My roommate’s girlfriend kept a journal, a sort of diary. Only, it didn’t say “Diary” across the front. At least, I like to think it didn’t. Because I read it.

     Mary and Alan were visiting their families in Southern California, and I noticed the notebook on the counter strewn with keys, pens, and flyers for Kinko’s and Blondie’s Pizza. I knew it was Mary’s notebook because it had unicorns, flowers, and sparkly rainbows on it.

     I hated unicorns and sparkles.

     Four of us lived in a house in the Berkeley Hills, near the rose garden. But we weren’t roommates in the traditional sense. We were strangers who each had responded to a posting at UC Berkeley’s housing office for rooms for rent. We’d met individually with Bob, the de facto property manager who found student renters and collected checks for the owner, an elderly lady in Hayward whom we never met.

     Both Landlord Bob and the house were falling apart. The house would have been an eyesore if it were visible from the road. The chipped-stucco, single-story bungalow was covered with overgrowth, shadowed by trees that cooled and darkened the interior, which had no heat to begin with. It was one inspection shy of being condemned—an outlier in that high-on-the-hill neighborhood perfumed by cedar roofs atop Mediterranean-style homes with expansive windows that afforded views of the San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, and Mount Tamalpais.

     Bob was as bedraggled as the house itself, with a shaggy gray mane that stuck up from his head and facial hair that obscured his visage—much how the untamed growth hid the house. He smelled of ashtrays and automotive grease, but we might have expected that. His uniform was a pair of wrinkled coveralls with oil stains, as if every time he turned up, he had come directly from working on his '72 VW Bus. He communicated in grunts and had a habit of looking around wide-eyed, as if perpetually startled. The second time he came banging on the door at night to collect the rent, unannounced and smelling of booze, we deduced that dotage was not Bob’s primary issue.

     Bob’s unorthodox management style was the price we paid for cheap rent and a killer view from the picture window on the side of the house. Except for Mary, we were all struggling students. I moved in first, and didn’t know what was happening one evening when two strangers opened the front door with a key, lugging in boxes and suitcases. Alan was a tall Japanese-American surfer and water polo player from San Diego who, like me, transferred to UC Berkeley as a junior. He was as passionate about architecture, his major, as he was about Mary. They were a new couple, and they laughed and fucked all the time. I was unaccustomed to being around such happiness. Their loud lovemaking—Mary’s screams and moans especially—would normally have annoyed me or made me feel like an intruder in my own home. But they were unapologetic and comfortable in their eagerness for orgasms, food, pot, and everything else. I basked in what I took to be a Southern California openness and enthusiasm that New Englanders might regard as unchecked hedonism. Such pure expressions of joy, devoid of irony or sarcasm, were foreign to me.

     The last housemate to arrive was Tony, a freshman from San José and the youngest in the house. He had come to the United States as a child with his family, fleeing Vietnam on a boat. He brought with him a human-size sack of rice. Tony was the first person I knew who used chopsticks for everything he ate. And who didn’t drink or do drugs. I assumed Tony was sheltered from elements of American teenage culture, which I mistakenly equated with naivete.

     Mary and Alan spent most of their time at home in the bedroom, and emerging sweaty, with loose grins, wrapped in towels, or either one in Mary’s thin blue robe, mainly to get refreshments or use the one, shared bathroom. So Tony and I ended up hanging out in the common area together. Tony had been a goalie on his high-school soccer team, and I played intramural soccer at UConn, where I studied before transferring. I told Tony about my fear of being hit by balls, how elementary-school dodgeball terrorized me. It was my idea to drive us in my Karmann Ghia, the one I’d slept in on several occasions while searching for housing, to UC Berkeley’s main field. I stood in front of a soccer goal while Tony kicked shots at me. I flinched every time Tony drew back his leg to shoot. But I focused on the path of the balls and tried to deflect them as they flew by. I even caught one or two. Tony, whose solid, square build suited his past as a defensive lineman on his high-school football team, took it easy on me.

     Back home, I fixed scrambled eggs and Tony made rice. He put it all together, added hot sauce, and ate it with chopsticks. I told Tony I knew almost nothing about Vietnam, only how everyone had been against the war. To me, Vietnam was the photo of the naked crying girl and other children running down the street, but I didn’t say that to him. I asked what it was like on the boat.

