Golden Age by Sarah Curtis
On a recent visit to my parents’ house, I was surprised to pick up an old photo album and find it rife with pictures of my godfather Doc. There was Doc holding me at my baptism, looking like a study in gray—gray suit and tie, gray beard, gray hair thinning at the temples. There he was a few pages later visiting us at our farm in Tennessee, sitting at the picnic table in our backyard with a highball of amber liquid in front of him. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and smiles down at me while I stand beside him in nothing but a diaper, my mouth open mid-sentence. I shuddered at seeing my chubby exposed flesh, its proximity to Doc. More Doc on the next page, from the same visit I assumed. In each photo I am nearly naked, Doc is looking at me, and I am looking away.
Why did my mother keep these? I wondered, wedging the album back on the shelf. Never. I would have ripped them out ages ago. In that moment I was a daughter but also a mother of daughters, and seeing that my parents were too lazy to remove photos of Doc didn’t just make me cringe. It made me judge.
Doc was not his real name. His real name was Truitt, and he was my father’s high school agriculture teacher in 1950’s West Texas. He encouraged my father to join Future Farmers of America, and later to try out for their State Entertainer, which my father, a budding country singer and guitarist, won. The role required him to travel around Texas performing for different FFA chapters, but his high school principal refused to grant him days off. They argued and my father stormed out of the school, vowing never to return.
My dad’s parents were poor cotton farmers with no grand plans for his education, but they insisted he finish high school. They worked out an arrangement with Doc, who at this point had been promoted to high school principal in a neighboring town. My father would transfer there and live with Doc while he completed his final year of high school. Doc was in his late thirties, unmarried with no children. To my father he was a mentor, an advocate, and a friend. When you form a strong impression of someone at a malleable age, it’s hard to see that person differently.
My father and his bandmates moved to L.A. in 1960, along with a swelling wave of musicians, artists, and seekers. Doc moved there too, and thanks to connections he made through my dad, he landed a job as the office manager for a music publishing company. For the first year or two, my dad and Doc rented an apartment together, though my dad was usually gone, performing on the road or in the studio. Doc maintained the place in his absence. He was unfailingly generous—throughout his life, that much is clear—and would often lend his car or money to fledgling musician friends in their inner circle.
My parents married in 1970. When I was born five years later, they christened Doc my godfather at a Lutheran church in Sherman Oaks. According to my mom, it was my dad’s idea—she says she never particularly liked Doc, with his tendency to show up at our house unannounced; though I wonder if her memory is tainted by later events. She did think it was sweet how he adored me, showering me with gifts and affection. After work, he’d sometimes stop by our house to take me for a stroll around our Studio City block while she cooked dinner.
As the seventies wore on, L.A. spun out—several of my parents’ friends lost their minds or lives to drugs and alcohol; crime ran rampant; and a black cloud of smog hung over the interstate like a bad omen. Doc had an idea for escape. He found a Spanish-style house for sale in the high desert, beautiful but remote, an hour and a half from L.A. He drove my parents up to see the place. Why didn’t they go in on it together? he asked. My mom argued that my dad couldn’t commute so far from the studio, but Doc had already thought of that. He proposed the three of us—he, my mother, and I—live there together during the week while my dad came up on weekends. The idea of my mother and me living alone in the desert with Doc did not appeal to either of my parents. They told him it was out of their price range.
Instead my parents bought a verdant farm outside Nashville, Tennessee, a music hub where my father could fulfill his farmland fantasies (Doc had trained him to love agriculture, after all.) Predictably, Doc was heartbroken. He drove us to LAX the day we flew out. As he clutched me in his arms at the gate, he broke into loud sobs, drawing the attention of onlookers. “My baby, my baby! You can’t take my baby!” he cried. My dad found his behavior so unnerving, he set down my diaper bag to pry me gently away, leaving it behind as we boarded the plane. My mom never let him live that down.
After our move, Doc missed me terribly, and would often call to hear my baby voice. “Don’t you want to talk to Doc?” my mom would ask, handing me the receiver.
“Tell Doc I busy.” This was my pat response to anything I didn’t want to do. I was apparently such an industrious toddler, my parents made me a t-shirt with the words “I Busy” scrolled in red across the chest, and my mother says I was always busy when it came to Doc.
