Our Grandpa Was an Alien
My parents raised us-- myself, my brothers and sister-- during what now seems to us a halcyon time, the years of the baby boom 1950ies and 60ies. They were strong-minded and eccentric, and not the least conformist; my father, a research biologist, tended to bring work home, which accounts for the monkey skull and the bag of mice in the freezer. My mother did not just set Dr. Spocks' child care advice aside, she flung it with great force. With our books, and our pets, and a circle of friends, and extended family, we lived on the top of a hill in the back country, sheltered from many of the mid-20th century storms by our parents' love, and dedication. They sent us out into the larger world, having given us the best possible defense against all the blows that life is apt to deal out; an unutterably happy and secure childhood.   [Click here to order from publisher]

Rattlesnake Cottage

Mom and Dad started their home life together when Dad finished his Army service. He came back from Korea when I was about a year old--- according to Mom I was exceedingly fretful, sitting on his lap--- a total stranger to me! All during the drive home from the airport. Dad’s license had lapsed, so Mom had to drive while he held me, but I fussed so vigorously that they had to trade places. Of course, I don’t remember that--- my very earliest memories are of the GI Bill married housing area attached to UC Santa Barbara. I had a sandbox in the back yard which was very popular with the other small children, and my new brother, JP slept in the very impressive black baby carriage. I burned my hand, touching a hot stove rack as Mom was taking dinner out of the oven, and we had a pet parakeet in a cage.

But when I was about three, and JP a toddler of two  Dad was finished at UC Santa Barbara, and moved us all back into the Los Angeles area, to a house in Beverly Hills,  in that part of it which really was the hills, all steep, chaparral covered slopes, an unpopulated desolation, compared to Rodeo Drive. My parents had a penchant for howling wilderness, and any property at the end of a couple of miles of dirt road was their dream house, never mind that when it was going to rain heavily, they would have to leave the cars by the mailboxes, about a mile and a half away. The house seemed to me to be as large as a cathedral: it was actually a small cottage, narrow but long, as I discovered when we visited years later, and I could see out of windows that had once been far above my head. It had a graveled drive, and sat in a grove of trees, mostly manzanita and eucalyptus. There was a range of pyracantha bushes, with bright orange berries that Mom told us time and time again to NEVER put in our mouths. JP, obedient and logical stuffed one up his nose, instead.

Almost immediately, my parents made a very unsettling discovery: the hillside was alive with snakes; mostly rattlesnakes of a dismayingly large and aggressive nature… dismaying because they did not stick to their usual habitat of brush and rocks, but sought out the sunny, sheltered flats around the house… where JP and I were likely to be playing. Rattlesnakes and toddlers are incompatible life forms, and no alternatives were viable. We could not be kept in the house all day, and Dad could not kill every snake on the hillside. He made a gallant try, his favorite weapon being a long handled hoe wielded with pinpoint accuracy and considerable force. Scarce a dent was made in the population, and Dad considered a revolutionary solution: knowledge.

JP and I were immediately enrolled in Dad’s seminar on “Snakes, General knowledge pertaining to, with special attention towards the dangerous varieties” and an ancillary course on first aid for snakebites.

He captured king snakes and the other harmless varieties with a snake hook, showed us the holes and shelters they preferred, let us handle them, lectured us on what they liked to eat. We were drilled on identifying them by their colors and markings, the patterns they made in the dust. For a time, there was a picture of me calmly handling a six-foot long specimen, about twice as long as I was tall.

“They eat rats and mice, “Dad lectured, “They are useful, keeping things in balance.”

Then he upped the ante and captured a rattler, keeping it in a large aquarium with a sturdy lid on the top in his study, so we could study it.

“Look at the diamond markings on the back…. Also it has a neck. In this part of the country the dangerous snakes almost always have a pronounced neck…. Listen to the sound it makes. “Dad tapped the side of the aquarium, and the snake coiled into a taut spring, tail rattling madly. “When you hear that sound, you should hold still until you see where it is coming from…. Then back away, slowly. They strike if they are cornered; given a chance they will go away. Be careful about large flat rocks, snakes like to lie out to get themselves warm. And never, ever put your hands or your feet into a place where you can’t see in.”

Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie were visiting, while Dad was keeping the rattlesnake in the den, and from the living room they could hear the sound of it buzzing distantly.

“What on earth is that sound?” Granny Dodie demanded, and Mom quickly replied.
“Cicadas!”

First aid for snakebites was the final segment of the seminar:

“The bite would look like this, “Dad showed us the picture in the First Aid Book, “You would first need to make a tourniquet, and put it on your arm or leg between your heart and the bite. “
How to make a tourniquet from a belt or shoelaces, how to widen the wound and suck out the venom and blood, being careful not to swallow any of it, Dad drilled us and made us practice: it’s outdated practice now, but we were letter perfect. If I ever did have to administer snakebite first aid, I would revert automatically to what Dad taught us so carefully. The area around the house was not fenced, and we had the freedom of it, but did not wander very far from Rattlesnake Cottage. I think the most foolish things we ever did were to make the rounds of the garden, eating a bite of everything in it, just to see what it tasted like, or pretend to be earthworms and sample a mouthful of dirt. (Which because of the decomposing granite hillside, was somewhat crunchy) We even had a playhouse, of sorts, Dad’s ancient Mercury sedan, which at the end of its’ natural life, was getting a mile to the gallon of everything, gas, water and oil and leaking copious quantities of all. He nursed it up the hill one day, clanking and smoking, and parked it on the level below the house, in the shade of the eucalyptus, from whence it never moved again under its’ own power. Squirrels nested in the upholstery, and JP and I played in it; in our imagination the Merc became a house, a fort, a rocket ship. Mom and Dad replaced the Mercury with one of suburbia’s necessary badges--- a station wagon, a slightly used, jade-green Plymouth, which became the main family car for decades. (Dad eventually bought another Plymouth of similar vintage, just to keep the first one in parts.)

With Dad’s penchant for animals: the parakeet, a bowl of goldfish which were lab subjects and supposed to die from the experiment, but didn’t and so came home, and a pet desert tortoise, until it snapped the lead it was kept on, through a chain link in the hole drilled in the edge of his shell, and vanished in the general direction of the desert.

Mom and Dad also acquired another staple of suburbia, the faithful family dog, although a cat would have to wait, since Grannie Dodie and Grandpa Al had raised Dad with an unaccountable prejudice against them.

“Sneaky little thieves!” Grannie Dodie said. She had never lived on a farm.

Our landlord, a lanky amiable man who had invented a device to package gumballs in long sealed strips of plastic, lived in a larger house, farther up the hill and kept horses and dogs. The horses were named Danny-Boy and Bellamy, and the chief dog a big, gangly mostly Great Dane female unimaginatively called Puppy Dog. Our new dog, Punch was one of her pups. Mom and Dad brought him home, a big, exuberantly friendly yellow dog, half-grown, who began licking my face so forcefully, he knocked me down. I climbed up into the low cruck of the oak tree in the front yard, and he sat at the foot of the tree, tail wagging and looking expectantly up at me. Puppy Dog’s ancestry and that of Punch’s sire included lashings of hound, yellow lab and German shepherd, besides the Great Dane, resulting in a largish, yellowish, shepherdish sort of dog, with large brown eyes of astounding sweetness. For a while, as a young dog, he had a vertical stripe on his eyelids, so was called Punchinello, after the commedia del arte character. He survived being bitten by a rattlesnake as a young and foolish dog, not having had the advantage of Dad’s extensive snake-avoidance training.

All our excitements were small, the stuff of childhood: Mom and Dad woke me up once, after bedtime, to hold me up in front of the sixteen-pane window in the large bedroom. Outside in the dark, it was snowing, pale flakes like feathers floating down. I never saw it snow again until I was quite grown. The large bedroom had been Mom and Dad’s when we moved in, and JP and I shared the smaller one, calling it the Nursery. But when we began egging each other on to noisy play at odd hours, they worried that neither of us was getting enough sleep. We played in the Nursery, or outside during the day, but I slept at night in the large bedroom, and Mom and Dad on a fold-out sofa in the main living room, and peace was restored.

