Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (37 page)

Four days later, she finished knitting the afghan and delivered it in thanksgiving to Father Ferraro at the rectory. The next day, on the fifth day of the new year, she drove to United Airlines to fill out the paperwork.

A few weeks later, the personnel director called Mom to schedule an interview. Uncertain what she should say during the interview, she huddled at the crosswalk with the bumper-sticker lady. “Tell ’em you could do anything, Ida,” the bumper-sticker lady coached.

“
Why do you want to work for United?” the personnel director asked Mom during the interview.

She couldn’t tell him the real reason, which would’ve been “to get the hell outta the house with traveling privileges.” So she came up with something more dignified. “I want to do something different,” she said. “I don’t want an office job anymore,” she alluded to the earlier years of payroll work as outlined in her application.

“
What other qualifications do you have?” the personnel director probed.

She completely forgot to mention her experience at Augie’s restaurant. In the heat of the interview, she could think of only one other credential: “Well, I stir the hamburger for chili at the hot dog days at school.”

United Airlines called the Redondo Beach Police Department for a reference check. The airline then called Mom and offered her a job as a porter in the flight kitchen.

“
Oh, boy!” she danced around the house. “Oh, boy! This is the job of the year!”

Mom got her wings!

In May 1976, about a year after Dad stopped working, Mom started working on the kitchen assembly line. She emptied the food units from the planes, dumped the units on trays, separated the silverware from the trash, flipped out the trash, washed the silverware, and stacked the clean units on clean trays.

There were uniforms. There were hats. There was order. “That job was heaven!”

It got even better. She heard the airline needed a janitor. Her coworkers warned her she would never make it out of the kitchen. But she bid for the promotion and pay raise anyway.

“
By God, I got it!” she exulted when she walked through the garage door at home.

She started scrubbing the toilets, the boarding areas, the employee lunchrooms, and the planes. Sometimes she was lucky enough to scour and vacuum the posh Red Carpet Room.

She drove each day to Los Angeles International Airport and made friends for life. She felt proud to be working on behalf of those “big, beautiful birds.” Her benefits included an all but free ticket to fly home to Mason City whenever she could find the time and catch a standby flight. “This job is the best gift God ever gave me!” she skipped out the door on the way to work each day.

Dad benefited, too. He and Mom made a habit of flying standby to Hawaii and staying in cut-rate employee hotel rooms, routinely hopping to paradise on the cheap.

No matter what kind of chaos raged at home, they found a separate peace together in Waikiki. When they returned home, they seemed like different people, holding hands, kissing and cooing, and gushing about the flights, the buffets, the cheap hotel rooms, and the weather. They were giddy and affectionate. They seemed to really love each other whenever they could get the hell away from us kids.

While Dad and Mom reveled in their inexpensive pleasures, they remained puritanical about material things. They maintained what they had, pee stains and all, so they wouldn’t need to acquire anything else.

Year after year, they implored us not to buy them Christmas gifts.

“
Peace in the family is the only gift that I want,” Dad pleaded.

“
As long as you kids help us take care of Geri,” Mom echoed, “there couldn’t be any better gift.”

Mysteriously, Geri shed her fear of Camarillo as she approached adulthood. She also overcame her associated fears of the numbers 2 and 3. But she still had many other fears.

She tried to hold down a couple jobs—first at a neighborhood boutique and then at a hamburger joint—but couldn’t keep pace. She attended cosmetology school and earned enough credit to receive her high school diploma from adult school, but she couldn’t finish her cosmetology degree. In each of these cases, she became preoccupied with the acute fear that somebody—a customer, a boss, a coworker, a teacher, or another student—was out to get her, was jealous of her, or was thinking bad thoughts about her. With relentless fears like those, it was nearly impossible for Geri to focus on a task.

Any kind of sustained pressure triggered a mental breakdown. Her breakdowns became cyclical. She would face a challenging situation, which would lead to a breakdown. She would then recover and remain stable for a while, prompting her to confront another challenging situation, which would lead to another breakdown.