     “Oh, man, it was bad. Hella bad.” Tony shook his head. “Like, you couldn’t even believe the stuff that went down.” He put more hot sauce on his eggs.

     “Yeah, man, it’s crazy. There were these pirates out there. But, thank goodness, we were lucky.” Tony said things like “thank goodness” and didn’t swear. It seemed incongruent with the urban street nuance in his speech, like how a gangster raised on Sesame Street might sound.

     “Pirate pirates?” I imagined eye-patch-wearing swashbucklers.

     “For real, these guys just go out looking for boat people to rob. Like, they just come up on you. Bam. It was hella scary.” Tony shook his head, chopsticks in his hand, his mouth scrunched like he could have laughed or cried. “We thought we were going to die.” He got up and paced around the kitchen.

     “They took our food, man. They took everything. We had nothing left. But somebody had an egg, and so there were like eight of us sharing one egg.”

     “Sharing one egg? How do you do that?”

     “It was hard boiled.” Tony shook his head like he still couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t tell whether he was shaking it over the pirates or over so many people sharing one egg.

     Tony was the household’s younger brother. When Alan wasn’t in his room with Mary or at his campus architecture studio, he gave Tony extra attention and encouragement, calling him “Tone” and offering part of whatever food he and Mary cooked up. And Tony parroted Alan more and more, especially with “hella.”

     Even so, Tony lasted only one semester before transferring to a school closer to home. Enduring a pirate raid on the open seas and near-starvation was one thing, but maybe being away from family was another. We didn’t know. He just left.

     Mary found a job right away in a law office, earning more than she ever had before. Her boss was none other than “The People’s Lawyer,” a personal-injury attorney whose ads appeared everywhere—on Bay Area bus stops, television, and radio. Mary and Alan marveled at how great he was, how “cool.” The guy did come off as an exception to the stodgy, stereotypical attorney. He had longish, curly hair that might have been permed, and in his commercial spots he poked fun at himself with a shrug of self-deprecation, telling viewers that his friends were right, that he was “not an actor.” He treated the office staff to beers after work every Friday at a nearby pub. Mary earned enough that she and Alan also rented Tony’s old room for more space.

     It didn’t surprise me that Mary’s notebook had cutesy adornments. It was not far from how I saw her. “Oh, goody,” she’d exclaim when she and Alan were about to indulge in doughnuts or cook up a piece of sirloin. “Yummy!” Mary had a habit of clapping her hands together, palms slapping and fingers straight up, like a child unable to contain her excitement.

     Her wide smile and incessant giggles seemed exaggerated, and they bewildered me. Whether it was from habit or a soulful wellspring of love and happiness bubbling out, Mary filled whatever space she occupied with effervescence. She was a light that didn’t turn off. She didn’t wake up grumpy in the morning or sulk in the evening, even when bad things happened. On the afternoons when she did return tired and with a complaint about something at work, or worried about one of her six siblings, she didn’t slam things or yell on the phone. Instead, she sighed her frustration out and heaved empathetic sadness, but not despair. This made me uncomfortable, if not a little self-conscious at my own depression and suicidal ideations.

     I wasn’t used to twenty-somethings being so cheery, even among my more easygoing, well-adjusted friends who arrived at young adulthood unscarred by childhood trauma, chemical imbalances, or neural misfirings. My life’s soundtrack was Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and Bessie Smith. I read Baudelaire, Bukowski, and the French existentialists because that’s where I found solace. At twenty-two, I had survived a childhood voyage far less perilous than Tony’s, on dry land with no marauding pirates, watching my father die slowly over two years while my mother drank herself into psych wards and drying-out institutions. I became so accustomed to red lights strobing and ambulance sirens singing outside my window in response to a family row or an overdose that I began to sleep through them. I took a break from UConn and moved to Madrid for a year. Alone, with only several hundred dollars in my pocket, I found a job teaching English at a safe distance from the family havoc.

     Mary and Alan did have an argument or two once the novelty of rooming together wore off. In such close quarters, their raised voices and accusations permeated the walls. The silences deafened the household. Mary wouldn’t disparage Alan or disclose the specifics of their spats. She would just stop beaming. One night, I returned from my job at a pizza place on Solano Avenue. Alan wasn’t back yet. Mary wiped away a tear when I walked into the kitchen, and attempted a smile.

