What about your mother? Did you and she ever reconcile?
No. I thought about going to visit her once I was back in S.F. I talked to Phil about it—I figured he’d be all in favor—but he thought it was a lousy idea. “You know you’ll just end up fighting with her, Jane. Why would you want to do that?” So I put it off. When she died in ’87, I still hadn’t seen her.
I’m sorry.
No, Phil was right. There was no love lost there, and no sense pretending, either.
Tell me about Berkeley. What was your major?
Christ, that question…Which one do you want to hear about first? I had like five.
You had trouble deciding?
I didn’t think I needed to decide. Look, there are basically two reasons people go to college. Some people actually go there to learn something, something specific I mean, a trade or a vocation. Other people—like me—just go for the experience. I was like one of those starving-artist types, people who convince themselves back in grade school that they have a destiny to become actors or musicians or writers. For them, college is a place to mark time until their destiny kicks in.
And you believed that you had a destiny…to become Nancy Drew with a lightning gun?
See, when you say it that way it sounds crazy. It was never that explicit. I didn’t even know what the organization was at that point, so it’s not like I ever thought to myself, “One day I’m going to join the fight against evil, and here’s how.” It was a lot more subtle than that, just this general sense that I was covered—I didn’t need to make a plan for my life, because the plan already existed, and eventually it would come clear to me.
But the wait got long. When I left Berkeley after five years, my destiny still hadn’t kicked in yet, and suddenly it didn’t seem so smart that I hadn’t studied anything useful. To survive, I ended up doing what the starving artists did, taking jobs that even a high-school dropout could get: waitress, pizza-delivery girl, liquor-store clerk…Name an occupation with no entry qualifications and no future, and I probably tried it at least once.
So I was poor, and living in one shitty apartment after another, but I was young, and having fun—too much fun, sometimes—and I still felt like I was covered. And then one day I turned around and I was thirty years old. And like I say, my destiny, I never thought about it that explicitly, but on milestone birthdays, you do think about things, and the day I turned thirty it occurred to me that it had been a really long time since I’d seen the coin. I decided I needed to see it, to hold it in my hand and remind myself, you know, omnes mundum facimus, we all make the world, whatever the hell that meant.
But I couldn’t find it. I trashed my apartment looking for it. And it was no surprise—I’d moved so many times, it was a wonder I hadn’t lost more stuff—but I was still very upset. So I went out and got really fucked up, and to make a long story short, my birthday ended with cops and an ambulance ride.
Afterwards, Phil came to see me, and we had a long heart-to-heart about what I was going to do with my life. I’d never told him about the coin, or the voice on the phone, or any of the rest of it, but he talked like he knew: “You don’t need an engraved invitation to do good works in the world, Jane,” he said. “You want to do them, you just go out and do them.” Which, once I got done gagging, actually made a lot of sense to me. So that kind of became the theme of my early thirties.
Good works?
Well, attempted good works. Turns out it’s not as easy as it sounds.