Her breakdowns manifested themselves at home in temper tantrums. Nobody at home could tolerate them forever. Not even the imperturbable Joe. Not even Dad. He arranged for Geri to move to a one-bedroom apartment a couple miles from home shortly after she turned 21 in March 1976.

Geri began making skin-diving suits at a “sheltered workshop” in El Segundo. The workshop was a vocational rehabilitation program for disabled adults. Geri made enough money to pay her bills, and Dad helped her manage her budget. She was stable for more than a year. But in September 1977, she hallucinated severely. In her mind, she saw men breaking into her home. Her screams upset the neighbors.

She landed in Riviera Hospital in Torrance for nine weeks. Her doctors continued to experiment with new combinations of antipsychotic and antidepressant medications. Riviera Hospital transferred Geri to Foothill Health and Rehabilitation Center in Sylmar in November 1977. Eight months later, she relocated to Hirschhorn Manor, a board-and-care home in Santa Monica.

Hirschhorn Manor drove Geri crazy “because of all the abortions that were going on there,” she shuddered in recollection. About 150 mentally ill residents, the vast majority of whom were men, lived side by side. Geri said her roommate had six or seven abortions from the men there. Geri worried about the men who wanted to have sex with her. Day and night, she worried that she might have to have her own abortions, which was a fear of greater intensity for Geri than that of any fear she had ever experienced before. She tried to avoid certain men by skipping classes and field trips. She once missed out on a malt, a shake, a hamburger, fries, and maybe two ice creams at a baseball game, because one of the men attending the game wanted to have sex with her, she said.

Residing at Hirschhorn Manor for 18 months drove Geri so crazy that she wound up at Camarillo after all for a second time in January 1980. Camarillo no longer scared her. Besides, she said, “it was a helluva lot better than Hirschhorn Manor.” She stayed at Camarillo for two weeks, recovering so quickly that everyone tending to her agreed that she could return directly to Hirschhorn Manor. So she did, but she went crazy there again after just two months.

The ensuing 15 months of her life were among the dizziest ever. During that time—the details of which were so confusing and chaotic that it’s a wonder nobody else in the family ended up in intensive care—Geri went to Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica for three months, then home for four months, then back to Saint John’s for six weeks, then back home for another four months, then to College Hospital in Cerritos for ten weeks, and then finally back to Camarillo once again.

She arrived at Camarillo for the third time in June 1981 at the age of 26. She stayed for nearly a year. The doctors experimented with yet another medication, called lithium carbonate, which is used to treat manic-depressive disorders. She gradually improved, allowing the doctors to release her in May 1982.

Geri moved from Camarillo to another board-and-care home, called Meadowbrook Manor, in the Mar Vista section of Los Angeles, located about 15 miles from home. Her paranoia subsided yet persisted. Once in a while, Geri was dead certain that people were saying or thinking bad things about her. On such occasions, she cursed those people in public and flipped them off.

When Dad took Geri out to dinner one night at the Plush Pony Restaurant in Redondo Beach, she “heard” a middle-aged woman say rude things to her in the restroom. The woman paid the price, dashing out of the restroom visibly distraught.

“
Call the police!” she urged the manager. “There’s a dangerous woman in there!”

Dad knew exactly what was happening. He dropped enough cash on the table to cover the bill plus tip and rushed to the door of the women’s room. “Hurry up, Geri!” he whispered through the door. He waited impatiently for her outside the door, grabbed her arm as soon as she appeared, and made a quick getaway before the cops could arrive.

Father Joe died of heart ailments in August 1983 at the age of 67.

Dad attended the funeral in Grand Rapids. There were so many people who wanted to attend the Mass of Christian Burial in honor of Father Joseph Stanley Godzisz that the diocese held two Masses in succession on the same day.

“
I missed him when he died,” said Dad. But he was not heartbroken. Dad was confident that Father Joe, like his parents who had gone before him, was in heaven. Of all people, Father Joe had earned the ultimate form of citizenship. Eternal citizenship. Dad saw no need for tears.

