When I reached the age of five, my father asked me whether or not I wanted to continue with my religious instruction. As long as I could remember anything, I had been hearing about heaven, Jesus, and hell in my grandparents’ Southern Baptist church. My response was simple: I wanted to watch cartoons. Though I was told that cartoon day was Saturday and the Sabbath was Sunday, I was unconvinced that the choice, ultimately, was not between cartoons and God.
Cartoons, I said. I want to watch cartoons.
Not only did I want to watch cartoons, I also wanted to go to the cartoon Mecca. And I wanted to go there quite badly.
My family of origin went on but two vacations that I recall. The more memorable of the two occurred when I was six, in August, 1969. Our parents packed my brother and me in the car and headed South, past the oil rigs and hot dust of Bakersfield, over the Tehachapi mountains, and into the magical, citrus-rich land of Southern California. Destination: Disneyland, motherfuckers!
Hollywood and Disneyland were beautiful, pristine places – of this, I was confident. In Hollywood, a land of rich black and optimistic white, everyone was a movie star dressed impeccably in sequined silk clothing. (Of course, upon entry into Hollywood, you, too, became a movie star.) The ladies had smooth bouffant hairdos and wore long, snowy gloves – and not just on Sunday. As for the men, they all looked like Gregory Peck and wore dark suits with narrow black ties. Children wore starched clothing from department stores and they had so many books they did not need a library card. Also, they owned stacks of long-playing records. And Hollywood children all had tree houses, some of them even equipped with running water. There were no demonstrations or assassinations or riots or Viet Nams in Hollywood. I thought that even the perpetually sad-eyed Walter Cronkite could find something to smile about in Hollywood, if only he could relocate.
By contrast, Disneyland was a Technicolor confection notable for its buildings, which were constructed from brightly-colored candy, and its residents, who drank lemonade and played pretend all day. Disneyland’s most outstanding feature was its ontological “otherness”: it was an entirely separate realm of being and reality. When you passed through its gates, you were received into an unspooling universe of sumptuous hand-painted Disney animation cels—which, through science, had been transformed into inhabitable space. Yes: I had somehow come to believe that at Disneyland, my most cherished picture books and favorite cartoons (never mind that most of the latter were Warner Bros. products) would rise from two dimensions into three.
I had intuited other facts about Disneyland. In Disneyland, adults did not yell at kids, nor did they shout at one another about money. Of particular salience to me was the fact that nobody forced anyone else to finish what was on his plate because a child was starving in a remote foreign country – because once you were in Disneyland, there was no more starvation, anywhere. Moreover, there were no spankings or beatings in Disneyland. As the remarkably-democratic kingdom’s venues and creatures were brought to life by one’s passing through Disneyland’s gates, all discomfort, spoilt surprises, undeserved whippings, not-getting-the-toy-one-pined for, best friends who were lost to parentally-forced relocations—all those horrible, quotidian childhood experiences of powerlessness would melt and forever dissipate in the face of balls-out magic. In Disneyland, adults, cartoons, animals, and children conducted themselves with mutual respect and perpetual joy.
Disneyland’s horns of plenty were filled with personalities rather than gourds and Indian corn. I was fairly certain that at Disneyland you could have endless personal audiences with magical, kindness-dispensing figures such as Santa, Bugs Bunny while cross-dressing, Lady Bird Johnson, Thumbelina, and Jesus (the pastel Jesus from the nice song who loved the little children, all the children of the world — not the furious Biblical Jesus who yelled at the moneychangers in the temple). Love, at Disneyland, was as pure and as concentrated as Tang.
The big question that haunted my early childhood was why all people did not choose to live in Disneyland all the time. If such a heaven-on-earth existed, why would people make it their destination for a once-in-a-lifetime visit? It made no sense. But adults acted irrationally all the time; I knew that a child’s only recourse was to shake her head, keep her mouth shut, and wait for time to pass. As such, I would settle for a few days of vacation in the land of living cartoons and perfect elegance and know, in my heart, that I would return to live there once I had reached the age of majority.
