Chapter 1:The Psycho Menagerie

I believe that sometime early in our nation's history, there must have been one genetically mutated, Tennessee-Williams-type family that extended its tentacles out all over the continent and created a mass of smoldering parent child sibling relationships which would require generations of psychiatrists and pop therapy fads to extinguish. Lately, I've been working a lot on this theory, but before I go on, I should perhaps say that I am neither a social nor natural scientist, but a comic book author, and that the method of my approach to this problem may have logical flaws. Nevertheless, as I remember from my Psychology 101 and Biology 100 classes, evolution or mutation is often tested by means of studies that followed the members of an identified gene pool through several generations. Thus, through the study of my own family, I am hoping not only to substantiate my hypothesis, but also get to the bottom of some personal turmoil.

Unfortunately, as I almost immediately discovered, getting the facts down is a major problem, since the "facts" of our family history have always surfaced in anecdotes or unrelated narrative fragments, told at odd times. For example, although I remember hearing that my Great Grandma Gaine came over the Rockies and out to the coast in a covered wagon – maybe on the Oregon Trail, maybe on the Donner Trail– this information was not introduced in a bedtime story or even a coherent anecdote, but during the course of a family squabble. My parents never told stories. Maybe they didn't realize the importance of family history or maybe they didn't think I would be interested. For whatever reason, the result has been that in my life-long search for the facts, I have been left to my own resources. This is also true of many of my cousins, by the way, most of whom I have interrogated thoroughly and who report knowing nothing about the family past. Not that their testimony is always reliable.
I, on the other hand, was an intuitively suspicious child, who imagined wiggly secrets hiding in the recesses of the family history, and so I kept my ears and eyes open. I think I hoped that knowing about my ancestors would teach me where to put up my guard. In time, my own observations began to merge with the bits of fact and family myth thrown my way to reveal the filigree threads of a massive story line. I noticed, for example, that my father's generation was greatly influenced by the Great Depression and that each member of this generation views this period of history as a personal crisis. The same is true of The War. Although I discovered that my father, George Golden, and his twin sister Lucy were born after the Depression and that he was therefore too young to serve in WWII, his older brothers and sisters were active participants in economic struggle and the fight for world freedom. In fact, the way it was told, each generation in my family struggled along in the middle of its assigned crisis and life was one long battle for survival, even though, from my perspective, most of it sounded suspiciously like a story of upward mobility.
At other times, watching the proffered snatches and episodes of family narrative piece themselves together before my eyes has been like a private viewing of Psycho. First I saw vague images behind the shower curtain, heard a strange scratchy voice in the attic, and then I began to suspect that Great Grandma might well have been one of the members of the Donner Party, who ate their fellows in order to survive an unplanned winter in the Sierras, an historical event which occurred before the construction of Highway 80 and the introduction of the ski lodge to Squaw Valley.

I suppose my mind is not especially linear, which may be why it is more occupied with trying to imagine a fantastic world into which all of the fragments fit, rather than trying to eliminate one at the expense of the other. For example, I decided early on that if upward mobility takes place in a dog–eat–dog world, cannibalism is a reasonable assumption, a chain of thoughts which led right into the fixed idea of my childhood that my Great Grandmother had been at Donner Pass. I even put this theory forth in a report when I was in fifth grade, which led my teacher to lecture the entire class on the difference between fact and fiction. His remarks did not affect me, since I had already decided that differentiating fact from fiction was not as central to my personal reality as differentiating good fiction from bad.

Anyway, to return to key motifs and general themes in my parents' generation – although war troubled their childhoods, their adolescence coincided with an era of post-war progress and the advent of track housing, the Nouveau New Deal version of forty acres and a mule. A chicken in every pot was long past. They were heading toward a car in every garage and a television in every room. They could therefore claim the war as the trauma of their early development and the rebuilding of the entire Western World as the burden of their adult lives.
My generation's lack of significant story line, on the other hand, was our major burden, since as far as our parents were concerned, we grew up in enlightened, secure homes, with no real problems. Certainly we had nothing as well publicized and prominent as their war, not until recently, and so we were criticized for our lack of motivation. However, I don't think that our apparent lack of enthusiasm was our fault. Evidently, the things we heard from our parents hadn't filled our ears with the resonance of the ages or our hearts with great expectations. Most kids grew up with nothing more concrete than Lassie Come Home to work with. In my case, I saw the past through the eyes of two characters from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman, who stepped into the time machine and appeared in all of the great moments of history. It was only after watching this cartoon at the age of four that I first suspected what would not really hit me until a few years later – that my parents and ancestors had been a part of history and that cartoons would be the medium for all of my revelations.

