Exploring Depth, Light, and Love
Excerpt from My Upcoming Autobiography
THE BEGINNING
I looked up and everything was shimmering, fractured glints of light. Cutting through the glare was a beige silhouette of a man, like superman, flying across the sky framed by the sun. Then there was a huge splash of aqua-tinted water that smelled of chlorine.
This is my first memory. The man was my dad, and he had dived into the golf club’s pool fully clothed, including his leather golf shoes, to rescue me from drowning. I was three years old, and I had just walked over the ledge into the pool. My mom was there, only a few feet away, in a lounge chair reading a book. Apparently, everything happened in a blink of an eye.
I was born in the beautiful ocean town of La Jolla, California. La Jolla is often translated as the jewel from the Spanish la joya, and it is indeed a jewel. As one of the richest and most beautiful towns on the California coast, it rivals any of the sparkling gems on the French and Italian Rivieras. My birth took place in the hospital that overlooked an intimate and tiny cove on the Pacific Ocean. That hospital was later torn down and replaced by the Contemporary Museum of Art San Diego. Karma, and hopefully, one day, I will have a massive retrospective show that will rival its location.
As kids, my four siblings and I didn’t spend time at home, rather we spent all our free time at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. It had twelve immaculate tennis courts, with a main court that had shaded, forest-green-colored stands about four rows deep. It also had a formal garden with a water fountain of large turquoise-patinated bronze sea horses and beautiful blue and rust colored tiles. Beyond the garden was an pale ochre yellow two-story building of suites for tourists, like the rich Texans that would spend their summers there. From the garden, cutting straight through the building was a wide corridor that opened on to the somewhat gray-green Pacific Ocean, cerulean sky, and the Beach Club’s private, sandy beach. It was a thrill approaching the corridor, as there would always be a blast of wind funneling through from the beach. In the summers, we literally ate every night at the beach, sitting in the sand around a fire pit. I remember my mom’s spaghetti and meat sauce that she had prepared at home but heated it up there.
My older sister, Janet, and I, would play tennis everyday at the club from when school got out till dark. Sometimes we played together but mostly against our peer group. On weekends and in the summers, we played from morning to night. The club always had a handful of kids that had won national championships. My sister being one of them. Though it was fun, it was pretty serious. For instance, when I was fifteen, and Janet was eighteen, we won the Southern California Adult Mixed Doubles Championship at the Los Angeles Tennis Club on their marvelous center court. An unheard-of victory, considering I was still not physically mature, and our opponent's male half was a member of the NCAA national powerhouse UCLA tennis team. Through, Janet, in the next year, would go on to reach the mixed doubles finals of Wimbledon playing with the great Raul Ramirez losing to legendary Billie Jean King and Owen Davidson. It is very likely that our mixed doubles win had a lot to do with the fact that my sister was one of the best tennis players in the world.
Eleven Years Old
Without question, I was born with a silver spoon, but that doesn’t explain why I would become such a life-long, dedicated, and passionate artist. However, there were six early events–all occurring when I was eleven–that would significantly shape my art future and prepare me for the marvelous celebration of Aristotle’s concept of eudaemonia.[1]
Rod Laver
Arguably the greatest tennis player of all time was two-time Grand Slam Champion Rod Laver, and he was playing in the National Men’s 35 and Over Championship at the Beach Club. I was standing next to him near the front court, where he was scheduled to play a match in fifteen minutes. The court was vacant of players, and all the kids at the club never let a chance go by to play on it whenever it was free. Even though knowing he was the world's best didn't stop me from asking him to hit with me. He, of course, said “Yes,” and I got to rally with him for the next fifteen minutes. It must have amused him, but he would have related to the front-court-is-empty-play-with-whoever’s- available scenario. It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t ask him to play. It also didn’t seem like a big deal; it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
My First Traffic Ticket
In the non-summer months and late in the afternoon my dad would play poker with a few of his buds at the club’s cardroom. I knew he would play for a couple of hours and then head home for dinner. My siblings would simply walk the few blocks home when it got dark. I, on the other hand, was fascinated about driving. I would wait til the club was empty except for the men inside the card room, then I would go into the parking lot and get in the front seat of my dad’s 1967 banana-yellow Chevrolet Impala. It was the era when everyone left their front doors open and their keys in the ignition. For months I had been studying how my parents drove. On every trip, I noticed how they started the car, that they had a foot on the brake when they shifted the automatic into either drive or reverse, how they managed turns, etc. The club had a small, nine-hole golf course that surrounded the entrance road to the club and the duck pond. The road was like a race course around a lake. With a feeling of guilty excitement, I would leave the car in park, put my foot on the brake, turn the key in the ignition, and feel a rush of excitement. Then I would turn it off and surreptitiously look around to see if anyone had noticed. For the next few days, I would wait until my dad played cards again. When the coast was clear, I would then sneak out to the parked car, turn it on and off, and sometimes–still keeping my foot on the brake–I would go as far as to put it in gear, wait, and then put it back in park.