He flew down to see us a few times, the visits depicted in those album photos. By this point, his style had changed. He’d grown his hair long and started wearing dashikis; but hey, it was the late seventies. He spoiled me like an indulgent grandparent on these trips, once buying me a green-and-yellow swing set. Another time he tried to persuade my mother to let him fly me back to L.A. so he could take me to Disneyland, an incredulous proposition to me now, as it must have been to my mother. She told him I was way too young to make such a long trip without her.
One day when I was six, an my dad received a phone call from a friend letting him know that Doc had died of a heart attack. He flew to L.A. for the funeral while my mom stayed back with me. Writing this, I had to call my dad to ask what year Doc died. I have no memory of his death, just as I have little of his life.
But a few years later, a troubling detail emerged. I learned that Doc’s body was found in a seedy alley off Hollywood Boulevard, his pants pulled down to his ankles. I say, “I learned,” but I don’t know how and when exactly I discovered this fact—I only remember the fact itself, how it rattled around my brain like a rusty nail. Did I overhear my parents talking about it, or did my mother tell me outright? It seems an inappropriate detail to tell a child about her late godfather, but my mom rarely hid the world’s excesses from me, so I can’t completely put it past her. I was too young to imagine why a man might pull down his pants in an alley, and I asked my mother why. She told me it was common for men experiencing a heart attack to be gripped with a sudden urge to pee. For days, years, this answer confused me. It wasn’t funny, though I usually found pee stories funny. It was something else, something I couldn’t contextualize so young. I think even then, I knew the story contained a darker truth.
That truth revealed itself one summer afternoon when I was twelve. My father received a phone call in his office, where he spent the remainder of the day holed up with the door closed. His office lay directly below my bedroom, and for hours I could hear my parents’ hushed voices drifting up through the air vent. They’d made some grievous errors of judgement when it came to Doc; but to their credit, they handled that day well, sitting me down on the living room couch before dinner to speak openly about what they’d learned.
The phone call was from the L.A. record executive who’d employed Doc. The man’s twenty-something daughter was battling heroin addiction and mental illness, undergoing a year-long stint in rehab. During therapy, she finally revealed the source of her lifelong pain. Doc had sexually abused her for years.
Starting how young? I asked my mother once.
Very young, she said.
As I recall, my mom did most of the talking that day while my dad sat staring at the carpet, dazed and unblinking. She wanted me to know that except for those brief neighborhood strolls when I was a baby, she’d never left me alone with Doc. She asked how I was feeling, but I wasn’t feeling much aside from awkward confusion.
Doc’s name, once revered in our home, now belonged to a monster. The only good news was that he’d died when I was so young. I’d barely known him, and anyway, even if my parents had left me alone with him, almost all our interaction predated my memory. An outsider might wonder if Doc ever molested me. While I’ve wondered this too, I suppose I’ve learned to live with the question like a benign tumor I can’t remove. I wish it weren’t there, but I’m grateful it won’t kill me.
In Sherry Turkle’s memoir, The Empathy Diaries, the social scientist describes how she learned later in life that her father had conducted cruel experiments on her as a baby. A pseudo-scientist with delusions of grandeur, he isolated her in a room for hours at a time, depriving her of touch or communication. Turkle has no memory of these experiments, but the piercing irony is that she’s spent her long career advocating for humanism in technology. Did her father’s experiments in detachment open a gap she spent her life trying to fill with empathy?
While reading Turkle’s memoir, I couldn’t help but think of Doc, and how much the body keeps the score, how much the mind. If he did abuse me, he might have left a residue on my brain that responds negatively to certain physical acts. If he did not abuse me, those feelings are natural proclivities. The maddening part is, I can never know where my free will begins.
When Doc died, he left me thousands of dollars’ worth of gold coins that I cashed in when my husband and I bought our first house (he left my parents silver bars—how telling that I got the more precious metal.) Doc also left me a pencil sketch of a cowboy by the Danish artist Oleg Wieghorst and two Hollywood movie posters—one of Shirley Temple, signed at the bottom by Shirley herself, and the other a promotional poster from The Wizard of Oz, signed by Jack Haley and Ray Bolger, the actors who played the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. The Shirley Temple poster hung in my bedroom when I was a girl, before the truth came out. The Wizard of Oz poster briefly did too, but I made my mother take it down because I was scared of the Wicked Witch of the West’s green face—how innocent and misplaced were my fears.