Yet another problem in pinning down historical fact is that in my family, what we children were told about our heritage depended not only on the occasion but also on the teller. The Golden family is a large one. I've always had dozens of aunts and uncles, great aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins, not to mention those who merged into the herd by means of matrimony. This has meant sorting through a lot of discrepancies and contradictions and the bending of the truth to suit a personal need. Every child knows the joke about the five miles of snow through which parents had to walk to school, before there were busses and four car families. These are the harmless, obviously suspicious meanderings from the truth used to engender guilt. However, when tales of world conflict, economic depression, and wars are used to make an acute parental point, history is in trouble. Compound all of this uncertainty with our generational fear of the future and the specter of a self-perpetuating technological wasteland and you are left with neo-gothic comics and heavy metal music.
And now my job is to sort all this out?

[Frame 1: Mirrored image of Nick's half-shaved face, reflection of bathroom door to right side of the mirror. Bubble captions come through the keyhole. Sound words at doorknob: Click. Rattle.]

"Hey Nick, open up. What the fuck you doing in there, anyway?" My cousin Jake sounds like Olive Oil. He's thirteen and hates what puberty's doing to his voice. I look at myself: my naked legs stretching down from under my boxer shorts, my feet, weathered and dry from too many shoeless walks on the beach and too little foot care. I look up at the mirror and see a growling expression beneath the shaving cream. "Shaving. Whaddya think."
A stream of curses flows in through the keyhole, through which Jake is obviously looking: "You're not the only one who's gotta be clean for this thing."

[Frame 2: Nick smiles into mirror. Motion lines around edges of door. Sound word: Thud.]

"When I'm finished, I'll let your know."
He gives the door a kick that he'd like to give me and stomps down the hall. I look at the mirror and see that my humor has improved. Something about irritating Jake cheers me up, even in the morning. It's hard to believe I'm going on thirty-five and supposed to be mature.
The thing Jake just referred to is a wedding. Freddy's getting married today. And I'm here to take a fateful step of my own. If I don't take it, I won't have to bother driving back to San Francisco tonight because Carmen will have the locks changed. I guess Freddy and I are just two more "Walkers on the Golden path with nothing to Gaine," as one family joke expresses it.

A man ahead of his time

My Great Grandmother, Virginia Walker, set the tone for generations of jokes when she married Walker Gaine. The old adage about not losing a daughter but gaining a son took on new meaning. As Virginia's father put it, "One Walker loses and one Walker gains." This is the kind of humor that I have grown up with.
But I guess I shouldn't start with Virginia Walker. The earliest family member in the present collective memory is my Great Great Grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Walker, Great Grandma Virginia's father.
Now that I think of it, this is just like those Russian novels that I complained about having to read in college, the ones I wanted to throw – actually the ones I did throw in some cases – against a wall. One, I think it was War and Peace, skidded and hopped half-way across the cold gray cement and polyethylene surfaces of the Greyhound bus station in downtown San Francisco before coming to a halt in a grimy corner. Nobody really took notice: it was one of the more harmless acts committed in that building, and people were probably unsure what I might be capable of if they remarked on my outburst.
The point is, there are a lot of people in my family, all moving around a point in the past like electrons around some mysterious nucleus. No wonder I've been confused.

[Frame 3: Scene is a dark attic space with a small window and low eaves. Cardboard boxes, labeled "Walker," "Black Oak School," and "Golden," several small wooden cases, a trunk, and two wooden chairs stand near the window. A flash of lightning is visible in the window. Several Semi-opaque figures in 19th century garb sit on the chairs and the trunk. They are obviously ghosts.]

My information about Thomas Jefferson Walker, or T.J., as I call him came from two sources: family anecdotes and the family archive. The family archive is a mass of old letters, diaries, photo albums and other records. Whether these papers have been forgotten or they're being ignored is unclear, but they have been mysteriously handed down from generation to generation, added to by contributions of the descendants entrusted with the family past. I used to think that these documents had passed from one chosen keeper of secrets to another, like some freemason's password or a Rosicrucian relic, but I finally realized that this family treasure fell into the hands of whoever found it in an attic and couldn't bear to throw it away. For the present, this person is my father's twin sister, my Aunt Lucy.

But even these letters and photographs, which would seem to be hard and fast evidence, do not provide the last word on my family, for the truth pieced together phrases from old bits of paper, snatches of old stories, and mute objects seems no match for the self-proclaimed authority of Aunt Lizzy, my father's oldest sister. The most coherent teller of family anecdotes, Aunt Lizzy should be visualized with a black whistle hanging around her neck and ice blue eyes. She dominates any conversation in the room at will and is generally feared by her siblings. She tells us how it is, how it was and how it will be with the Golden family and the world, leading me to ask myself what some curious relative of the future will find as evidence of my life? My comics? And what will they glean from those? Will I be believed?

