Road To El Dorado

Deanne Stillman

Word Count 1192

I was sitting in the kitchen of our big house with the winding mahogany staircase, eating a bowl of Grape-Nuts before school (my father’s favorite cereal, mine too) when the phone rang. It was my best friend, who lived across the street. She was upset because I hadn’t told her we were moving. “What are you talking about?” I asked. She told me there was a “For Sale” sign on our front lawn. I rushed out to look. There it was, in front of my favorite dogwood tree, not unlike one of my stamps commemorating a cataclysmic moment in history. My mother explained that moving had something to do with my father being away so much, but a few weeks later, she attached the word “divorce” to the situation, and I suddenly realized why the television actors on “Divorce Court” were always sobbing.

A family uprooted by a surprise air raid, my mother, sister and I moved from a world where even the children grazed on filet mignon and cherries jubilee to the side of town where everyone was powered by tuna casserole, a foreign country where we were greeted with suspicion as immigrants always are. This was a neighborhood where the only people who were divorced were divorced women from other neighborhoods; the church in this district of tool-and-die workers didn’t permit it.

At the time, I had no idea that there were other children whose hearts had broken along with their homes. Pain was solitary, not a burden to discuss with your friends or proclaim in public. My first knowledge that families could have serious problems had come from “Divorce Court,” perhaps the most melodramatic show ever brought to the airwaves. Why were these people always crying? Couldn’t they just kiss and make up? Nobody had the answers because nobody who lived outside of a TV set talked about divorce. While many Americans were rocking around the clock and politely steering clear of the other guy’s blue suede shoes, others were locked in a private two-step, the unseemly dance of divorce, which was generally performed with the venetian blinds closed.

My mother, sister and I settled into our new neighborhood, but the only people I recognized discussing divorce were stand-up comedians on TV. The jokes generally portrayed women as the bad guy, and many of them introduced me to a strange, new epithet for my mother: “divorcée.” As I recall, the term “divorcée,” nowadays heard only on the channel that regularly features Barbara Stanwyck, came to mean “hussy” at worst, and “cocktail waitress” at best; although my mother was neither, she was one of the few single mothers in the neighborhood, so why else did my girlfriends tell me that they weren’t allowed to play at my house because there wasn’t enough supervision? Was my mother out with men? Maybe, but so what? So taboo a subject was divorce, in fact, that despite my regular viewing of “Divorce Court,” I didn’t really understand what it meant when my mother told me, a little girl with a big vocabulary, that my parents had entered that unholy state.

At first, when I was invited to the unbroken home of my new schoolmates for a meal, I was scared. How could they eat, I wondered, while a figure nailed to a cross dripped plastic blood above the Kraft salad dressing on the dinner table? Yet it had become my mission to spend time with them, no matter how haunted their houses, for they all had fathers.

In 1981, I wrote a book called “Getting Back at Dad.” It was a collection of my own writing, with an introductory piece of that same title, subtitled, “Or Why I Write.” The introduction was an angry essay chronicling all the details of my parents’ divorce and the sudden disappearance of my father. I talked about the joy of fleeing Ohio and the excitement of finding kindred spirits at college; it wasn’t just me with a gripe against a parent — the whole country was mad at Dad. “The Dad in the classroom was teaching Dad’s warped version of history,” I wrote, “and the Dad at home played golf with all of the other Dads.” I discussed how I had carried my childhood rage into my professional life, and how I had made a living by being funny for money (my parodies, satires and commentaries had been paying my rent). And I wrote about how prior to my parents’ divorce, my father and I had been co-conspirators in literary flight.

Our world was one that had nothing to do with the routine of family life and everything to do with escape. Instead of polishing the waffle iron, for instance, my father and I would flee a household of chores and head for his study, a safehouse where he would open old volumes of prose and poetry. Often he read aloud from his favorite authors — Hemingway, Steinbeck, O’Hara. I remember thinking how fantastic it would be to live in a city where “Butterfield 8” was a telephone exchange, as opposed to ours, where everyone’s had something to do with fruit. In fact, when I moved back to New York after my junior and senior years of college at the University of New Mexico, I was disappointed to find that “Butterfield 8” was no longer in use and re-read the book to see it in action.

