Our first pick from our subscribers' submissions
Read the opening pages of Susan Hayden's 'Now You Are a Missing Person', a hybrid memoir in poems, stories and fragments
Auraist paid subscribers can submit books to us for consideration as the best recent release in the genre of their choice. We’re delighted to say that Susan Hayden sent us her memoir Now You Are a Missing Person (published by the wonderful Moon Tide Press) and that its writing is more than a match for that in our other recent picks. We hope you enjoy the excerpt below and that you’ll help support such exceptional work by buying the book using the link below the excerpt.
Outlaws
I’m an unreliable narrator but I’m asking you to trust me anyway.
When I was five, the best-looking men on Ventura Boulevard could be found in photos on the walls of the post office, carwash style. I would stare up at them and wonder why all the guys I knew were clean-cut in comparison. I asked my mom which TV shows they were on.
She said, “These are mugshots, Susan. These are horse thieves, train robbers, kidnappers. That one killed his wife. What’s wrong with you?”
I didn’t know. To me they were scruffy and real, and I hated anything that was shiny and anyone who was polished.
Borrowing Sugar
I used to borrow sugar, or try to. Not from just anyone. From “entertainers” in the neighborhood. They lived in sprawling, ranch-style homes with aerial views, front yard aquariums and life-sized statues. Leon Russell on Woodley, The Jackson Five on Hayvenhurst, Tom Petty on Mooncrest. Affluence and intimacy, a false sense of security: That was the real Encino.
Never had a strategy, only an impulse. I wasn’t even developed. Playing house with a Betsey Clark folding scene and Hallmark reusable stickers, the inspirational kind that said things like, “Every Day Is a Gift From God,” “Showered with Blessings” and “I Believe in Miracles.”
I was an anomaly in the West Valley, a trickster with a two-spirit nature, Technics turntable and a Barbie suitcase, jam-packed with personal belongings—a sheltered freewheeler, seeking access and the thrill of the hunt. And I was a bolter, always running away, but just for a little while.
Mostly I was a New Romantic, the sameness of my fate as yet to be determined. Love was someone else’s story, carved in a spiral groove on a vinyl platter. So I borrowed sugar, or tried to. But instead, dogs barked, alarms rang out and I was escorted off Private Property, released back into “The Ranch of the Evergreens”—Los Encinos— encircled by the Transverse Ranges, surrounded by the nouveau riche.
For months, years, my measuring cup stayed empty. Roaming the streets of the 91316 where It’s a Wonderful Life was shot. South of Ventura, Liberace had a piano shaped pool. Let me swim in it once. Called me “Sweetie.” North of Valley Vista, the gulleys and ditches connecting flatland to hillside were hideouts, wishing wells of early faith:
Faith in the power of Everything, canceled out by a voice saying “You’re Nothing.” My brother, brazenly dealing weed and coke
from his bedroom window. He tried to teach me that Goodness was impermanent, on loan. But I had love songs in my head that made Big Promises. When the lunatic moon touched my brother, converting him from a gentle boy into the Opposite of Sugar, it was songs and sweets that pulled me across.
When not borrowing, I was busy eating: Hostess cupcakes, Fruit pies, Sno Balls, Twinkies, Zingers, Donettes. I was addicted to sugar. It made me bold and shy. Empowered me. Sedated me. Borrowing sugar equaled escape from an unsafe home. Fleeing risk by risking was better than staying put.
The in-crowd lived elsewhere, that much was clear. “Over the hill” in woodsy canyons with more shade and less heat. Jackson Browne on Outpost Drive, Joni Mitchell on Appian Way. I wanted to be free and in the clouds but was exiled to Royal Oaks, with its lion’s head door knockers and central air conditioning.
And I learned how to work my way in by saying, “Lend me some sugar, I am your neighbor.” It was my only way around a set of circumstances—in search of the sweetness from someone else’s life whose whereabouts were hidden but known to me.
That’s how it started, this borrowing sugar. That’s how it started, this running away.
You Make Me Feel So Young
Sam Weinstock asked for a slow dance during a family wedding at the Ventura Club in Sherman Oaks. He approached me at the dessert buffet where I was pouring chocolate syrup on a do-it-yourself hot fudge sundae.