[Frame 4: Nick stares into mirror, but where his face should be, he sees the visual cliché of a post-revolutionary figure with white wig, three-cornered hat in his hands. Cloud borders around image suggest a dream or flashback.]

The letters and records in a box marked "Walker" have revealed that Thomas Jefferson Walker was born in 1823, during the Monroe government and what one of my American History books called the "Era of Good Feelings." His parents were Alexander and Bethany Walker, cotton manufacturers and supporters of John Quincy Adams in the election of 1824. So far, this seems factual enough. However, there is more, for example, something I heard from Aunt Lizzy when I was ten years old. I had just been watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and observed Mr. Peabody go back to the Civil War. Having long since deduced that since there was always a Mr. Peabody in historical situations, there must also have been a member of the Golden family in all phases of history, I asked Aunt Lizzy what our family had been doing the second half of the 19th Century.
She told me that Walkers had stood in favor of strong national government and against slavery, emphasizing that they opposed slavery because they were morally offended by it. I accepted this blindly, it being what most children in my position would want to believe; however, when I read the family letters some years later, I began to suspect that the Walkers might have opposed slavery because they could afford to, having had their own supply of cheap labor in the steady waves of poor and desperate immigrants that kept dashing up against the New England shores.

The Walker family's cotton mill was small, one of many precursors to the huge manufacturers that soon appeared along the Merrimac River. According to Aunt Lizzy, Alexander Walker had had the chance to become one of the great industrialists of his time by agreeing to a merger, but had been to idealistic to give up personal control of the family business.

[Frame 5: A much younger Nick is sitting in an arm chair. Aunt lizzy stands, towering over where he sits, her eyes locked on his. Her bubble caption: Your Great-Great-Great Grandfather was a tribute to the American tradition of small business. Nick's thought Bubble: We could've been rich…]

As a manufacturer of southern cotton, Alexander experienced a lot of ups and downs during the national government's decades of struggle to find a system of duties and taxes that would satisfy the New England businessmen, the Southern farmers, and the nation's own need for revenues. One key conflict in this historical struggle, which I found mentioned in several letters between Alexander and his brother Frederick, not only helps characterize the Walker family but more clearly shows my difficulty in transforming bits and pieces of information into a coherent family history.

The background for the conflict was this: in 1828 and 1832, Congress imposed tariffs on cotton, which the southerners considered unfair. In 1832, South Carolina decided to flatly reject these tariffs, on the grounds that the Federal Government had no right to interfere with their trade. The President did not wait long to react and sent a warship into Charleston harbor. T.J.'s father, Alexander Walker, praised this action in his letters, adding that it was more than time to show those Southerners who was boss. However, when, instead of blasting those South Carolinians with a cannon ball or two, the president offered them Henry Clay's Compromise Tariff of 1833, Alexander Walker threw a fit and cursed that "Southern hick of a Democrat President in ex-revolutionary hide" who was "finally showing his true confederate colors." In this statement he was referring to Andrew Jackson.
This disturbed me. By my junior year in high school, when I first discovered these old letters, I had learned that Jackson was the personification of democracy in his time. He was the archetypal Democrat, after Jefferson. And being a child of my own time, I naturally connected Democracy with Equality and the Democratic Party with Civil Rights. How did this all fit together? My contemplation of this problem and the reading I did to alleviate my irritation at the apparent contradiction let me to discover yet another conflict of sources, another barrier hindering my search for a personal past.
I had already realized that Aunt Lizzy, my main source of family history, was not as interested in detailed or accurate political analysis as in the representation of positive family attributes, such as moral strength, right thinking, and duty to the family. And it was clear that the letters and personal records in the archive were biased. However, then I learned that my main source of official history during the first sixteen years of my life had been watered down, ideologically manipulated textbooks. Is it any wonder that I was distraught?