Rattlesnake Cottage seemed as huge, a mansion to me then, the ceilings open to the roof beams, and a long, long corridor running along the side of the house from the master bedroom, past the Nursery, Dad’s study and the bathroom, to the living room and kitchenette, which were a step down or two below the level of the rest of the house. This part of the house looked out onto what little formal garden there was, fenced with a hedge of pyracantha bushes. But it was actually quite small and very much out of the way.  It was used for a week, for a TV location shoot, to the great amusement of my parents. So far out in the hills, and isolated from other houses, it made a perfect hideaway for an escaping gunman on the old Highway Patrol series... and the leftovers from the generous catered meals on the set augmented the food budget rather nicely, as Dad was still in graduate school. It turned out that the director was an alumnus of Occidental, like Mom and Dad. The sheer amusement value of watching Broderick Crawford’s male nurse keeping him away from the alcohol made up for the inconvenience of the lights and cameras, and having to keep quiet and out of the way. JP escaped Mom, once, and toddled up the long corridor, as one of the actors opened the door, looked inside and said

“No one here!” while heroically managing to ignore the small boy at his very feet.

Dad was often away in Nevada, during this time; he was one of the field biologists doing research on the residual radioactive materiel in the animal burrows and other places left over after atomic tests. I remember discovering Mom curled up in the big red armchair, crying, after a phone call--- he was either away again, or not coming home for another week or so, and there she was, marooned again, alone in the hills with two small children, and I was frantic because I couldn’t comfort her enough to make her stop crying.

About this time, Mom began despairing of driving to Pasadena every week for church services at Granny Jessie’s church. She was observant, Dad was not, and I was almost legal age before anyone suggested to me that this might be a seriously unusual and conflict-ridden situation. To me, it was just the way it was, a subject for logical discourse across the dinner table. Mom began taking us to a church in North Hollywood, in a neighborhood which had once expected to be annexed by Beverly Hills, so called itself quite logically as Beverly Hills Lutheran, although it was still actually in North Hollywood. This new church’s architecture also took after an English model, only smaller and half-timber Tudor instead of cathedral Gothic. It also boasted lavish stained glass windows, a Sunday school lesson in every one, and ornately embroidered brocade altar paraments, pastoral vestments, and linens to equal anything I have seen since in a European cathedral… red, green, white and purple, for every season of the ecclesiastic year. Because of the location, the congregation drew in a fair number of people in the movie and television business. Most of them worked in the “business” at the technical level, like Uncle Raphie, who was a makeup artist, but there were a scattering of celebrities; once, someone pointed out the actress Elke Sommer to Mom, who had assumed for weeks that she was someone’s German au par girl. Betty Hutton coached the kid’s choir for six months, and taught us how to “project” and belt out “Shine on, Harvest Moon”, which still strikes me as interesting but a little irregular for the kids’ choir. There were a scattering of stars that chose to marry there, mostly because it was handy, and the building itself looked very attractive in newspaper pictures of the event.

A few of the older members were émigrés, refugees from Europe, not just the au par girls, who were perfecting their English and working as household help. The most awful fight in that congregation, Mom told me later, was when an elderly, American-born member bequeathed a small fund, specifying that it be used for an American flag to put in the sanctuary by the pulpit. Those émigrés, who remembered how Hitler had subverted their native churches by forcing them to display the Nazi flag in the sanctuary, promptly came unglued. The patriotic, American-born contingent came unglued at that comparison, and the fight was on for months; neither Mom nor I can remember who eventually won.

At the time, playing Mary in the yearly pageant for the Christmas carol service was more important to me, since I eventually graduated from being one of the angels, in a long white dress and stiffened gauze and marabou wings. As was fitting, this church had the most marvelous costume box, for the children to dress in, once a year and mime the Christmas Story, while the choir sang the relevant carols. The tallest boy got to be Joseph, with the next tallest boys being the Kings, and Shepherds, while all the very tiniest children dressed in woolly white rompers, with little eared hood, and were the herd of sheep. The first year that Pippy was a sheep, she cried her eyes out: she thought it was pajamas, and she was being put to bed. And then the little boy who was the lead shepherd put on the most enormous fake beard, and scared the tiny children into such fits that even after he took it off, they wouldn’t come near him. For the pageant that year, all the sheep were huddled as far away from their shepherd as they could get and still be on stage.

