Tony Platt GoodToGo

A NAUGHTY NIGHT IN LONDON

The last time I was in England – during the summer of 2007 – I didn’t make any plans to meet a dominatrix. Especially given that I was with the wife and a grandson. Cecilia and I were visiting London with then 12 year-old Jonah. We’ve been coming across the pond together from the Bay Area for more than twenty years. Much longer for me since I was born and lived in England until I came to grad school in Berkeley in 1963 and made it my new homeland. We were giving Jonah his first trip out of the United States and a rare departure from small town life in Chico. I took a similar trip alone to London from the industrial north at about the same age to visit my godparents, but already I had traveled widely with my class-savvy parents and was getting schooled in how to find my bearings in new places.

Crossing boundaries was all new to Jonah. This was also his first extended time away from his mom Anna since his dad, our son Daniel, died in July 2006 after a lifetime of illnesses. It was a journey of new experiences for all of us, trying to live beyond the shadow of Thanatos.

We’re used to being Jonah’s grandparents – indulging his whims even before he can imagine them. But on this trip we had parenting responsibilities: keeping him safe from cars speeding by on the wrong side of the road, prodding him to bed before midnight and out of bed in time for the first museum, getting him to eat right occasionally, and teaching him the basics of a foreign language (loo, k’yew, wanker, sorted, etc.). I hope Jonah will remember this trip many years from now, and that it will open up some new worlds of possibility. And maybe he’ll realize that I don’t usually spend precious days in London this way. It was my first time, as well as his, taking the double-decker bus tour of the Sights of London, ditto a boat ride on the Thames, shopping for schlock at Camden Market on a Saturday amid hormonal teens in studs and tatts, going to see “Oceans’s Thirteen” (having somehow missed Eleven and Twelve), picnicking with the lions at Trafalgar Square, seeing a cheesy blockbuster musical, and eating fish and chips at Ye Olde – I-kid-you-not – Cheshire Cheese. I said a firm no to the Eye in the Sky, but I couldn’t avoid lining up four-deep-cameras-aloft at Buckingham Palace at 11:30 a.m. on the dot. And because I lost the toss to Cece, I was dragooned into the Tower to witness the gore of yore.

The trip was going well, but it was a pleasure also to have some time to ourselves when my brother Steve and sister-in-law Claudia came down from Edinburgh to take Jonah and their son Josh off to see a musical gender-bending version of “Billy Elliott” (which I wish we’d chosen over the “Lord of the Rings” extravaganza that we sat through for three long, long hours). For our evening off duty, Cece and I considered a highbrow outing to something suitably postmodern at the National Theatre, but opted for lowbrow pleasures instead. We walked about ten yards from the flat where we’re staying on Fleet Street to El Vino, a long-time watering hole frequented for years by the male scribbling class when this neighborhood used to be headquarters of the fourth estate and before women crashed the party in 1982. Now its customers are nouveau toffs, well-heeled female and male professionals, upwardly mobile neophytes and their managers, mostly straight lawyers who know their plonk.

We were still a few weeks away from the smoking ban taking effect in England, so many customers in El Vino had lit up. We managed to find one table with a sign that announced “Non-Smoking Zone,” presumably an in-joke because the closest smoker was about three feet away. Despite the haze, we liked the place – olde enough, cozy, leathery but not too clubby, a fabulous wine list, and a 1950s menu. I was happy to order battered prawns and cubed cheddar with my French sauvignon and Australian Shiraz. Cece scoured the menu for something not fried and enlisted the help of our blonde, sexy waitress. “Hmmmm,” said Dana.  She looked over the tapas list, tapping a pencil against each item. “Fried, fried, fried, not fried, fried, fried, not fried, fried.”  Cece chose one of the non-frieds and got something vaguely Asian in a sluggish cream sauce.