Of course, I later realized that, in Alexander Walker's days, the Republicans were considered the party that freed the slaves and that the Democrats were the bad guys; and that, then as now, equality was a relative term. But my penchant for critical listening was just budding, and in my childhood, I had swallowed everything whole.
In any case, I learned from the Walker letters that Alexander Walker had hated Andrew Jackson. And why? Because Alexander Walker had loved John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, and John Quincy Adams had considered Andrew Jackson a complete dolt. In fact, Adams' dislike was so great that when Andrew Jackson was offered an honorary degree from Harvard University, Adams refused to attend the ceremony, swearing that President Jackson couldn't even write his own name and should not be allowed to set foot on university property, much less receive academic honors. Thus influenced by his own business interests and the opinion of a man he greatly respected, Alexander Walker's prejudice against Andrew Jackson grew. In a letter to his brother Frederick, Alexander Walker put it this way:

You might at least be honest, my dear brother, and admit that you like the man only because he is giving away land in the West for next to nothing and that this suits your present need. I don't know why you have bought land in that desolate uncivilized wilderness. You should never have left the mill. Why do you think the Whigs made the donkey the emblem of the Democratic Party when Jackson came into office? Why do you think that animal is called a "Jack"ass?
I admit, I was like to think the best of him at the beginning, his being an orphan, and rising up to his destiny the way he did. And he showed promise, in the beginning, of being a friend to the businessman. But I ask you, where is a man from Tennessee finally going to place his allegiance? With us? I dare say not. He will side with those planters when forced into a corner. My lord, he has done so already.

This letter was dated from some time in 1836, shortly before Jackson was voted out of office, which would have made my Great Great Grandfather T.J. about 13 years old. By then it seems that Alexander and his son had a tradition of violent bickering on political issues. T.J. seems to have sided with his Uncle Fred, as some of his earliest letters to Frederick Walker reveal:
 

Father shows an increasing lack of democratic moderation in his views, Uncle. I wish you were here to defend the opinions which you and I share, for Father and I can no longer converse on the subject of the government without bouts of shouting, followed by days of silence, both of which distress mother greatly.
 

But political differences were not the main area of conflict between father and son, for Alexander Walker was a businessman and he had conceived a son for one basic purpose – to take over the family business. Unfortunately, T.J. showed absolutely no interest in the manufacture of cotton and when he finally enrolled at Yale in 1843, it was only because his father had threatened to disinherit him completely if he did anything else.

[Frame 6: T.J. Walker sits at a wooden table, his eyes directed toward his hands, folded on the table. Behind him, his father, paces. Father's speech bubble: Yale will set you to rights. T.J.'s thought bubble: Whatever.]

With this conflict I can identify, for in our family, the profession one chooses is absolutely everybody's business.

When I was studying for my M.F.A. in Art, my relatives asked me "What are you going to do with a degree in that?" As if an Art degree were some dirty rag. This just proved to me how little they knew about the ability of art to transform the drab experiences of daily life into something extraordinary and wonderful. Like my experience with mold…

[Frame 7: A saucepan sits on a counter. Although a lid has been placed on the pan, its edge is not resting on the lip, but rather on a raised cushion of stiff green foam, which seems to be growing out of the pan. Short wavy lines emanate from the mass. Motion-scent words float in the air surrounding the pan: Ooze. Seep. Reek. Nick sits at the kitchen table reading, his back to the pan. His look is quizzical. Thought bubble: Sniff?]

Once my roommate and I let an old pot of soup stand on our kitchen window sill until the mold within began pushing up the lid, revealing a sponge-like mass of firm, foamy gunk. It reached a height of five-and-one-half inches before we finally threw the pot away. Instead of feeling guilty about my poor housekeeping habits or the wastefulness of throwing away a perfectly good pot, reactions of which my mother would have approved, I began to imagine something completely different. I imagined that the stuff had invaded our lungs, where it was waiting to push out of our mouths under the right incubation conditions.

I envisioned colors: a background of anthracite gray, olive green mold with streaks of chartreuse, sort of fluorescent. Then a title came to mind. It would be called, "You are what you eat...eventually." I pictured an epidemic, which attacked the most corrupted, the weakened, or perhaps the secretly mutated parts of the body. Everyone developed mold in different places: in their ears, edging over the tops of their shoes, peeking out from behind belts...and everyone was on the look out for mold showing up in others.

[Frame 8: Same kitchen. Same pose. The kitchen is covered with dripping, creeping masses of mold. Nick's body has begun to decompose, but he's still reading.]

This kind of experience led me to study Art and to end up in comics. What other medium could be the showplace for such visions? But if Art was a dubious major, you can imagine what my family thought of a career in comics. And do I care? Do I care if they misinterpret my stories or find the jokes unfunny, or fail to recognize that there is a punch line at all?

I can understand T.J.'s unwillingness to fulfill his family's social imperative. I think it's admirable that my great great grandfather lived up to his negative potential despite all opportunity for upward mobility. What I find even more interesting was the fact that he was probably one of the earliest examples of the American practice of going to college to escape family responsibility; for although T.J. Walker was sent to Yale to become socially and intellectually competent, he went to college for completely different reasons. His letters home were full of references to the important social reformers like Dorothea Dix, of his own comparisons between doctors in insane asylums and the professors at Yale, and of his remarks about being in intellectual chains. When he wasn't ranting radical dogma, he was going on about Samuel Morse and the telegraph, about the railroad, or about the importance of both to the future of America. In short, he caught the fever of Manifest Destiny.

