Exit Laughing (15 page)

It was customary for the leader, herself a survivor, to ask if anybody had anything they would like to say. We had recently passed a milestone: when the leader asked that question the last several weeks, somebody had always spoken up. Not so this time. Everybody shifted in their seats, looked at their hands or feet. It was as though the silence screamed out to me to speak, telling me the longer I waited to make the announcement, the more difficult it would be.

“I’d like to say something.” I then proceeded to do what my husband always accuses me of, qualifying what comes next. “I realize this isn’t a competition. I mean, I’m not trying to upstage anybody.” I took a deep breath and continued, “My mother killed herself the night before last.”

It was a hot summer night in a building that had no air-conditioning. The fluorescent overhead lighting buzzed, emitting heat and radiation, making the already stifling environment even more so. Forget the bullshit that dry heat is better. Extreme heat
sans
humidity is just as miserable. It was claustrophobic. The room was so quiet I could hear people sweating. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the man
whose father had died in the tub said, “Well, that’s a showstopper.”

The room erupted into laughter. Even the group leader couldn’t restrain herself from joining in. It was as if somebody had pricked a balloon, releasing all the air. Tears rolled down the faces of people whom I had never seen manage the slightest of smiles. It marked a turning point for the group. Because despite all the intimacy that such a group implies, we had not yet allowed ourselves to laugh in our time of unimaginable grief, for fear we’d be seen as callous or cruel. Breaking that unspoken taboo liberated us. Before this moment, we were connected by grief. Now, we were connected by something equally as powerful: laughter.

Once we crossed that boundary, the remaining walls tumbled down, and we became a cohesive group. On the last meeting, we sat together and candidly looked back on our journeys. Each of us confessed measuring our grief against the others!

It was suggested that we take a vote to determine which of us had the most tragic tale. We embraced the idea. Ballots were cast, and the votes tallied. We shared our last group belly laugh when the winner was announced: Young Pregnant Widow was a clean sweep.

I left the group struck by the banality of death, even when it’s a more lurid death like suicide. The truth is, however we leave this world, we’ve left it. Death, in all its forms, was finally demystified for me. And I learned that even in grief there can be moments of humor. I also found out that my reactions—from what made me cry to what me laugh—were not unique, they were universal. It was a humbling experience.

My fears, guilt, and grief were very much like those emotions experienced by everyone in my group. And even my shameful secret, which was my proclivity to secretly quantify death, was also shared. I went in thinking I was different, and I came out seeing that I’m very much like everyone else, ordinary in the most extraordinary way. And it was the ordinariness that made it extraordinary. I was human.

I could tell you how we met
.

I arrived to escort an author to a television interview and ended up sitting in a Berkeley kitchen with Maya Angelou and Jessica Mitford telling me about riding elephants together in a charity circus parade—two of the world’s best storytellers comparing their fantasies of wearing spangled harem pants and lounging in pillowed luxury versus the reality of being hoisted up to terrifying heights and hanging on for dear life. The elephants’ hide was rough. “It turns out you have to wear the stoutest of jeans,” giggled Mitford, the world-renowned muckraking journalist, former card-carrying member of the Communist Party, legendary civil-rights activist, and author of
The American Way of Death
, a book that revolutionized the funeral industry.

I could tell you about the first performance
.

I had been asked to help recruit authors for a literary talent show to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the
Paris Review
, and it happened that Maya Angelou was in town. I invited her to stay for a few extra days so she could be in the show.

“Hmmm,” she said. “I can’t stay that long, but Decca will do it. Have you ever heard her sing ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’?
No? Well then …” Dr. Angelou picked up the car phone and dialed a number. “Decca,” she said. “I’ve bought you a scholarship. You’re going to be in a show. Here, talk to Ms. Goldmark.”

That was how I met Jessica Mitford (known to her friends and family as “Decca”) and became her record producer.

She arrived at the
Paris Review
party in a glittery gown. My band was performing, and we did a journeyman’s job of backing up Leticia Baldridge on “La Vie en Rose,” Ben Fong-Torres on a couple of Elvis tunes, and Louis B. Jones and Nion McEvoy on a classic rocker. Herb Caen contributed jazzy drum stylings. We let George Plimpton plow through “The Minute Waltz” on his own. But Decca brought down the house singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with Caen on cowbell. I looked over at David, my musical coconspirator and bandleader. He nodded. We had to record this for posterity. That’s how “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” Records was born—and went on to achieve CD sales well into the dozens—with Decca and the Dectones as our first project.

I could tell you about the recording session
.

I couldn’t afford the gorgeous horn section required to duplicate the music bed on the Beatles’ arrangement of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” so I invited twenty Jessica Mitford fans to join us on kazoo instead. The Dectones, as we called them, performed double-duty on a second track, “The Ballad of Grace Darling,” a song Decca had learned in her youth that featured a large group howling “Help! Help!” on the chorus. We released Decca’s single with a blowout bash at San Francisco’s Paradise Lounge featuring a half-hour set of old
protest songs, torch songs, and the grand finale, “The Ballad of Decca,” a parody which, in true old-Commie form, was written by committee with her husband, labor lawyer Bob Treuhaft. Sung to the tune of “Grace Darling,” it was the story of Decca’s life, minus the elephant ride:

THE BALLAD OF DECCA

The kazoo chorus, proud Dectones all, became a signature component of the “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” sound, and I learned how to record and mix kazoo sound with an ambience of controlled chaos—a lost art, these days.