When I was about four and a half, the worst thing that could ever happen to a mother happened to Mom. She lost JP in the Big City for about two or three hours; a careful parents’ darkest nightmare.

We were visiting Auntie Mary Hammond, Mom’s friend from church who lived with her husband and four strapping sons, and her mother, Granny Clarke, in an apartment in West Hollywood. Their house was built on such a steep city street that the garage and storeroom were on the ground floor and their front door a flight of stairs up from the sidewalk--- very different from the trees and hillside around Rattlesnake Cottage. More and taller apartment buildings hemmed in Auntie Mary Hammond’s home on every side: there was only the sidewalk in front, and a little strip of lawn and trees. There was a narrow paved passageway along one side, where the walls of the buildings were so close together that the sunshine couldn’t creep in, a wider paved yard across the back, and another narrow passageway along the other side, with a little lawn, and a few skinny trees and clipped shrubs. Gates closed across the side passages, but they were never locked. It was a very different place to play, all paved over, no rocks and dirt and horses.

The Hammond’s youngest son, Paulie, was JP’s age, but looked much older, more nearly my age. He had three big brothers, and was Auntie Mary’s last attempt at having a daughter, just for variety, but there he was, another boy, and he turned out to be even larger, and rowdier than his older brothers.

We were running in and out of the house, up and down the back stairs into the paved area which was most satisfactory for tricycles and pedal cars, while Granny Clark, who had been housekeeper and cook to movie stars, spoiled us with cookies and sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and things in them that Mom never attempted. She even let Paulie have a plain unwarmed hotdog, and I had a taste of it, but I thought it tasted rather yucky, cold from the fridge.

And then, JP was no longer there. We were all three playing together, and he wasn’t there, and neither Paulie nor I had any idea of where he had gone, or when.

Auntie Mary and Mom and Granny Clark became progressively more frantic, calling for JP from the back door, going up and down the street to the other houses looking for a small boy. He did not answer; they could not see him anywhere. This was the city, there were cars and large dogs, and all sorts of darker dangers, and even in the 1950ies small boys of three and a bit usually weren’t allowed to wander on their own in the city. How far could he have gone, why hadn’t anyone noticed him? I think one of Paulie’s older brothers was left in charge of us, while Auntie Mary and Mom and Granny Clark quartered the blocks around the apartment building. Granny Clarke, tiny, straight-laced and Scottish, even braved a disreputable place that was either a bathhouse or a gym, trotting in with one hand shielding her eyes, accosting men in dishabille, and demanding to know if they had seen a little boy.

No one had. The police were called: everyone seemed to be looking for a little boy- JP Hayes, aged three years old, brown hair, brown eyes, last seen in a plaid cotton shirt, khaki shorts and sandals, and the seriousness of it all began to sink in toPaulie and I.
“Everyone is looking for JP,” I suggested to him, “Let’s go look for him, too.”
Mom was on the phone, Auntie Mary distractedly bade us stay in the yard and alleyways around the house, and so we did. Since it was the only territory we were allowed to search, search it we did, and thoroughly. We went out of the front door, and up to the side alleyway. It was empty of anything, nothing to hide in, or behind, just two walls and a concrete walkway. We went through the gate, into the yard where we had been playing before. There was the garage (empty) and Paulie’s fathers’ workshop--- not empty, but Paulie and I dutifully checked under the workbench, and behind the trash cans. On to the other side yard, the one which got enough sun, where a little patch of grass and some box bushes trimmed into gumball shapes constituted the Hammond’s garden.

And there he was, squeezed into the gap between the fence, and one of the gumball-shaped shrubs, with his hands over his face. He had wet his pants, and was ashamed to tell anyone, and had hidden there for hours.

Mom and Auntie Mary did not let any of us out of the house for the rest of the day. We were allowed to play in the living room: I think everyone was afraid of taking their eyes off us for an instant, as if the goblins or the bad fairies would snatch us away. When the policeman came to take a report, he looked as tall as a house, and his pistol seemed the size of a cannon. Paulie and JP and I were all terrifically impressed, we had never seen a policeman close-up before.