The drive to Disneyland was torturous: I would wait until I could bear it no more, then I’d blurt out “How many more miles!? how many more minutes!?” Initially, I suspect, this was cute, but after its umpteenth repetition my parents stopped answering my queries. Naturally, this did not affect my need to voice them. “How many more miles!? how many more minutes!?” Eventually my father, his rectangle of eyes glowering at me in the rear-view mirror, threatened me with a paddling if I would not shut up about how much longer it was going to be. Determined not to get smacked, for the remainder of the long drive I ground my teeth and kicked my white Sun-San sandals together, clenching and unclenching my fists for good measure. We would get here eventually, then everything would be perfect.
The disappointments, of course, were immediate and myriad.
Upon entry into Disneyland, cartoons did not, in fact, rise like mist from the ground and heal every lousy thing that had ever happened to you, your quarreling parents, and your intermittent adversary, the elder sibling. It was the same old shit, only you were supposed to be enjoying yourself, only how can you enjoy yourself when you are dumbstruck at how little Disneyland differs from the rest of creation. Disneyland was a violence against the imagination. Those who do not recall their emotions at relatively early developmental ages might question whether a recent graduate of kindergarten can experience life-redefining disenchantment, but I assure you that I did.
Like a goose fated for the pâté plate, expectations as to what visitors encounter at Disneyland had been funneled down my gullet as long as I could remember. I had not done this to myself. Rather, the Disney industrial complex of fantasy pushers granted me gateway samples: Saturday morning cartoons, children’s “literature” and read-along records manufactured by Disney, all of which conspired to dupe me into believing that physical entry into the kingdom of Disney was going to provide an amazing, life-fulfilling, peak experience for me. It was emphatically not a collective or shared experience that was promised; to the contrary, all signs pointed to this being a deeply personal hero’s journey in the company of familiar animated creatures and requisite parental guardians.
But as it turned out, I was one of many children at Disneyland. There were hoards of us forming cues to board rides and pointing with bald and unseemly desperation at souvenirs that promised material compensation for the collective let-down that I was certain we were all experiencing. Upon absorbing our astonishing ubiquity and recognizing our shared delusions of what should or might transpire at a corporate amusement park, the slightly more intelligent of the unformed, sticky masses, were rendered bitter, sullen, and prematurely wizened. Everywhere you turned, it was a funhouse of yourself and your suddenly frumpy family: lines of ugly, squalling children and irritable parents with helmet hair (mostly women) and crew cuts (mostly men).
Worse than one’s complete lack of uniqueness in the Magic Kingdom, though, were the depressingly faux-cheerful mechanical rides that were supposed to induce childish squeals of delight. Their mechanical features were not even hidden: pivoting linkages, trusses, gears, and cables right there, as if we were too stupid to see them. To my eye, the rides were uniformly old, coated with sun-cracked, buckling, and sometimes outright peeling paint. Where was the magic in any of that? I’d seen new tractors with hard candy shell paint that were more impressive than this shit. The rides were nothing but poorly-faked magic. They were the manufactured contraptions of the same imperfect world from which we had traveled. We were the victims of an elaborate con.
As for my cartoon character “friends,” their fraudulence was instantly apparent. Disneyland had neither brought its cartoon creations to life, nor bothered to produce credible ersatz cartoon beings. What kind of idiot-child could be duped by adults parading around in over-sized, cumbersome Halloween costumes? Additionally, in an irritating and confusing conceit, the costume-encased adults feigned muteness and used their gloved hands to mime communication. Of course, the necessity of this strategy was obvious: if they were to speak and use their human voices – rather than the native cartoon throat that none of them possessed – the ruse that they were the actual characters from TV would be broken for whatever dimwit child had not already put two and two together.