I gave the Wieghorst to my parents, who appreciate cowboy art more than I do. But when my first daughter was born, I thought about those movie posters, left to rot in my parents’ basement. The Shirley Temple poster had suffered water damage, and I took it to a fine art restorer who was unable to remove the brown spots on Shirley’s cheeks, but I suppose it’s fitting that she’s marred. Despite the damage, I paid to have both posters rematted and reframed. Today they hang in my daughters’ playroom.
A few years ago while I was hosting a backyard barbecue for a mom friend, she asked me about the posters. She and I had shared uncomfortable truths with each other during many playground chats—our mutual bouts of postpartum depression, our occasional ambivalence towards motherhood, and our distrust of certain mothers who never seemed depressed or ambivalent. In other words, I felt certain our friendship could handle Doc. Over plates of grilled chicken and potato salad, as the sound of our kids’ laughter drifted from inside the house, I revealed the posters’ ugly backstory.
Immediately, I knew by her stricken expression I’d been wrong. She thought it was sick I hung the posters in my home—above my daughters’ dollhouse, no less. I would never, I could tell she was thinking. I would have thrown those out ages ago.
Had Doc designed the posters, I probably would have gotten rid of them, in the same way I can no longer watch Woody Allen films I once loved. But I tell myself he was a mere conduit, the medium through which the art and gold changed hands to reach me. Maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe there’s blood on my own hands.
What does one do with the gifts of a monster?
For years I’d downplayed Doc’s role in my early life, relegated him to a cobwebbed room in my brain and shut the door. Then my mother mailed me the cassettes.
Our first winter in Tennessee, while a rare blizzard thrashed the siding of our tumbledown farmhouse, my parents recorded three eight-track tapes of me singing Christmas carols and reciting poems, the prologue to Madeleine and various nursery rhymes. I was two years old. I can’t remember recording the tapes, but I can envision the scene: me in footed pajamas toddling around my mother, cross-legged on the floor holding a tape recorder. Behind her, my long-haired father sits on the tweed sofa, tuning the pegs of his guitar.
In operas or musical scores, a character or theme is sometimes represented in a short, recurring phrase known as a leitmotif. As I listen to these tapes, I realize I’m hearing my own family’s leitmotifs. My mother’s laughter provides the harmony: the ease of tension, the ear’s release. My father is the melody: the force keeping us from straying too far from our assigned keys. I am the rhythm: the heartbeat at the center of the phrase, the unifying pulse.
It’s clear the Nashville music scene has already gotten its hooks in me; when I sing “Away in a Manger,” I drawl the last verse like Loretta Lynn, with two syllables: “Asleep in the ha-yyyyyyyy.” My mom coos with delight after each song, but my dad is a tough critic, coaching me constantly: back up from the mic, count it off, stand up straight (a strange directive for an audio performance) and, at several points, sing on key! Once or twice he stops strumming and lectures me about being flat, a word he never defines. He just assumes I speak his language. When I flub or forget a line, which is often, he orders me to start again, clearly exasperated.
“Let it go,” my mother says a few times.
“Okay,” he grumbles, his voice on edge.
Listening to the tapes, I’m left with several questions. Why was my dad such a perfectionist? It’s almost like he’s grooming me for stardom, though I can’t remember him pressuring me so. Maybe he figured out early on that my voice was mezza mezza, as a music teacher once told me, and gave up. Or maybe parenting is just different these days. Was more decorum was expected of the babies of 1977? Either way, the tapes unsettled me even before I reached the biggest revelation.
When I played the second tape, I realized the purpose of these recordings. They were made for an audience of one. They are copies of cassettes my parents made for Doc.
“Hi Doc!” I chirp at the beginning of each song or rhyme. “And now I tell you a wittle poem.” If you want to hit eleven on a cringe meter, listen to a two-year-old recite “I love little pussy her coat is so warm, and if I don’t hurt her she’ll do me no harm” ten times in a row to her child molester godfather.
But the moments that tug at my heart the most do not involve my overbearing father or problematic nursery rhymes. At the end of each performance I cry out in frustration, “I want Doc to clap and say yay!” And my parents both assure me yes, Doc will most definitely clap and say yay. I am learning the meaning of recording in real time—that Doc will not say yay now, but rather later. That I will not hear the attention I seek; I have to take it on faith. And that tells me my mother was wrong. I wasn’t always busy when it came to Doc. I desperately wanted his approval and love.