This training was not limited only to the club’s parking lot. I also continued my experiments in the driveway at home around 2 o’clock in the morning. In all that time, I never saw my parents’ bedroom lights flick on. To me, of course, this meant I had a continuing green light.
As my courage grew, I became more adventurous at both locations. I started putting the transmission in drive and then reverse and moving the car a few feet in either direction. Later, I would watch my dad like a hawk to see if he had noticed that his car had been moved. Finally, I decided the day had arrived for me to drive farther than a few feet. I did that first at the parking lot and drove the car around the circular route of the club’s entrance. It was such a rush!
Next, at home, I got up at 2 or 3 a.m. and backed the car out of our long driveway to the street. So far, everything had gone perfectly. I had made no technical mistakes, and my parents were oblivious to my secret excursions. I could drive backwards and forwards with ease. Idling in our quiet street, I decided then to drive to town. We lived in the Shores, and the town of La Jolla was about a mile and a half away. It was time to be off and running! My mom’s favorite expression when we would go on a road trip.
I was about to embark on one of the most exciting experiences of my life–what a fantastic feeling of movement! I knew how to turn on the lights, but I had kept them off in the driveway, so as not to wake my parents. Once I left the driveway, I turned on the lights, and started to drive on a real street heading towards downtown La Jolla at 3 o’clock in the morning.
I was driving on Prospect near the Cove and passed a parked cop car on the other side of the street. I continued on, but when I cautiously looked in the rear-view mirror, I saw the police car make a U-turn and begin to follow me. I simply continued to drive for some minutes, and then…they turned on the red light. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it couldn’t be good. I vividly remember how the red light seemed to set the car interior ablaze. The roads in La Jolla are tiny single lane things that wind around. With the cops following, I continued to drive towards Bird Rock, the next town. At this point, I was about four miles from home. Finally, when the road widened, the cops pulled alongside me and flashed a searchlight in my face. I distinctly heard one cop say, “Oh my god, it is a kid!” They gestured for me to pull over, and I complied.
After parking the car, they placed me in the back seat of the police car and proceeded to drive me home. They asked me some questions, which I don’t remember, but about halfway home, I asked them why they pulled me over. I was curious, and I didn’t want to make that mistake again. I saw the profile of the cop’s face in the passenger seat, and he had a look of, “Do we tell this kid what he did wrong, or not?!” He was clearly anticipating that my motive for the question was to improve my driving. They did tell me and explained that I had the high beams on, and, since I never turned them off, they thought I might be drunk. Since I didn’t know what the high beams were, I asked for clarification, and I received a lesson from them about car operations. I also felt strangely calm. I had heard stories of 15-year-olds getting caught driving and having their future licenses suspended for six months. But I knew with certainty I was too young to be penalized like that. Imagine having to wait an additional six months before you could get your driver’s license!
When you are the parents of five kids, I guess it’s hard to be shocked at being awakened at 4 a.m. by one of those kids explaining that two policemen are waiting to talk to you. My parents were too sleepy to register it, and I was free to go to my room and go to sleep, happily content.
The next day, mom thought the episode was hilarious, but my dad, the lawyer, tried to explain to me that if I had had an accident, my family could have been sued for everything. His comment was over my head at the time. And it certainly did not diminish the excitement of experiencing the greatest adventure of my lifetime, so far. And I knew I wanted more of them.
***
Awakening
It was a summer’s midday, and I was walking with my dear grandmother, Edna, on La Jolla’s main street, Girard Avenue. It had quaint, one and two-story shops painted in soft, pastel colors. We stopped at the Warwick bookstore's front window, and I was held there, fascinated by the portrait painting of a woman on the cover of a very large book. I was captivated by the cool, golden light that flowed over the portrait's face and chest. I literally forgot where I was. I forgot my grandmother's presence. Time froze as I continued in slow motion to follow the painting’s light. The paint moved through the deep recesses in the shadows, up and around the woman’s forehead and nose and ended as glints in her amazing eyes. It was as if she was really alive and seeing right through me. She had the most sensitive and intelligent expression of understanding. I felt an overwhelming emotion of transcendence. It was exponentially much more powerful than the excitement of driving, and it was soul shattering. More precisely, it was shattering my old self and awakening some kind of tremendous potential within me. I remember returning to the world as if from a dream and wondering where I was. I looked for my grandmother. She was about 10 feet away from me with her body facing the store window, and her gaze was an indescribable expression of wonder that was transfixed on me. Nonchalantly, she silently conveyed I could continue looking at the book because there was something she wanted to look at in her window. When I returned to looking at the portrait, the emotion continued to grow and expand–a feeling of enormous love that was much more profound than anything I had ever felt.
A few weeks later, it was my 12th birthday, and my grandmother gave me a heavy present. Quickly unwrapping it, I saw it was the very book that had so deeply captivated me during that walk: The Complete Works of Rembrandt.
For years after that, I poured over that book every night. And every night I felt that same enormous love and pleasure, and I wondered: how did he make the paint feel so magical?
I grew up in Riverside, just a couple of years older. Your memories are delicious, like a sun warmed fully ripe peach picked off the tree, juice dripping down my chin. The memories are exquisite because that world of our California childhood no longer exists.