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Some people dwell on the negative. I won't anymore. I did during the years I didn't speak with her. I was angry about a favor I asked her to do for our mom in 1986.My sister was a good person. She died suddenly in December and the thrust of the powerful forces that control life forced me to go back through time recalling our days together.
Over the last few years we reconnected, writing and emailing each other regularly. She let me know it was important to her and I let her words thaw the chill that I held in my heart, for little reason, as it turns out. Early this morning, my thoughts drifted back . . . back . . . decades . . .
Claudia was a free spirit, a wild child. Strikingly pretty as a teenager, she was very popular. We didn't live far from actress Natalie Wood and if you want to picture Claudia, she looked a like that, with dark hair, deep eyes and a great smile - groovy. She spent years dating singer-songwriter Gary Lewis. I remember his father, goofy comedian Jerry Lewis, coming over to our house regularly looking for his love-struck son. He wrote one song that I know of for her that made the Top 10, titled, This Diamond Ring.
Claudia and Gary broke up and he went to fight in Vietnam. She began dating another singer-songwriter, who was altogether different. Gary was clean cut and this guy, John, was on the cutting edge of a new genre of rock. His group, Steppenwolf, was on the threshold of greatness. She kept her affections for this guy a closely guarded secret, as our dad would not have approved. Steppenwolf had yet to make their mark, and I think John was from Germany or somewhere in Europe. As if on a Magic Carpet Ride, He shuttled back and forth to L.A., before finally nailing down a contract and Steppenwolf made their world premier at my high school during an after-school assembly, a couple of years later.
It's funny, though. Because I've seen both John Kay and Gary Lewis in concert during the last 10 years, spoke with them, and both remember her, me and those days, vividly.
She was a cool chick, she was. A tomboy, tough. Sometimes big kids would bother me and she'd come running outside and threaten to kick some ass. One day she racked one boy up, who was taking me down. She had a reputation like that, you know.
She was up with the scene. Not just music - but she seemed to know what was happening before it happened. She loved the beach, tanned dark, and grew her hair long like the times. It shined and gleaned in the summer sun in Santa Monica and Malibu.
On a summer day I went with my dad - who loved her more than he loved anybody in the world - when he bought her a brand-new fire engine red 1962 Ford Falcon convertible with white seats and a white rag top. She drove that car into the Hollywood Hills, Laurel Canyon and she drove right out of my life.
That was the first time I missed my sister.
One Sunday night I was having dinner at my Grandma Frances' place with my folks, and Claudia came over after having gone MIA for a few days. She sat down and ate dinner.
Everything was normal - except for the ring on her finger. She had gone away - to Mexico - and eloped, just like Baby June Havoc in the play, Gypsy.
But wait! She's back! This meant she was home again! Not home at my house, but back in my life. Her husband, Roy, was OK, too. He often took me riding with him through Hollywood as he collected shopping carts for the Hollywood Ranch Market and other grocery stores he had contracts with to pick up the baskets that people took home. He was quite the entrepreneur! Young, handsome and a lot of ambition.
Claudia and Roy got an apartment in the Palms area or someplace between West L.A. and the beach, I think. She got pregnant and they had a handsome kid, who they named, Darrin, after the lead character on their favorite TV show at the time, Bewitched. (If it were a daughter she would have been named Samantha!) He was a good baby. I remember feeding him, babysitting him and hanging out there regularly.
The tides of separation came again, not like the rough surf that Claudia and I loved so much, but more like a tsunami, sweeping us far apart as I moved to Washington, D.C. with my parents and she stayed out west.
My father resettled us after his friend and Whittier College schoolmate, Richard Nixon got elected president. The humid, green woods of Virginia was a culture shock that I never quite got with; and my mind was still wrapped around the burgeoning rock scene in Venice Beach, where the yet-unsigned Doors were the house band at the Cheetah, jamming every Friday and Saturday night.
Westwood Village and Headquarters were hangouts, as was Santa Monica Boulevard's Troubadour, where the house band was Linda Ronstadt as early as 1967, when she drove home the soulful lyrics of Different Drum. There, and down the street at Pandora's Box, which was later torched in the conflict recalled now only in the Buffalo Springfield song For What It's Worth . . .
In 1969, Linda released the album Hand Sown, Home Grown, her band quit and re-emerged as The Eagles. . .
The era, like the people who lived it, might be a hazy, purple blur most days now. Back then, we were like vibrantly-colored birds starkly contrasting against the African skies, as we flew through the nights, free, high and brilliantly bright.
Watergate, and the dirty thieves involved with those deeds, murdered my father's spirit. Six years later, we buried him in Virginia - a shadow of himself during those last few years. My family suddenly seemed hollow, then empty, like a vacant house with people still living in it. A certain shame permeated us, a disease passed down from my dad.