Looking at these letters now, I can't imagine how Alexander Walker missed the fact that his son was a compulsive personality, and that his compulsions were divided between two thoroughly contradictory movements of his time – technological progress at all costs, and utopian escapism. That he would never amount to anything is clear from where I stand. Of course, my parents never noticed that 10,000 hours of cartoon watching might affect my career goals either.

[Frame 9: A young T.J. stands before a stately building labeled Yale, back to the viewer. He has a suitcase in his hand. His thought bubble is divided into two parts by a slash: On one side is the image of a woman in a state of planned deshabile. She is bending down to fix a garter. On the other side is the image of a steam locomotive, a puff of smoke emiting from its chimney.]

At college T.J. heard a lecture by former Yale student of Theology, John Humphrey Noyes. Although T.J. was allegedly in his final year of study, he and another classmate decided to join Noyes' commune at Oneida, a community somewhere in New York State. What and where I learned about this great social experiment is a good example of the kind of detective work I've had to.

I first heard reference to the Oneida Community, during the time my parents and my Aunt Lucy were thinking about joining a rural commune up in Northern California. I was seven years old and scared to death that we would end up moving away from the Sunset District of San Francisco, where I had lived in since my birth. I already had a healthy fear of the suburbs, where there were no streetcars or trolley busses, so the idea of a country town terrified me. I was used to such pastimes as hiking up to the top of the hill on our street, jumping on a skateboard, tearing down toward the busy intersection at the bottom and grabbing onto the pole of the street light near the corner to stop. This and community baseball in Golden Gate Park, where we caught our coaches slipping off to smoke a joint between innings, constituted the only childhood I could imagine. To make matters worse, I had been told that the people in the commune lived from their own farming and handicrafts. I envisioned myself behind a plough. Since the Real McCoys was rerunning at the time, I pictured myself dressed like Little Luke. Also, although I had seen my mom do hippie stuff like make pottery, hand-dye fabric, or help with the harvest up at the family's boarding school in Sacramento, I had never once seen George touch the dirt at all – with an implement or without one; and even though it was his family who actually owned the family school and its adjoining farm, I had never seen him do anything more physical than take a meandering walk along the river and, once a year, clean the windows. Of course, he had helped Aunt Lizzy evaluate textbooks and stuff like that. And I had seen him l go without sleep for days when he was preparing some journalistic masterpiece. Still, I was sure that this was not the kind of talent or endurance necessary to farm work. In short, I was worried. And so I started paying attention to the adult conversations around me.

On the day before Thanksgiving, I heard mom remark to Aunt Lucy that "the commune" would probably be the theme of that year's family celebration at the Willows, the family boarding school. When we drove up to Sacramento the next day, George, mom and Aunt Lucy naturally included this subject in the casual chatter. My cousin Stacy and I were sitting in the back, separated from one another by Aunt Lucy. Stacy was riding up to the Willows with us because her mother, my Aunt Daisy, had been in Reno for a couple of days, gambling away her year's hoard of silver, and Stacy had been staying with us the entire week as a result.

My flashback halts for a moment. I consider the expanding list of players and entangled relationships invading my storyline I have had numerous nightmares about them.
In one, I was skiing down a hill. Surrounded by white silence. I felt like I was moving in slow motion. Then I heard a rumbling behind me. Avalanche was my first thought. Ever since one of my school friends had been caught in one, I'd been nervous. I looked back to see if the slope was about to descend upon me, but instead I saw a giant snowball – as they appear in the cartoons, of course – filled with the living bodies of the Golden family.

[Frame 10: Nick is positioned on a snowy slope, his body facing downhill. His motion is stopped in mid-step; his head sharply turned toward the uphill slope behind him, where he sees a giant snowball racing toward him. Arms and legs protrude out of the snowball, all flailing and waving. Standing on the sidelines, in a gimpy old-person posture and waving a cane, is his grandmother, Grandma Golden. Nick's thought caption: ?!?!? Grandmother's thought bubble: Chuckle. Additional bubble captions emanate from all angles of the snowball.
…Who's idea is this anyway?
…I think we might be out of control
…You THINK???
…Ouch!
…I don't have any feeling in my legs…or arms…or fingers!!!
…Is this the best your fantasy can do?
…Oh, so he's the victim. And us?
…We're cannon fodder for his neuroses.]