I was thunderstruck that They – this “amusement park” pretending to be the Wonderful World of Disney – my parents, the orange grove farmers who had originally owned the land, or whomever – were successfully peddling this cheap imitation of the Disneyland of my imagination. An added arabesque of outrage and melancholy was the fact that everyone seemed engaged in a collective decision to pretend that Disneyland was just as wonderful as it should be. It was my guess that those feigning joy or even neutrality were either secretly let down, as I was, or they were complicit in and benefiting from the ruse.
However, I was a guarded child, and would not speak of my impression of Disneyland without thinking it through. Instead, I gathered data in the form of my parents’ facial expressions, body language, and speech. After a short period of analysis, I deduced that my parents also felt despondent – but I also gathered that this was not a permissible topic of conversation. It was as if we were all playing Go Fish or Old Maid and the rule was you did not show or discuss the cards in your hand. I wondered why this was the case, but decided that it did not matter. They did not speak of it, and neither would I.
Though negotiating Disneyland was not as simple as maintaining a stiff upper lip in the face of crushed expectations. There was something else going on in the parental silence – something slithery, something menacing, something with infrared vision that lived under beds and inside dark closets. I was acutely aware of the economic sacrifices of this trip, and I sensed that the imperative not to speak of the awfulness of Disneyland arose from this. There had been plenty of times when my father’s income had not been the equal of our bills. Before I was toilet trained, my mother taught me that the first rule of home economics was that if you have less than a dollar to feed a family, buy eggs: they are relatively cheap, they are a good source of protein, and they are filling. So while I did not understand money, I knew we sometimes did not have enough of it. Moreover, I was aware that I wore homemade clothing because only wealthy people had store-bought wardrobes. I was nothing if not observant. Therefore, I knew that Disneyland was a luxury that involved the removal of precious dollars from my father’s lean, butt-contouring wallet. An additional cost of Disneyland, I noted, was the purchase of the right to sleep in a number 6 Motel, which was so decadent it was almost unbearable. As much as I relished the finer things, I felt shame and guilt for putting my parents in this situation.
It occurred to me that a good child would, under these circumstances, feign ecstatic enthusiasm for Disneyland even though it completely sucked. So I did. When “Goofy” and “Mickey Mouse” sidled up next to me, I pretended to be bedazzled. We stood in lines under the same hot white sun that existed at home for our turn sitting, for a few moments, on spinning, creaking rides. I smiled broadly and pretended not to notice the fact that this was merely the quotidian world, as opposed to the pristine cartoon cel-world that we were supposed to be visiting, which apparently did not even exist. In a bit of inspired duplicitousness I asked to go on the “It’s a Small World” ride twice, for I thought that this would be the most effective way to convince my parents that I really liked it. And so forth. An endless concatenation of white lies to justify the nauseating expense of Scamland.
In one square snapshot from this trip, I am wearing cat-eye sunglasses purchased in a Disneyland gift shop, which my parents had grimly purchased for me, along with Minnie Mouse ears, which were not really “ears” per se, but a black felt beanie with plastic ear disks – and a bow, because it was for girls. My mouth formed an involuntary upside-down U, as it nearly always did when I was told to face blinding sunlight and say “cheese” for the plastic Kodak Instamatic camera.
“Smile!” my mother yelled at me as she took this picture. “You’re Miss Hollywood!” I frowned, certain that the sun was melting the eyes out of my head, and grimaced, wrongly imagining that I had formed something approximating a grin. My mother snapped a picture and lowered the camera. Both of my parents smiled with their teeth showing. Struck by this unusual demonstration of approval, I was momentarily cheered by the possibility that I might find an even vaster audience. Perhaps we would go to Hollywood, I would become a child star, and all that dismayed in Disneyland could be forgotten.
It was unclear what was on the familial agenda for the following day, and I made no inquiries. My father rose early, as was his custom. Upon his return to the foreign glamour that was a rented sleeping room for a family, I sat up, still in a sleep coma, and kicked back the stiff nylon bedspread. I was percipient enough to note that my father had a Styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, a newspaper wedged under an armpit, and a singularly grim expression on his face. I wondered if I had done something wrong. My mother looked as if she were thinking the same thing. He gestured at my mother to leave the room and she obeyed without a word.