When Dana returned with our second round, I pointed to the sign and said, “So you’re going to have a healthier job on July 1st” (first day of the new smoking regulations). “It doesn’t bother me,” she replied in a New Zealand twang, “I like to smoke and drink. I do everything,” she said, deadpan, “Everything.” A Pinterish pause. “I’m a naughty girl.” Dana helped to put us into a relaxed state, despite the lawyers. We unwound over the drinks, first discussing how the trip was going with Jonah before moving on to our own lives. Both of us are in transition from the steady work of professors to something not quite clear yet. In the middle of a discussion about Cece’s future – how she wants to make the most of her artsy predilections – Dana squatted in front of us in her retro fishnets. “I heard what you were talking about,” she said without a hint of deference. “I’m interested in theatre too. I’m a performer. Never went to university. Left school when I was 13. Now I’d like to go back, but I’m not sure what I want to do.” She introduced herself; we did too, a three-way shaking of hands.

Later, Dana slipped us a piece of paper with her web site and her nom de stage: Killpussy. “Don’t let the manager see,” she said. Playful bondage and nude sex shows seems to be her thing, I found out the next day at her x-rated website. “I mostly do my stuff for gay and lesbian audiences, but you’d be OK,” she said, praise indeed. We passed on the third round, deciding in favor of Eros: it was time to get back to our childless flat and do our own naughty things before Big Ben struck eleven and Jonah returned.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

    I’ve traveled all over the world but one of my favorite places is close to home. A few hours in the car is all it takes to get me up the northern California coast to a sparsely populated resort, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest.  I’ve been coming here to Big Lagoon, as it is called, for thirty years. I’m here as usual to see in the new year.

    I first brought my son Daniel to Big Lagoon as a small child, and his deep love of the area is one of the reasons I’ve held on to my share of a cabin. Now that he’s gone, I irrevocably associate him with this wondrous place.

    A few weeks before Daniel’s death in the summer of 2006, I was here with his son, my then seven-year old grandson. On an unusually warm Father’s Day, I stretched out in a sand dune next to the placid lagoon, watching Nathan dig a hole he dubbed “the world-wide web fort.” Further down the beach, a woman I’d later meet was watching her son swim off a fraction of his boundless energy.

    Behind us to the west I could hear the kettledrum booming of fierce waves. If you stand exactly in the middle of the barrier beach, one ear is deafened by the ocean’s roar, while the other can hear the whoosh of brown pelicans as they alight clumsily on the lagoon. And this détente has lasted for at least a millennium, as we know from stories passed on by the Yurok Indians, who thought of Big Lagoon as the center of a universe regulated by spirits that inhabit the off shore sea stacks and under-water caves.

    Nathan is an openhearted kid with a hard-working imagination. I’d brought him to Big Lagoon knowing that he would enjoy himself in much the same way Daniel enjoyed himself here when he was the same age. Nathan had all he needed – water, sand, rocks, and wood – except for kids his own age. Luckily, seven-year old Lonnie appeared out of nowhere to join my grandson in his construction project.

    Nathan-the-knight and his new pal Lonnie-the-dragon, a wiry and agile kid with eyes in the back of his head, quickly turned the peaceful beach into a battleground, defending their kiddie-pool fort with an arsenal of puny driftwood sticks and a beat up tennis ball, magically transformed into ray guns and electric spears. When I offered them peanut butter sandwiches and juice, they quickly negotiated an armistice.

    Soon, Lonnie’s mother – a tall muscular woman in her 40s who fits easily into a dancer’s body – came over to collect her son. After two minutes of pleasantries befitting strangers, Stephanie Silvia and I quickly got into more serious stuff about the boys. Recently I’ve become more open to telling my stories to strangers, and hearing theirs.

    Stephanie and her husband had recently adopted seven-year old, tri-racial Lonnie after he had spent several years in the hardscrabble world of foster care. She told me she’s doing her best to make sure he doesn’t go through the rest of his childhood flinching, as she did. 