I think of my father's siblings: Lizzy, Charles, Charlotte, Jane, Daisy, and Lucy. They are all named after fictional characters, according to the family habit of concept naming; however, because I cannot relate to the novels of Jane Austen, Henry James or E.M. Forster, even though I have been forced to read those in which these characters appear, I have created a list of my own historical allusions: Lizzy Borden; Charles Goodyear; Charlotte's Web, Jane, his wife, Jetson; Daisy Duck; I Love Lucy, and St. George. These are not the characters they were named for and only Lucy found my little joke really amusing.

In the car of my flashback sat two characters from this list, my father George (at the wheel) and my Aunt Lucy (back seat in the middle), together with my mother Madeleine (suicide seat), my cousin Stacy and me (on either side of Aunt Lucy).

"Anastasia," I silently lip-synched to my cousin, which she responded to with a jab behind Aunt Lucy's back. Aunt Lucy had leaned forward between the two front seats and was talking to mom and George. "Anastasia," I mouthed again, pressing myself against the car door out of her range. My cousin hated her real name.

Acting on Aunt Lucy's advice, Aunt Daisy had named her daughter for the mysteriously vanishing Russian princess. Aunt Lucy had always loved Ingrid Bergman in the movie Anastasia. Nevertheless, Anastasia Golden, my cousin, seemed to mistrust her name from the beginning, and on the first day of first grade, she renamed herself Stacy. But cousins never forget, and so teasing her about her name was as traditional as a Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas stockings.

[Frame 11: The interior of a car as seen from the rear window. Aunt Lucy is leaning forward between the fronts seats, talking to the George and Madeleine. The backs of their heads are close together. Stacey is jabbing Nick behind Lucy's back. Nick's attention, however, is momentarily frozen on the back of his aunt's head. George's caption: They were hardly orgies, Lucy. Nick's thought bubble: Orgies?!?]

Busy with my cousin, I mostly ignored what the adults said during the trip, until they began discussing the commune, the prospect of which, as I've already said, terrified me. Thus, I was listening when Aunt Lucy chuckled evilly and said, "Our little experiment is harmless compared to the orgies that went on at Oneida." My pre-adolescent ears perked up. But George and my mother only laughed, after which the subject changed. Later, at Aunt Lizzy's, when I was hanging around the chip and dip assortment trying to remain unnoticed, I heard the subject come up again. Since I was curious as to what kind of orgies an old geezer from the last century could have been involved in and what that might have to do with the hippie commune that my parents and aunt wanted to schlep me off to, I shifted my concentration from the Cheeto bowl to the conversation.

George sat in an overstuffed chair which was covered in that old-fashioned carpet like upholstery that scratches you when you're wearing short pants and often has a kind of fan pattern pressed into its surface. His long, loosely linked limbs were stretched out in several directions. Aunt Lizzy hated it when he sat like this, but he did it just to irritate her, as he had once admitted to mom and me. If Lizzy sounds as if she were George's mother instead of his sister, it's because she's fourteen years older. So, there was George, sprawled on the chair, while Aunt Lizzy eyed him with evident displeasure. My mother was silent; she mostly refused to take part in the family discussions, preferring to corner individuals one-on-one.

"What on earth could you have against it, Lizzy," said George slowly. "You work on a similar principle here, growing everything you eat at the school."
Aunt Lizzy's lips took on a subtle edge. "Don't be an idiot. We're a family business."
"You have non-family employees, and some of them live in the dormitory."
"I'm not going to argue with you. A boarding school is not a commune."
"Communes are in the family blood though, you can't deny that."
From the conversation in the car, I guessed what George was referring to. Aunt Lizzy's eyebrows said that she knew what he meant, but it was Aunt Lucy who responded. "That's right, Great Grandpa Walker was at Oneida, and that community still exists today."
"It was one of the first great utopian experiments in our country," said George brightly.
Aunt Lizzy made a "Hrmph" noise. "That old fool almost drove this family into financial ruin. If you're following in his footsteps, we can expect the worst."
Uncle Charles voiced a tentative protest, "Let's be fair, he was one of the men who built our nation's first transcontinental railroad, and he founded this school."
"And it would have gone to ruin if Great Aunt Rochelle hadn't run it," Lizzy countered.

George sighed. "Getting back to the point, Miss Elizabeth, you must admit that the Oneida Community and its status in our history proves that communal life has a tradition in this country and is not some new-fangled radical plot."
I giggled. The expression "new fangled" sounded funny coming out of my father's mouth. It is one of his talents to adjust his vocabulary to that of his partner in conversation. I now know why he does this, but when I was a child, it seemed as if he was always becoming someone else.
At that point, Aunt Charlotte's voice drifted in from the dining room, "Will someone get in here and help me get this food on the table?" Since my aunts generally combine the wording of a request and the tone of a command, the discussion ended abruptly.

