” he tells her. (“He was hysterical,” my brother whispers to me.)

She holds out her hands for my brother and me to pull her to her feet. She is still wearing her horrible cardigan and the day is even hotter by now. But I understand all of a sudden that my family is like an old sweater — it keeps unraveling, but maybe someone knows how to sew it up; it has lumps and then it unravels again, but you can still wear it; and it still keeps away the chill. Besides, who appointed me the keeper of my mother’s thermostat?

My mother turns to Sam. “Let’s go for a walk,” she says. He doesn’t want to. He always wants to race down to the shore and just plunge in. But he likes her; he’s glad to be with her. The fact that she’s wearing a sweater does not seem to annoy him. I watch carefully. I tell you, families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness. At some point you forgive the people in your family for being stuck together in all this weirdness, and when you can do that, you can learn to forgive anyone. Even yourself, at some point. It’s like learning to drive on an old Volkswagen bus: Master that, and you can learn to drive anything. I keep watching. Sam takes his grandmother’s hand. It’s not a big deal. He just wants to help her find her balance.

It was tea time. “Khume asee oktagare kezee,” she would say. Drink this, it’s good for you. “What is it called in English?” my mother would ask. Arshalous would throw back her head and mumble in Armenian. What difference did it make?

Years later, my mother would throw back her head when I asked, “Oukhlemor, what is it?” Though it is similar in smell and texture to chamomile, it isn’t quite as sweet. The dried leaves of Oukhlemor are dull-green in color, and the tiny buds almost a yellowish ecru. The tea is toffee brown with a rosy undertone.

And it is good for you — but more as a remedy for the spirit than the body, a sort of comfort in a cup, a liquid security blanket. A transcendental calmness, like a loved one stroking your head. A moment of smelling it and dousing your face in the steam always preludes any taste of it. Then slow sips. No gulps.

My grandmother would always wait for the tea to cool — but just for a few minutes, not too long. You don’t want it to burn your lips, but if it’s too cool, it isn’t soothing. The only way you can tell when it’s ready is by holding it; if it just warms your hands, it’s just right. And Oukhlemor always tastes better in the warmth of a light, whether you’re sitting by the window, catching the last rays of the afternoon sun or by the evening light of a lamp.

In fact, you must sit down while having a cup of tea, my grandmother would say. You can’t have it on the run, like coffee. Although I have heard that coffee actually carries less caffeine than many teas, it is still an on-the-go drink, a boost of energy made to drink while dashing across town. A cup of tea is to be savored, to be cherished over time. A cup of tea can last as long as you need it to.

It was during the Pritikin diet craze in the ’80s that my mother finally unearthed the name of this mystery herb. She had read about a tea that was supposedly good for the nerves and hypertension and went to the store to buy it. Into a pot of boiling water she tossed it and as soon as she did, she knew. It was Oukhlemor or, in English, linden flower tea.

Whenever my mother and I are together, we find the time to sit down for a cup of tea. Usually, it is Oukhlemor, but other times it’s whatever we can find. What I really savor about what Arshalous passed on to us is not the type of tea but the ritual of having it. I think she really believed that sitting down for just one moment during the day is the best remedy for almost anything.

But one day right after Xmas I come downstairs and see a child in the lobby. The child is four or five years old, a little girl, black, wearing dirty little overalls and a happy face T-shirt, baby Reeboks with no socks, and a big green ribbon in her hair. She is sitting on one end of the cardboard couch, alone, staring at the TV. Several of the Doomed, also staring at the tube, seem unaware of her presence.

I go out to get my coffee, read the Trib amongst the Trib writers, walk over to Sherlock’s to look at the books, then walk back to the hotel. The kid is still sitting there staring at the tube.

I go upstairs, take a shower, do some laundry and hang the clothes up in the window to dry, then go down to get my mail. The kid is still there, staring at the TV.

“You letting kids move in here now?” I ask the Desk Guy. He shrugs.

This is extremely dangerous, I think. If I approach the child, someone will think I’m a cop. A welfare cop, or a child molester. A baby seller or a baby-stealer. A social worker baby-stealer. A welfare cop family breakup artist. Fuck it.

I buy a Coke from the Coke machine, sit down next to the kid. The kid stares at the tube. The kid is stiff with terror. I should take the hint. Whatever the kid is afraid of is not something to mess with. (It occurs to me later that maybe the kid was afraid of me.) The poor little fucker.

“Coke?” I say, offering the Coke to the kid. The kid stares at the tube.

“Would you like a Coke? I got you a Coke,” I say.

The kid stares at the tube.