Father Joe wouldn’t have wanted tears. He had taken a serenely matter-of-fact approach both to life and to life after death. “Don’t worry about how difficult life on earth can be,” he had often commiserated with Dad over the phone during the dizziest of times, “because life here is merely preparation for life in the hereafter.” Death didn’t scare Father Joe.

The funeral program captured his spirit perfectly. The cover bore his portrait, a contented face with the easy smile of a man on vacation. Beneath the portrait appeared a simple two-word inscription in Latin, taken from the Gospel of Saint John: “
Vado piscari
.” The English translation followed immediately below: “I’m going fishin’.”

For 13 years, Geri lived in a succession of board-and-care homes within the city of Los Angeles: from Meadowbrook Manor in Mar Vista in 1982 to Golden Gate Lodge on Venice Boulevard in 1985 to Villa Stanley in the Fairfax District in 1993. She continued to hear voices of people who were out to get her, who were jealous of her, or who were thinking bad thoughts about her. But overall, she remained calm for longer and longer periods of time in the structured environments of the board-and-care homes. In the early 1990s, she resumed the piano lessons that she had begun as a child.

Her condition improved remarkably with the introduction of a new antipsychotic medication, called Risperdal, in 1994. Initially, the improvements were so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. But month to month, she became slightly more coherent, slightly more relaxed, and slightly more sociable. It was as if three decades of toxic chemicals were being gently flushed from her system and gingerly replaced with better ones. Her hallucinations abated. Her tantrums almost completely ceased.

She still hallucinated. She still had paranoid moments. But for the first time in her life, she began to recognize her paranoid moments as paranoid moments. Sometimes, she laughed at her own paranoia. She became less and less likely to erupt in fits of rage, and she became more and more likely to erupt in paroxysms of joy.

She still babbled incoherently at times. But at other times, she could see things that nobody else could see, and she could articulate those things with stunning clarity. “The whole world’s a Camarillo,” she grumbled in one of her more profound moments, “and no one’s got the key to get out!” She then burst into hysterics at her own cleverness.

By the time she turned 40 on March 13, 1995, she had settled into a medication regimen that left her more functional than she had been since she was 12. Nobody allowed her to operate her own stove, but she could order her own dinner from a diner or fast food restaurant, enjoy her meal, and use the restroom without terrorizing the other patrons.

She even had a steady diet of fun while living at Villa Stanley. The board-and-care home was located a couple blocks from Canter’s Deli, the culinary heart of Jewish life in Los Angeles. When we visited Geri and took her out to eat at the venerable diner, she was thrilled not just to partake of the heaping portions of corned beef and cabbage but also to play hostess along the way as we walked to and from the meal. She introduced us to the neighborhood homeless people by name.

Geri introduced us to many people, places, and things. She taught us powerful lessons about our family, our community, our society, and ourselves. We each learned different lessons from Geri in our own ways. But in all cases, she taught us that the most important people in society are often the ones whom we have deemed the least important.

“
Geri made our family a better family,” Dad often said, “because she prevented her overachieving brothers and sisters from becoming too arrogant about their accomplishments or too prideful before God.” As long as we could identify with Geri, he believed, we could never detach ourselves from her plight. And as long as we could never unravel the mystery of her, he believed, we could never presume to have power over even greater mysteries. In other words, Geri brought us closer to God by bringing us down to our knees. “She taught us to surrender our lives to God and to conform our wills to His will.” Dad believed that Geri taught us all a grand lesson in humility.

Mom learned some humbling lessons about parenthood. She had once believed that she could teach her kids everything they needed to know to survive. “But there are some I can’t teach.” From talking to other moms, she learned that there are many people like Geri who aren’t getting any help. “There are lots of families who are being torn apart because of it. It’s terrible.” Mom learned that entire families, even big extended families like her own, can’t do certain things to help someone like Geri. “I would like to. But I’m sorry. No matter how much I do, it’s never enough. But I can’t let it get me down. You can only do so much. You can’t play God.”