    I immediately liked Stephanie: the way she wears mismatched earrings and acts so sure of herself. On the surface, we have little in common. I’m a retired professor with a pension, health benefits, a brown-shingle house in Berkeley, and enough savings to buy a share in a second home on the coast.

    Stephanie rents a funky mobile home in nearby Trinidad and scrapes by as a teacher’s aide. She’s always looking for full-time work in this economically depressed region, hard hit by clear-cutting, the damning of rivers, and government neglect. In Humboldt, where the once plentiful salmon are dangerously depleted, local fishermen, like Stephanie’s husband Scot, spend months of the year away from home, trawling in Alaska.

    I was in Big Lagoon for a vacation with my grandson at my son’s request. A few months earlier, Daniel took me aside for some straight talk about why I needed to pay more attention to his two boys.  He had experienced four close calls in his forty-year life. I had rehearsed his death many times, but I’d also come to expect a last minute reprieve.

    We shared an unusual intimacy, forged during grim visits to oncology and lung clinics, and hilarious consultations with urologists.  We had been best man at each other’s wedding.

    “You need to stop worrying about me and spend more time with the boys,” he said, pointedly.

    Of course, I couldn’t stop worrying about him, but thereafter my partner Cecilia and I made a special effort to relate to Daniel and Anna’s two sons as more than dutiful grandparents. Thus this trip with Nathan to Big Lagoon.

    A few days after I met Stephanie, we got together for coffee in the local Beachcomber Café, and discovered some surprising threads of common history. We are both secular Jews, both transplants to the west coast: she came from New York in the late 1970s in search of deadheads; I arrived from England more than a decade earlier in search of the beats. We discovered that we both aspire to wake up and write early in the day.

    Before we parted, I asked Stephanie to send me her poetry. I told her that I’d be glad to give her feedback on her work. A few days later she filled up my email box with her poems.

    But it was a long time before I had the energy to seriously read anything. In the middle of the summer of 2006, Daniel died.

    Back home in Berkeley, I retreated into a small world. It took a blind-sided jolt – a young man running a red light and totaling my car – to help get me going again. Glad to be alive, unscratched no less, I began to resume my routines. Returning eventually to Stephanie’s poetry, I found myself drawn to her more sorrowful pieces, spiked with a gritty toughness I recall in myself before I lost my good friend, my son.

    A piece she calls “Today” snagged my moody attention:

waking up and writing first thing
this is a purpose
this is not getting out of bed
taking care of the dog
(I love the dog)
doing an errand
after having green tea because of giving up coffee because
green tea is supposed to promote weight loss
and planning on cleaning the house
and going back to bed
to lie in an awful stupor
(like the bed sweats with no sweat)
between asleep and wakefulness
somehow summoning a force field
to make it to the kitchen to grind strong black coffee while
scouring the cupboard for good/bad  things to eat
before getting on with the day
much better yet with a hint of  lingering daze

none of that today
today
toasting a bagel at 8 am
(8am!)
walking with a mug ( a coffee mug) in my hand
to the cabin next door
like I have something important to do
like I am working
like I am whole and awake
and not longing to be hit over the head
to end my yearning misery

    Like Stephanie, I know what it’s like to plunge into creative work in the hope of shaking off the numbness. I’ve been writing my everyday stories for more than twenty-five years, going back to Daniel’s first near-death experience, when a surgeon removed a tumor the size of a small orange from his brain. He made it through that and another brain surgery, a stroke, and lung failure.

    “I’m baaaaaaaack,” he’d exult after each recovery, and rush to fill up his abbreviated life until it spilled over the edges.

    But this time, there would be no deus ex machina. And he knew it. “When my well-used body gives up,” he told me about a month before his death, “I’d like a Viking funeral.”

    We honored his request some hundred yards north of the place where I had stretched out on the beach a few weeks earlier, watching Nathan and Lonnie fight off their imaginary enemies. With his family gathered under the stars, we placed his ashes in a cedar box on top of a driftwood pyre and sent him ablaze into the distant heart of Big Lagoon.