He said he lived next door to my Aunt Goldie on Alcove Street and thought I was kind of pretty. The hired singer crooned Sinatra. As Sam twirled me, his hands on my back were like wheels of brie, smooth and effective, soft like a cow.
He was James Coburn’s double. I’d seen “ Ride Lonesome.” I already knew my future husband would be like a steak at The Palm, a Prime Porterhouse, rough- hewn on the outside, tender underneath.
I told him I was six. He told me he was forty. I told him he smelled good. He told me he’d bought his cologne at Rexall.
I remembered Mom once saying that guys who wore Canoe by Dana were “cold and hungry.”
1971 Was a Bad Year for Certain People
Into this house, we’re born.
— The Doors
ONE
“Riders on the Storm” was my father’s favorite Doors song long before I’d understood its meaning.
My father was about to turn forty, had missed
the 60s altogether, that kind of music made him feel included. He’d thought sitting in the Orchestra Pit at synagogue
would bring him closer to God, but the choir, with its rinah u’tefillah —temple songs written to open the heart—pushed him away,
he was more drawn to the Fender Rhodes electric piano pretending to be rain, my father also pretended to be rain, dropped from Manzarek’s fingertips, echo effects
from Morrison’s lips into our candles on Shabbat and Hanukkah. Year-round soundtrack, other parents were listening
to Petula Clark, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66, Bacharach
but this Doors thing was my father’s obsession, his own heart
a Venn diagram: circular, logical, somewhat closed, imposed with decorum. And yet earthy renegades outweighed
and swayed his better judgment.
TWO
“Riders on the Storm” turned me on and terrorized
my entire childhood. Pulled me into the land of the Zodiac Killer, HARD LUCK tattooed on the hand of Billy Cook.
Look, I wanted to love that song, but I thought it was about murder and I was eight. Who knew this would be the coming age
of future crime sprees? Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, Hillside Strangler, Jim Jones. Hollywood High teenaged runaway
with ligature marks, an Honors art student injected with Windex.
I already dreaded unearthly forces whose DNA and fingerprints went undetectable in an era when Forensics meant
trying to catch someone with the limited technology of bare hands.
THREE
“Riders on the Storm” played tricks with my head
involving bloodshed and trepidation, where
I would pretend to be a victim of crime scenes, the void inside
a chalk outline. I’d seek out signs whenever in the dark,
as I practiced martial arts under the covers in a Lanz nightgown: bending down, kicking up, punching air, a nightly bedroom prayer, where I mastered open-hand techniques while exploring
the faceless drifter in me.
FOUR
“Riders on the Storm” blasted through a house where
everything unjust in the world was kept hidden like The War,
the horror show my father would watch on Eyewitness News at 6 PM. He was oblivious of my fears and to the fact that 1971
was a bad year for certain people, including me.
He kept tuning into the song and tuning out my bleak reality, criticized me for wearing army pants but failed to share his feelings about combat, collateral damage, the inequity of modern men.
He guarded his kids from uglier truths of existence, would never bring up Current Events. He’d reference The Ten Commandments, which he knew by heart. He lionized Judaism. Had honor, courage, strength, bestowed on us at length his personal code,
an Ethics discourse.
FIVE
“Riders on the Storm” was my father’s all-time favorite Doors song, even with Morrison’s laundry list of known offenses:
indecent exposure, profanity, unpredictable scenes, mood swings, breakdowns, asthma, ulcers, bloating, clinical despair,
with the stunted air of liquor breath and the ever-present death wish. He’d once been a UCLA guy, like my father. Behind a desk,
folding corners of his homework into paper airplanes.
But Morrison graduated and then “dropped out.”
Let’s face it: The Doors embraced uncertainty.
My father was presence in reverse, immersing himself in plans and answers. Saw an alter ego in mystical Jim, a sliding door of what could have been had he risked being an artist.
SIX
“Riders on the Storm” was the oft-heard song
coming from overhead speakers at my father’s secret spot,
The Third Eye, a psychedelic Garden of Eden
where he’d buy me love beads.
My long waves with a middle part, yin-yang necklace,
patchwork halter top. It was a head shop selling Pop art, Oaxacan wedding dresses, handcrafted leather.