One of the works my father most liked to recite was Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eldorado,” the sad poem about a wandering knight’s search for the land of gold. Together, my father and I traveled the path of the perpetually questing knight, and I remember the sense that Eldorado was a land far beyond the borders known to either of us, an enchanted place to be found somewhere in the books from which my father loved to read aloud, perhaps in the reading itself. I found solace among the fictional wanderers along the path to Eldorado, the only world that remained. I started reading tales of the West, stories about all of the great frontier characters — Crazy Horse, Jesse James, Calamity Jane — and I started to compose short stories in which “seldom was heard a discouraging word.” In one of them, my parents reunited; I called it “They Got Divorced at the End of a Decade,” and it was inspired by the apocalyptic tone of the James Jones title, “Some Came Running” (which, to this day, I still have not read). I tried to arrange a reunion one Christmas when I persuaded my parents to exchange presents. Neither wanted to and both of them hated the presents. I remember turning my parents’ failed holiday reunion into a tale called “Security Council,” about a battling couple who air their problems before an emergency session at the U.N., a place I knew of because, in college, my mother had worked there. I submitted it to Reader’s Digest, either not realizing that they only published condensed books, or being presumptuous enough to think they could make an exception in my case.

Later, I became more adept at wielding my Swiss Army knife, and I began to make a living as a writer. I wrote pieces that I would not be able to write now, including “The Feminish Dictionary” (which satirized the influence of political correctness on the language as it relates to gender) and “Dean Martin Roasts Alexander Solzhenitsyn” (at least 10 years before glasnost ). At the peak of this phase in my writing life, I found a publisher for my angry essay about my parents’ divorce and the pieces that went with it. But when I turned it in, my publisher had a change of heart; their lawyers advised them that the introduction invaded my father’s privacy and they did not want to go ahead with “Getting Back at Dad.” I explained that, mainly, the introduction invaded my privacy; it was a piece about me, not anybody else, and naturally, my father happened to be part of my life, along with others, such as Peaches, our erstwhile gardener, and my friend who had delivered the newsflash about the “For Sale” sign. Their fear of a lawsuit quickly subsided, although I later realized that this may have been because they knew they were going out of business about two hours after my book was to be published. At any rate, “Getting Back at Dad,” my message in a bottle, was cast into the sea and, to my surprise, floated ashore to a house I hadn’t visited in years — my father’s.

I was not sued. But to my surprise, several months after publication of my book, my father called, announced that he was in town and — just as surely as the pope stands up in his car — asked me to meet him for a drink. To my relief, we confined our conversation to updates about family members; I wasn’t prepared to retry my case during happy hour at the Tiki Room. After the second or third round, my father asked me to stay at his house instead of the hotel I generally inhabited whenever I was visiting Cleveland. He also warned me that other household members were still upset about “Getting Back at Dad” (for some, it was the first time they had heard about the things I had written about), and a visit might be fraught with tension. I pointed out that various relatives had recently “joked” about sequels, either fearing or hoping that the “getting back at” shelf would soon expand with more stories. My father and I both marveled at their presumptuousness, trying to imagine a book called “Getting Back at Aunt Edna,” yet knowing that this would never happen, and not just because I don’t have an aunt named Edna.

Eventually, I took my father up on his invitation and spent a few days with him and his family. One afternoon, when I was out, the phone rang and my stepmother answered. It was the owner of a local bookstore who was a fan of my work. My stepmother asked the caller to leave a message. “Oh, is this Mrs. Stillman?” the caller wondered, not knowing that she was speaking to my father’s second wife, the mother of three of his other children. The answer, of course, was yes; the caller was speaking to Mrs. Stillman. “Well, tell Deanne that her book about her father is quite popular around here. It really seems to have gotten to people.” My stepmother replied that the book was not as popular chez that particular Stillman residence as it may have been at others, and later relayed the phone call to my father as we watched a football game on TV. He was not overjoyed and his feelings were mixed. I felt a pang of hurt knowing that my father was embarrassed, and then we both sat back in an uneasy and intense silence, as the Browns took on the 49ers. During a timeout, Dad turned to me and winked, in the peculiar sign language of those born before Pearl Harbor Day. A couple of days later, as our reunion was winding to a close, he confided that he had one editorial comment about the book. “You should have put the introduction at the end,” he said, “because the other stuff is so funny that it’s hard to laugh after you read about us.”

If life were a television show, this would surely have been the “golden moment” — or “golden shower” as we called it on a TV series on which I was later employed as a staff writer, that brief interlude when relatives hug/kiss/phone home and have otherwise heartwarming experiences. But since life is something else (exactly what I cannot say), it wasn’t until years later that I fully experienced the impact of this particular moment. It involved a visit to the real El Dorado; the dreamtime that Poe had conjured became my salvation.

Deanne is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books include Twentynine Palms, an LA Times "best book of the year" which Hunter Thompson called "A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer"; Mustang, an LA Times "best book of the year," recipient o a starred review in PW, praised by Ian Frazier and Tony Hillerman, and in audio with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, John Densmore, and Wendie Malick; Desert Reckoning, based on a Rolling Stone piece and winner of the Spur. LA Press Club and Southwest Book of the Year awards, and Blood Brothers, which received a starred review in Kirkus.