[Frame 12: A high school classroom. The teacher, his back still to the class, has just written the phrase History of Reform on the chalkboard. Teacher's thought bubble: I wonder if I should sign onto that retirement plan? Several students, viewed from a three-quarter angle are in postures of inattention. Nick is clearly identifiable. His eyes are half closed. His thought bubble: Zzzz. Other thought bubbles float above the heads of various students: What time is it? Where did he get that suit? Asshole.]

When my parents decided not to join the commune, the subject of T.J. Walker's experiences in Oneida dropped out of my life, until approximately ten years later, when I was sitting in Mr. Jansen's American History class. He said something about the Oneida community, whereupon I awoke from my usual fifth period nap. Raising my hand, I said that my great great grandfather taken part in the commune. Jansen's mouth turned up slightly at the corners, the way it always did when he was interrupted in his monologue and forced to look one of us in the eye. He thought that by successfully mimicking a friendly expression, he could prevent us from noticing that he thought we were dumb punks. "How interesting," he said. "Maybe you could tell us more about the colony." I realized how stupid I'd been in thinking he could help me achieve enlightenment on any subject, so I shook my head and went back to sleep. Despite Jansen's deflating disinterest, however, the mention of the Oneida Community prompted me to complete a thought that, as I've already said, Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman had initiated years before, that history was something we lived in, but we didn't know it yet, and that a 3-D version of my family lay hidden in the bundle of dates we were being put to sleep with in high school.

Still under the influence of this light-bulb experience, I went to the public library and looked up information on James Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida colony. What happened next changed my life in a lot of ways. First, the librarian kicked my out for laughing in the stacks, upon which I went to George, looking for more information. I asked him if he had ever investigated the subject. He said enough to reveal that he already knew about everything I'd just found out, upon which I asked him what else he'd failed to tell me, but George was not easy to provoke: he just shrugged and referred me to Aunt Lucy, "the keeper of the skeletons" as he termed her. This led me to the collection of family letters, some of which I have already quoted here, letters that no one had much mentioned, that no one except Aunt Lucy and, to some extent, George, had even read.
Aunt Lucy was happy to have someone show some interest in her archive, which was housed in a little room that I'd never paid much attention to, it being nothing more than a confusion of books, folders, boxes and file drawers. Once she turned on a lamp, she opened a box, rooted around in it for a few seconds, and produced a packet of papers marked "Thomas Jefferson Walker, childhood/college/Oneida". I looked around. This was evidently the tip of an iceberg. I saw a box marked "Walker", one marked "Gaine", and at least three marked "Golden". The packet had come out of the Walker box, which was full of other packets, loose papers and photos. There didn't seem to be much from the part of T.J.'s life that I was interested in, but I sat down on the floor and began reading. After awhile, I found a letter from T.J.'s mother, Bethany Walker, that seemed to refer to the commune.

Dear Tom,
Father has a new mare. We took him out for the first time yesterday. We weren't ten paces onto the big road when Father let him out. That horse took off like I don't know what. I presume Father was thinking of you as he sped that horse. They were both in a sweat in the end.
We have laid a new carpet in the study, and all of the woodwork will be painted by the time you come home for your birthday and Christmas. You will be coming home, won't you? Painting walls seems the fashion now, but I don't know as I like the grain of the wood better. Your Father will be modern.
I was sorry that you weren't here for your Grandfather's birthday. We thought of you all the while and there were a great many silences at the table. I have to tell you that Father is mighty angry and your Sister Puss cries herself to sleep some nights. I've always set store by your good sense, but I must admit that this great experiment is a blow to any good Christian. I dread seeing the Reverend Jasper every Sunday, although he has been very tolerant in his criticism of you.
Your mother.

Considering this letter now, I see in it the prototype for numerous telephone conversations between my own mother and me in which she attempted to resolve one of George's and my father-son conflicts by appearing to hover above the plane of crass power struggle on the wings of maternal tolerance, making both of us feel guilty about our own drives for self-assertion. I now view this role of "harmonizer" more skeptically, but in those days, I wasn't ready to find this aspect of Bethany Walker's letter interesting and moved on to a letter from T.J. to his mother, one that shed a bit more light on the commune.
 

Dearest Mother,
What can be more Christian than a life based on the Bible? It is our only law. Can you say that the people outside live by this law as strictly? What has been termed a life of license by our critics is truly a life of searching for the Perfect form of Christian life. I am sending you a pamphlet that we have prepared. Mr. Noyes believes that all of the doubts about Oneida can be best resolved with information.
To this information I can only add that I am not hurt by your words, nor by Father's. One of our greatest beliefs here is that "Criticism is a privilege." It is indeed an active principle in our daily lives. Without this, we cannot attain the Perfection that God wants from us....