It was Morrisonesque. Hippies and straights would commune
in the same blacklight room, drink Bonny Doon from the bottle and stare at the posters: Dr. Strange Meets Eternity, Lost Horizon, 2000 Light Years From Home, Butterflies and Dogwood,
Symbology, Love is Love. Never seen colors so vibrant.
Never been high, not even close, but glow and vibrations, ultraviolet energy made me believe I’d entered a new dimension. There was a hand-painted school bus parked out front,
a bathtub stuffed with nasturtiums, bohemians hanging
with Vets just home from Vietnam, jamming on guitars, reflecting on battle scars, smoking hand rolled cigarettes
and grass. I felt urgent, paid attention to their stories,
listened in, touched straggly beards. My father would say:
“Stay away from those shell-shocked men.” But I didn’t.
SEVEN
“Riders on the Storm” —the single—debuted on Billboard’s Hot 100 in June of ’71, just before that last overdub ending in Le Marais, sending my father into situational depression.
Attached to a rock star defined by transgression, he played
the “Storm” song as a form of Kaddish. It seemed to soothe him. The day Jim Morrison died, I sneaked out of my house
and into The Third Eye, to spy on freedom and linger
in The Bead Room, which had cracks in the cement floor
from the Sylmar earthquake. No one knew I was gone.
My eyes fixed on shelves with bowls of colored glass,
puka shells and seed beads, as I settled into a corner and listened,
not to “Riders” but to “L.A. Woman,” realizing that in about ten years, I would be one. A teenaged girl on a bean bag chair kept smiling.
I smiled back and wanted to ask, “Are you a bohemian?”
She could have been on the cover of Seventeen Magazine
with her lean frame, freckled face and empty gaze,
like Morrison’s “cosmic partner,” Pamela, nothing seemed to faze her, as if she’d dropped too much of something
and was on a trip somewhere I’d never get to go.
She was a tableau of all the beautifulness one might find
on a good day in 1971, how I’d imagined a freethinker to be, fearless and carefree, the way—not just my father—
but I dreamed of being.
EIGHT
“Riders on the Storm” began to play. The song brought
tears to the Third Eye volunteers behind the counter and the girl
was also crying. “Dying will make him more popular,” she said,
twirling her hair, which was red and partially French braided.
She wore a stainless-steel bracelet with a man’s name
engraved on it, saw me staring and said, “POW/MIA.
It shows a soldier’s rank and date of the last time he was seen.
I mean, he’s probably been blown to pieces.”
Then she took the ID bracelet off her wrist, handed it over, asked me
to keep it. I sat there long after she’d left, at once bereft
at imagining the unaccounted-for army man, whose loved ones
were awaiting his arrival or death—and elated at this unlikely gift
I had been given. Later, when the bracelet was next to my skin,
alone with the lifeblood of this veteran and the absence of Jim,
I could only envision my father, who was disappeared
in a different form. I wanted more than his watchful eye, more than having to listen to his favorite music.
I didn’t know he loved me. He never said those words out loud.
Did he have to emotionally detach to shield me from harm’s way? Did he have to conform, pay the cost, by letting his own free spirit get lost
and stay Missing In Action?
Demolished
My mom took me to see “ Love Story” at the Encino Theatre and in a crochet beret, I entered but didn’t win the Ali MacGraw Lookalike Contest.
On the ride home she explained how wrong the advertising campaign was for that movie, that you should always (not never) say you’re sorry when you love someone.
I wanted to move my bedroom furniture into the Encino Theatre and take up residence there. It was the hub of our town, with single-attraction shows and a thousand seats.
By the mid-70s it was mowed down to build a high-rise office building. My Encino was gone. It became a business district, like what was happening all over Los Angeles, like so much of America.
Three devastating losses are at the heart of Susan Hayden's lyrical memoir, Now You Are a Missing Person. The suddenness of each of these deaths―her father, her childhood best friend and her husband―sparks and guides a series of explorations to claim equilibrium and a sense of self. Stories, poems and fragments are woven together to trace Hayden's search for identity and belonging through lovers and friends, some enduring, some ephemeral. She creates an intimate album of her life, from the 1970s to the present, evoked in an LA populated by troubadours and actors, both shining and fading. Raised in an observant Jewish family in the suburban San Fernando Valley, she struggles and finds her footing in an ever-shifting culture of expectations around body image, sexuality, motherhood, widowhood and autonomy.