I thought I did not remember Doc, or that my memories were manufactured from photos and scraps of conversation. But one winter day as I was drifting into a nap, hovering in that blurred, half-conscious limitrophe, an image presented itself, as clear and sharp as ice. Doc holding me in his lap in the backseat of my father’s 1976 black Cadillac, the Nashville airport receding outside the window, his breath smelling of cigars and mint. It was the smell that hit me first, the mingling of those two scents. In my memory, I find it sort of pleasing, the curious odor of a man who loves me, bouncing me on his knee, amazed at how much I’ve grown.
The next day, I called my mother. “Did Doc smoke cigars?” I asked.
“Oh yes, all the time,” she said. “I never let him smoke inside the house though.” I felt relieved that my memory still performs its job from time to time.
We talked for a while about Doc, and she told me—as she has before—that she always knew something was off about him. The day the music executive called, she said, “everything just clicked into place.”
I asked her when she last saw Doc. She said he came to Nashville on business when I was four and spent one night with us. My dad was still at the studio, and she left to pick up Chinese food for dinner. When she came back, she found Doc sitting in a corner of the dark living room wearing a caftan while I lay sprawled on the couch in front of him watching cartoons. “Oh, Doc, turn some lights on!” she scolded him. Something about the image rattled her. She told my father later it might be best if Doc not visit anymore.
So she did leave me alone with him, I thought.
A few days later, I called my dad. I told him I wanted to talk about Doc.
“You don’t remember much about him, do you?”
No, I said, not much at all.
He told me Doc had wanted me to call him “Grandpa Doc,” but my mom the heavy said no, I already had two grandpas. Then he talked about his business with the publishing company Doc worked for—how the head executive would take him to the iconic Italian restaurant, Villa Capri, where they’d grease the maître d’ twenty bucks to get Frank Sinatra’s table. That’s also where my dad learned to make his favorite salad, you know the one, Sarah, with pimentos and capers? I said I did. He talked of his close friendship with Doc’s younger sister and brother-in-law, a successful railroad executive he admired. I asked about Doc’s finances, and he told me his mother had owned a service station and some land in Post, Texas. When she died, she left Doc and his sister a modest inheritance, a bit of which trickled down to me.
A few times I tried to steer him back on the subject of Doc himself, though of course we were on the subject. Doc doesn’t live in a closed box in my father’s mind; he’s more like a train car linking him to Texas, music, and meals with friends. Maybe that’s why Doc’s presence looms so large on those tapes, because he provided my father a connective tissue to places he had left behind, a link between the past and present, youth and adulthood, Texas and L.A. “I don’t mind you writing about him,” he said. “There’s no love lost there. And his sister and her husband have both died.”
But looking back on my notes now and listening to those cassettes, I see that’s not true. My father did love Doc, and so did I. It was the seventies, and mistakes were made. And anyway, I don’t want to give my parents more guilt than they already have. I have but one memory of Doc, and it’s innocuous: the perfume of tobacco and mint, a joyful drive from the airport.
You don’t remember him, do you, Sarah?
No, not much at all.
These are the lines we repeat whenever Doc’s name comes up, as reaffirming as a call-and-response between a priest and the congregants. A kiss to the sky, a prayer that appeals to our rational minds.
Do you remember?
No, I do not.
Can I get an amen?
After I hung up with my father, I thought about the thin membrane of safety (and perhaps memory) that protected me from Doc, how I could have been the one with a year-long stint in rehab overcoming trauma and addiction—if my parents had bought the house in the high desert, or if my mother had decided she needed a break, and put me on that plane with him to Disneyland. How fragile a child’s bubble, how easily destroyed. I see now that I cashed the gold and hung the posters out of privilege; after all, I’d managed to remain on the inside of the bubble looking out. And though I couldn’t articulate it to my horrified mom friend, I find the posters a useful reminder of the darkness that lies below so many glossy surfaces, a metaphor for the golden age of Hollywood, or the golden age of childhood.
But also, I just like them. They remind me how very, very lucky I am.
Sarah Curtis’s essays have appeared in the L.A. Review of Books, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, the Colorado Review, the American Literary Review, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, the anthology, River Teeth: Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She lives in Michigan, where she is at work on a biographical memoir.
12 January 2023
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