I missed my sister, and I doubted she knew much about what was happening back east. She was thousands of miles away. So I wrote her and told her what things were like and she invited me to move back to the coast and live with them. But I didn't bother to bother them. I had taken a place in Beverly Hills a couple of years earlier, in 1969, during the late summer. I finished high school at 90210 before hitting the Pipeline in Waiamea on the North Shore of Hawaii the following June. I never made it back to UCLA to study Pre-Med. I got in some trouble with some older kids on the island who I was living with and they wouldn't give me back my stuff. I ended up sleeping in Ala Moana Park, then moved back east when I got my head together to ask my parents for a plane ticket home.
I mention it because Claudia picked me up and drove me to the airport to surf that summer and as fate would have it I wouldn't see her again for about a decade.
She and Roy busted up, but I don't remember when. I wondered why, but I never asked.
Claudia was able to support herself and had a good job with the Phone Company. She advanced from a 411-Information and 0-operator to management and then upper management. She had a work ethic. More than most, I've known. She worked hard and she made it, one punch of a time clock to the next. She was transferred by her company, Pacific Bell or General Telephone - I forget which one it was at the time, since she worked for both a few times, as they used to bid for her services and she went back-and-forth over the decades. Finally, they sent her from the San Fernando Valley to the Palm Springs area.
She met a guy, Stormy, who was a top telecommunications director in the Phone Company. His job was sending TV signals for desert sporting events, like major golf tournaments, to satellite uplinks. She called me one day and told me how happy she was and asked me, since dad had died, if I would give her away. Claudia's joy at the time was her BMW, with the personalized license plates, "I Got Mine."
I took a flight to L.A., and picked up Grandma Frances. They had a garden wedding and grandma, 95 at the time but still years away from dying, survived the desert heat as the band played and my sister and Stormy looked happy. I wore a green pin-stripe suit. . . walked up to the alter arm-in-arm with my sis and gave her to a no-nonsense kind of man, who I could tell right away was strong enough to be her good match.
I visited her again a few years later. I was on vacation with my girlfriend, Petals, and we stayed a couple of nights at their house - cactus out front and "special" plants out back. As the visit was ending, we said our goodbyes, and as we were driving away, I remember telling Petals, "I miss my sister."
As it turned out, I never saw her again. I relayed a message from my mom for her to give mom a call. When she wouldn't, I got pissed. They were on the outs for years, true. But for Christ's sake, mom wanted a deathbed pow-wow to clear the air, and Claudia wouldn't pick up the phone. Mom died three days later and I cried, vowing never to speak with Claudia again. Back then, I held my anger close, like a lover who needed servicing daily. Now I need forgiveness, because until I typed these words, nobody - except us - ever knew the reason she and I became estranged. I think she did forgive me.
Battles and wars are fought by foolish fools. Yet, when you're in the midst of your anger, you're more related to your dog than your mind. And, families, all families I think, get that way sometimes. That's how it was anyway.
One day, many wasted years later and not that long ago, I was still surfing. Only now, it was on the Internet instead of the white waters with blue curl. I typed her name into a search engine and found a message on some obscure website that read she was searching for me.
There we were. Me and my dilemma: It was, let hatred go or hold on to it bitter taste of separation forever.
Since it was around Christmas, I didn't need an excuse to write, so I sent her a card and we began writing and emailing on a regular basis.
Last summer, she told me she had a mastectomy a few years back. I didn't know that. She said she had had some tests and may to have the other breast removed, which she did. After that, she asked me to visit her, because she doesn't fly. I asked her if I "had" to come out and she said, "No. (long pause) . . . But you never know."
Maybe she did know. She died, afterall. Maybe we all know, in that secret cavern of the mind that never lets us admit all the truth to ourself, that it is much later than we think.
I remember missing my sister in the summer of 1963, as she cruised in her red Falcon. I missed her again in 1968, when I we were miles apart. Even during the consuming years of the 1970s and 1980s, and through the 1990s, when we didn't connect, I had a secret: I missed my sister.
This morning, I woke up again. My room was dark and silence, but my heart was split wide open and screaming. I wiped tears from my face and rolled away from the dampness on my pillow. I closed my eyes, and tried to gather myself and be who I pretend to be. But, it was too late. I was, instead, back on the beach in Malibu with my sister, it was 1967. It was one of those crazy, private moments in time, the kind nobody but you and one other person know, or care, about.
Claudia and I were laying there, toes dug deep into the warm moist sand, tanning on our blanket and talking. We had the radio blasting and tuned to 93-KHJ.
On comes this song - Tuesday Afternoon - off an album called Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues. We hadn't heard it before and we looked at each other and she said, "come on, little bro, tell me is this song bitchin or what?" We locked eyes and deviously smiled. Over the decades, it became our song . . .
I doubt I'll listen to it again and it's clear to me now, I'll miss my sister for a long, long time.