“You speak English?” I ask, emboldened by the fact that nobody has leaped for my throat yet from some hidden recess of the lobby.

The kid gives a tiny little nod, staring at the tube.

Response! I push the can of Coke at the child. “It’s for you. You must be thirsty. Coke.”

“Pepsi,” says the kid, staring at the tube.

“Coke,” I repeat, stupidly.

“I don’t like Coke. I like Pepsi,” says the kid, staring at the …

“But we don’t have a Pepsi machine here. We just got a Coke machine.”

“Pepsi,” says the kid.

“Are you hungry?” I ask. “Want some cheez-its? Food? Where’s your mommy?”

The kid stares at the tube. A tear, just one, has left a track down the dirty cheek. “Fuck you,” the kid whispers. “Fuck Coke. Pepsi. Pepsi. Go away.”

The Room | The hotel room is average-sized, maybe twelve by fourteen feet. The head of the bed, against which I sit while reading or writing, is against the east wall of the room and a bit right of center. The bed itself is an ordinary double bed, not uncomfortable, mattress and box spring resting on a heavy wooden platform which is impossible to move (and, I suppose, to steal). It has a heavy, solid wood headboard, to which I’ve attached my reading lamp, but no footboard.

Between the headboard and the wall, in the northeast corner, is a brown-painted wooden night stand with one small drawer. In the drawer are Dudley’s I.D. and other papers, pocket calculator, pen, and flashlight. On top of the stand sits Dudley’s clock, ashtray and cigarettes, and a couple of half-burned candles for power failures. Against the north wall, between the stand and the door of the room, an armless chair with brass-colored metal frame and green plastic seat and back.

To my left as I sit against the headboard facing into the room, set into the south wall of the room, a nice-sized window perhaps four feet by five with the sill at knee-level. The window is propped open about eighteen inches from the bottom with half a metal curtain rod wedged
into the groove of the frame on either side. A more or less permanent arrangement made by Dudley, who says that the window is extremely heavy to lift due to the counterweights inside the frame being broken off. The lower pane of the window is cracked all the way across and the upper pane cracked across one corner. The cracks have been taped with masking tape, now dry and crumbling. A set of lightweight white curtains hang to the floor, and behind them a plastic window shade on a roller. Between the floor and the windowsill, at the lower right corner of the window, is an old wrought-iron radiator with the adjustment valve taken off and capped.

In the southwestern corner of the room, opposite the foot of the bed on the left, is a shallow niche containing a sink and wooden medicine cabinet with bleary mirror, above which is a light fixture with bare bulb and the only electrical outlet in the room, into which is plugged the extension cord for my reading lamp. The sink’s faucets are the kind with springs inside which turn them off when you let go of the handles. Only the cold water works. To the right of this, a tiled shower stall with wooden door, sheet tin nailed on the inside. When turned on, the shower head emits a trickle of water which alternates with alarming frequency between icy cold and blistering hot (when there is hot water at all). To the right of this another door opens into a closet about four feet by five, with shelves along one side. At right angle to the closet is the corridor door on the north wall.

Across from the hall door, on the south wall, stands a rickety wooden dresser with three of its seven knobs missing. On the dresser sits Dudley’s old black-and-white TV set, also plugged into the extension cord.

The ceiling height is about ten feet. The ceiling and walls are painted light gray and several cracks run at angles across the ceiling, spackled but not painted. The floor is covered with carpeting of a dark brown, napless indoor-outdoor fiber. There is a hardened, black circular patch between the bed and the window, probably a burn from a hot plate.

The one peculiarity which stands out in my perception of this room is a fuzzy black splotch on the wall about a foot to the right of the door frame. This discoloration is about a foot in diameter, darker at the center and fading out at the edges. After a few days of getting used to the room and its little irregularities — the walled-over outline behind the dresser, which must have once been the door to another room, the lighter patch in the paint of the northeast corner where another piece of furniture must have stood, the cracks in the windows and ceiling hastily and unprofessionally repaired (a banner across the front of the building reads “Grand Opening” and claims a complete renovation since the 1989 earthquake; Dudley says the banner has been there for six months, and it will remain for another six months until shredded by a windstorm in December) — my attention is increasingly drawn to this blotch on the wall. I measure myself against it and see that the center of the blotch is at the approximate height of the center of my head. I note that when the room door is opened inward and I stand behind the opened door, the back of my head is centered within the stain. However, when I stand with my head aligned within the blot, the doorknob of the closed door is more than a foot beyond my reach. Also, that the stain is not a one-time deal, like the bloodstain in the hall toilet. Someone with dirty, greasy hair spent a lot of time standing pressed against the wall in just this position, behind the opened door of the hotel room.