The pamphlet was not in the letter, but I had found enough information in the library to guess what T.J. was referring to. I left the chaos of Aunt Lucy's book room to join her in the kitchen, where she was making us a cup of green jasmine tea. She was wearing a pink, green, black and silver flowered robe and stiff straw Japanese house shoes; her hair was pulled back into a loose knot. Aunt Lucy had nothing like Asian features, but she always seemed transformed by what she was wearing. It was kind of a companion characteristic to George's ability to change verbal personalities at will.

Aunt Lucy looked up from pouring boiling water into a low wide teapot. "Did you find what you wanted," she said smiling slightly, nodding at the letters still in my hand.
I didn't know what to say. I didn't really know what I'd been looking for, and yet I was somehow disappointed in what I'd found. I'd expected a great drama, but had discovered the apparently uneventful.

"I guess Great Great Grandpa Thomas was considered a pretty wild guy, huh?"
Aunt Lucy nodded. "I would think so."
I opened one of the letters: "Listen to this: What has been termed a life of license by our critics is truly a life of searching for the Perfect form of Christian life." I gazed into Aunt Lucy's inscrutable eyes. "What does he mean?" I could tell from her responding shrug that she didn't get my question. "I mean...there seems to be this mixture of Bible preaching and some kind of weird stuff called complex marriage and male continence. Last night, I asked George if he'd ever heard of male continence, but he just said it was a "Catholic plot." Oh, and then he said, "Marriage is always complex."
Aunt Lucy laughed. "I'm not an expert, but I think male continence is sex with delayed or repressed ejaculation; There's something similar in the Taoist religion. It's supposed to increase pleasure."
I felt myself floating on the mixed feelings that these words evoked as they came out of her mouth and decided to steer the conversation away from the topic of extended hard-ons. "And what about Complex marriage? It doesn't sound very Puritan."
Aunt Lucy took the letter out of my hand and studied it for a moment. "I think complex marriage is some form of polygamy …"
"I thought polygamy was when a man had more than one wife. This sounds like everybody was married to everybody else."
"Oh well," she said, as she poured out the tea.
"Really, Aunt Lucy. I read in the library that they used to keep records of who did it with who so that everybody got a fair deal."
Aunt Lucy raised her eyebrows and got what my mother called a devilish look. "If you know so much about it, why are you asking?" She stared at me for a minute, but then her interest seemed to shift. "Did you find anything else of interest in there?"
"It could take years to find everything of interest in there."
"Well, any time you're bored, just come over and sift through a bit of the family dust...and dirt."
I nodded, happy to see the conversation turn to something other than sex, a topic I didn't exactly want to talk to my Aunt about, no matter how cool she was.

That conversation I saved for the next day, when I went straight to Mr. Mankewicz, the horny old panda of a man who tried to teach us art. He was a major confidant at that time of my life. With him I discussed the concept of male continence in complete detail, learning more than I ever wanted to know about subtleties of sex at a time when I was overwhelmed by the most rudimentary of physiological truths.

However, T.J. was much older than seventeen when he went into the Oneida colony, so maybe he was ready for complex sexual practices. Or maybe it was the rigors of male continence that drove him out. In any case, he left the colony in 1851 and aside from several family sayings such as "Criticism is a privilege" and "Great Leaders are not chosen, they are found," the origins of which I had just discovered, little of his experiences seems to have seeped into the outside world.

So what did I learn from all this? I accumulated some odd facts about sex and the institution of marriage. But I also discovered something important about the nature of homilies and expressions of domestic wisdom: that they run through all families, that they are rampant in ours, and that they are usually passed down without their context, which can be dangerous.

For example, I always thought that everyone used the phrase "Criticism is a privilege." I thought it was American, like "the pursuit of happiness," or "everything you say can be used against you." When I brought home a lousy report card, when I whined in defense that my teacher picked on me, George would smile and say "Criticism is a privilege." When I talked about my best friend being voted captain of the little league team, he'd say, "Great leaders are not elected, they are found." I naturally assumed that these phrases were generic parental material like "Who do you think you are?" or "You never know when to stop, do you."" or "I only have two hands.". However, somewhere around the third or fourth grade, I noticed that I never heard these particular phrases outside of my family. And when I was seventeen, I suddenly learned they came from a family-specific context. This didn't seem such a huge revelation in itself, but it was enough to further pique my already budding curiosity about the relationship between my family and my personally warped sense of reality.