I could tell you about taking the show on the road
.

Decca, Maya Angelou, and journalist Shana Alexander headlining a lit-rock event in Cary, North Carolina, along with Olivia Goldsmith and Roy Blount, Jr.; a gala at Slim’s to close the San Francisco Book Festival; a performance at the opening of the new San Francisco Public Library; a very strange gig on the roof of Virgin Records downtown, with Cyndi Lauper as the headliner; a glorious evening on the stage of Town Hall in New York on behalf of the
Nation
magazine; a CD release
party in an Upper East Side New York town house; a follow-up recording,
There Is a Moral to It All: Musical Duets
, with Maya Angelou and Jessica Mitford singing English music hall ditties “Right, Said Fred” and “One Fish Ball.” There were always eager kazoo-tooting Dectones backing up our star, well into her seventies, giving “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” her all before an enchanted crowd.

And I could tell you about singing old union songs with Decca and Bob in their Berkeley living room
.

Hearing great stories about standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee and the early days of the American Communist Party; many delightful parties and dinners. I read her autobiographies and learned about the famously well-documented Mitford sisters and her extraordinary life.

Decca was the daughter of the Second Baron Redesdale, born in Burford, Oxfordshire, in 1917. She was a self-described autodidact, educated at home by her mother. She told me about her sisters: Diana Mitford, who married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists; Unity Mitford, who became a close friend of Adolf Hitler; Nancy Mitford, “the
real
writer in the family.” Decca developed left-wing sensibilities. She married Esmond Romilly, nephew of Winston Churchill, and the couple moved to the United States in 1939. Romilly joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was killed in a bombing raid.

A few years later, Mitford married radical lawyer Robert Treuhaft. They both joined the American Communist Party
and were active in the Civil Rights movement. They moved to Oakland in 1948 and had lived in the East Bay ever since, raising kids, fighting for social justice and the rights of the oppressed, and writing scathing, hilarious exposés.

We became great pals.

Meanwhile, I’d caught the record-producer bug and began working on other projects. Of all the quirky offerings on the “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” label, Decca’s favorite was the album
Potty Animal: Funny Songs about Potty Training
. She offered a blurb for the back panel and sent me cassettes of scatological ditties she’d collected from all over the world.

Fast-forward to KPFA’s Berkeley studio, sometime in 1996. David Gans invited Decca and me to appear as guests on his Grateful Dead–themed radio show. We agreed, lured by the promise that we could bring our own music to play on the air. As Decca cued up her choice,
Potty Animal
, we could feel Deadheads turning off their radios in droves.

A few months later, Decca went to the doctor with peculiar symptoms and was diagnosed with brain cancer. She had just a few weeks to gather her loved ones around her, to settle her affairs, and to deliver marching orders to those of us who visited her bedside—amounting to instructions on how to take care of one another after she was gone.

I led my band of loyal Dectones, kazoos in hand, in a final tribute at the memorial, a spectacular event. Then I went home to try to figure out how to fill the empty space. No more playful faxes filled with corny jokes, or thanks for the “swell grub” after a dinner party. No more thrilling moments on lead kazoo, holding up the “Bang! Bang!” and “Help! Help!”
sing-along signs beside my lovely star as she bellowed and vamped her heart out. No more Decca. And without Decca, there could be no more Dectones.

A couple of weeks later, I got a call from Bob.

“Can you come by this week? There’s something that Decca wanted you to have.”

We made a date, and I wondered what the something might be. A trinket? A book? A letter about all the fun we’d had pretending to be rock stars together? Bob wouldn’t give any clues, and a few days later I drove to Berkeley to pick up what I was sure would be a small gift, a token.

He pointed to an old, polished hardwood cabinet in the hallway. “That’s it,” he said with a smile. “I hope you have room in your trunk.”

“Um, wow, thanks.”

“Do you know what this is? Here, let me show you.” The front of the cabinet turned out to be two fake drawers on a hinged covering. Bob removed the facade to reveal—a porcelain potty.

“It’s the Mitford family chamber pot. Decca loved your potty songs, and she wanted you to have this. It’s over a hundred years old, you know.”

I wrestled my treasure into the car, thinking of all the aristocratic English bottoms that had graced this gift, going back over a hundred years. It remains in a place of honor in my dining room to this day, adorned with a 45 of Bernard Cribbins singing “Right, Said Fred” and a photo of Decca at her
CD release party. Using a pair of red flannel cowboy boxer shorts as a hanky, she wipes her eyes while vamping on “Mean to Me,” her favorite torch song.

The commode itself, of course, is filled with kazoos.

It’s early spring in Northern California—roadkill season—and it’s the fifth dead skunk I’ve passed on my bike this morning. This one is perfect, though, with no obvious signs of violence or bloodshed. Casually curled up at the edge of the road, it looks like it’s just fallen asleep. I have a sudden urge to stop, get off my bike, check it out, see what its face and its little skunk paws look like up close. Maybe even see how long its body is, if I stretch it out.