“Lie down!,” my father scolded me before following my mother outside. The door glided shut on its own, because at the top it was attached to a mechanical device that resembled one of those refillable Black Flag bug sprayers. My parents conferred on the other side of the lacquered motel room door. I scooted over to the open window, and I heard the words “ritual murder,” which sounded very bad, but also “movie star,” “Folgers coffee,” and “heiress,” all of which sounded good. The overall tone of the conversation, however, was definitely not good.
Time passed. They eventually came inside. I was alarmed by my mother’s eyes, which were teary, and her demeanor, which was agitated. My father set down the newspaper at an angle that permitted me to see its headlines, which were in heavy, screaming type. The creepiest thing about this newspaper was the photographic window from which the black and white face and vacant, deep-set eyes of Sharon Tate stared. I stared back at her. “She was so beautiful,” my beautiful mother said ruefully. All of this was making me quite anxious. I asked what had happened. My father informed me that the beautiful woman had been killed, along with a coffee heiress and their friends. He added that the murders had occurred in Southern California, at a location that was evidently adjacent to the motel, because we, too, were in Southern California. I felt my eyes go wide. It seemed we were not at all safe. I asked if we might also expect to be killed in Southern California.
“No,” my father said. “Los Angeles is very large. Besides, they are just killing rich people.” Later that day – once we were en route to Knotts Berry Farm, and after she had recovered from the initial shock of the what were to become known as the Manson Murders – my mother, a former beauty queen, resumed calling me “Miss Hollywood.” I was no longer interested in the title.
···
Upon our return home from the ill-fated vacation, I announced, seemingly inexplicably, that I wanted to attend Sunday School. For I had learnt on our pilgrimage to Southern California that cartoon paradise on earth was a sham: Disneyland, while a beautiful thing in the imagination, was in reality a flimsy, cheap imitation of something remarkable. It had promised transcendence and great beauty, but to actually go there and experience it firsthand was to expose oneself to the null set of the human experience. Adding insult to injury, there was a budget-annihilating price tag attached to the privilege of having your dreams eviscerated by the snake oil salesmen that ran the place. Perhaps worst of all, its myriad disappointments had to be processed solitarily, for none of this could ever be spoken of. That was the rule, after all. Hollywood, too, was not at all what it was supposed to be: instead of a land of opulence and ease, it was a malevolent, murderous place – at least for rich people. Therefore, I was done with Hollywood. As for cartoons, while they were still pleasurable, I no longer believed in them.
As a citizen of the imagination, I felt it was not viable to survive in this world without having faith in the existence of another one. There had to be something beyond the scope of one’s material surroundings. Something that promised respite from the overseas war on television every night, the riots that seemed to be taking place everywhere, the fire bombs that were thrown through the windows of churches and family homes, and police who aimed guns at long-haired college students. Surely there was a paradise untouched by all the terrifying, unfathomable, boiling violence of America.
That pretty Doris Day song “Que Sera Sera” was as instructive as it was troubling. While her singing was as buoyant as helium balloons, there was a ribbon of menace woven into the lyrics: What will be, will be. Somehow, that was not a comfort, though it was packaged up as an answer to uncertainty. What if what will be, will be ends up being a ritual murder of a pretty actress and a coffee heiress and exotically-named people in Los Feliz? What if que sera, sera turns out to be the assassination of another President? What will be, will be had not worked out so great for Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and those skinny rice farmers in Viet Nam who were getting blown up every day because they lived in jungles, and jungles breed communism, and communism was trying to kill us.
Since Disneyland and Hollywood had failed me, it was time to move on. Perhaps church would offer the elusive safe haven for which I yearned: a tranquil, alternative world that was not predicated on fantasy, deceit, guilt, and violence. It was time to begin the Great Investigation.