I picture myself as this person, standing behind the door. I’m holding a gun. My partner or roommate is conducting some kind of shady deal in the doorway. Whoever my partner is doing the deal with knows that someone is standing behind the door with a gun. There are no bullet holes in the walls or ceiling.

I explain this scenario to my daughter.

“You’ve started watching TV again,” Jessy says, pleased.

“Take a good look at it.” I gesture toward the blot.

Jessy studies the goddamned thing for ten minutes. She studies the door, the doorknob, the ceiling, the walls, the window. She walks to the splotch and stands with her back to the wall. From this position she studies the whole room again. “Jesus,” she finally says.

Dudley never notices the spot. He is not terribly perceptive.

Nevertheless, the spot seems to haunt the room. A Mystery Spot.

Money and a Room |If one has no money, one can’t very well expect to have a room of one’s own, can one? Maybe if one has a BIT of money one can spend it all on rent in order to have a room … but then it would be just the room, you see, and no … OK. What kind of money are we talking about here, and what kind of room? Define your terms. No? OK then, how about just money? A room of one’s own without money can only be a trap. How can one create anything within a trap that will not be born entrapped?

The animal trapped by the foot will chew off the foot to escape. What about the one who is trapped by the mind? The mind in a trap can’t create, it can only stumble around trying to find a way out. And on freeing oneself from one trap, one may find oneself in another, larger trap. Freedom is relative. The bars of the cage may become harder to define. May become impossible to define.

Journal Entry |Went to Martinez today, to the housing authority there, to try to expedite my application for subsidized housing. Another ordeal which could have just as easily been taken care of by mail.

I left the hotel at eleven a.m. and was still fifteen minutes late for my two o’clock appointment. I had enough trouble just trying to find out how to get to the place on BART and bus. People out there don’t take buses. They don’t understand that it takes an hour on the bus to get someplace that would take ten minutes in a car.

The lady at the housing authority tells me that I need to provide proof that I’m homeless.

“How do you prove that you’re homeless?”

The clerk looks up with a puzzled little smile from the pile of paperwork which is supposed to document my financial status, marital status, family status, social status, legal status, educational status, vehicular status, employment status, and the level I have reached in the criminal justice system.

I sense that I’m not going to get a helpful answer. I don’t suppose they could just take my word for it.

“I mean,” I continue, “All these years I’ve always had to prove that I lived somewhere. Rent receipts, utility bills, you know. They even come to your place and check, count your kids, the whole bit. I’ve never had to prove that I didn’t live anywhere.”

“That’s a good question,” she says, laughing a little.

“So what do other people do for proof of homelessness?” I’ll sign an affidavit. I’ll swear to HUD.

“I don’t know. We don’t have many homeless people in Contra Costa County.”

“What would you suggest, then?”

“It’s up to you to get proof. I just process paperwork. Perhaps a form from a shelter.”

“I don’t live in a shelter.”

She is beginning to show symptoms of exasperation. “Just go in and ask for the form. Surely they’ll let you have one.”

“I just need the form for the shelter,” I say to the woman at the desk at the shelter referral service.

“What form?”

“The form you give someone when you send them to the shelter.”

She gives me a funny look. “You want to go to the shelter? There’s a waiting list, you know.”

“I just want the form that says …” I am beginning to sweat all over my laboriously washed sweatshirt. “The referral form.”

“You want me to refer you to the shelter.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you homeless?”

“That’s right.”

“You told me that you are living in the Cracksmoke Hotel on San Pablo.”

“I’m getting evicted.”

“Where’s your eviction notice?”

“I forgot.”

“You’ll need to bring it in.”

“I just want the fu … the form. The form.“

“What do you want the form for?”

“I don’t want it. The Contra Costa Housing Authority does.”

“What for?”

“Proof that I’m homeless.”

“Proof of homelessness? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It isn’t my idea!”

“Look. I don’t know what your scam is, but there are people with real problems waiting …”

I get up and walk out of the office, crying and formless. Unable to handle going back to my loathsome hotel and my unspeakable room, I find myself sitting in the BART plaza on Fourteenth and Broadway at one o’clock in the morning. Lots of homeless bastards wandering around with filthy blankets wrapped around their shoulders in the shadow of the soaring new American Presidents Lines building. Obviously couldn’t do the paperwork necessary to get off the street. How could they if I, with fourteen years of college, can’t figure it out?

Copyright © 1997 by Aggie Max. Used with permission by Chronicle Books.