     “You okay?”

     “I’m just . . . I don’t know. A little upset.” Such was Mary on a tirade. “You want to have a beer with me?”

     “Sure. I should have brought home a calzone to go with it.” I lit a cigarette and leaned against the counter. “Alan still at the studio?”

     She looked out the window, lights from the city below and beyond blinking against the darkness. Was she going to cry? “He works so hard all the time.”

     “You do, too, Mary.” I wondered how she felt being the only one in the house with a regular nine-to-five schedule, not coming and going to classes. Did she feel she was missing out, content with her two-year degree from a community college?

     And though I didn’t put words to it, I imagined myself more worldly and experienced than Mary. I judged and tolerated her, even while falling in friendship with her. We grew closer, despite not sharing the often substance-fueled, all-night therapy chat sessions I had with other friends. Mary was too bonded with her big, Irish-Catholic family, which her devout mother kept financially afloat with diligent coupon cutting, and too entwined with Alan to need me as a confidant or empathetic ear. Still, I was nearby. And I appreciated the female comradery, albeit of a foreign brand.

     Mary was too nice. Not the typical kind of person I made friends with. She had no edge. None. Not even a little. The few times she tried to make a little sarcastic or critical remark, it had the effect of stabbing someone with a plastic Play-Doh knife.

     Nonetheless, when I picked up the little notebook and read what she’d written, I was shocked. Though I didn’t copy down the entries verbatim, I can attest to their contents.

 

Sept. 20: Dear God, thank you for the birds and flowers and the oceans and the trees.
Thank you for pretty butterflies and colorful rainbows. And thank you for Alan and my
family. Please help me to be kind and make people smile.

 

Sept. 28: Dear God, let my sister Susan not be so heartbroken. It makes me want to cry to see her this way. Thank you for each and every beautiful day.

 

Oct. 15: Dear God, the sun is shining and the sky is blue. Let Alan and Anita and Tony  and Mommy and Daddy and all of my silly sisters and our brother be as happy as they  can be. Thank you for healing our father and convincing him to go to a doctor. Thank you for my job and my coworkers and our boss. Please let Alan not worry so much about his projects; he is so talented. Thank you for this beautiful world.

 

Oct. 27: Dear God, thank you for the warm sunshine on my face and the moon and stars. Please help me love and be good. I am so lucky to be alive and want to make people smile.

 

     Mary had adorned each entry with colored-pencil smiley faces, hearts, and flowers, like kindergarten hieroglyphics. I’d read enough. I placed the small notebook back exactly where I had found it, on the corner of the counter with the moon sticker angled closest to the edge so she wouldn’t suspect I had touched it.

     That same weekend, three East Coast friends living in San Francisco came over for beers. At the insistence of Marc, half of a handsome boy couple—painters, both pursuing MFAs—we were headed out to hear French philosopher Michel Foucault speak at Zellerbach Hall. I knew the three through a UConn friend, but Marc and Mark and their roommate Kathy had made me feel at home in their Castro District Victorian flat, where I would pass out on a futon when our nights lasted into the next morning. 

     I was impressed by their collective intellect and entertained by their cutting wit. Their joke was that whoever left dirty dishes in the sink would be forced to shop at The Gap. An outing to hear the renowned philosopher surpassed my expectations of this new chapter of my life. Besides, I had considered minoring in philosophy because I loved the classes I had taken at UConn. One seminar at UC Berkeley, though, with an arrogant blowhard in the philosophy department cured me of that aspiration.

     “Here, what do you make of this?” I picked up Mary’s notebook and held it out. They crowded closer. “Can you believe it?” I had convinced myself I wasn’t doing this to bond with my new friends by smirking together at Mary’s expense, wasn’t asking them to join in community-building ridicule. I just wanted another perspective. I figured they might find it as curious and extraordinary as I did.

     “Does this belong to a child?” Marc wore the requisite Levi’s 501s and snug white T-shirt paired with a cashmere V-neck sweater and leather jacket. Both he and his boyfriend epitomized classic New England casual grace mixed with a New York City art and thrift-shop fashion vibe. He made room for the other Mark, and they leaned together over the small notebook.

     “Is this serious?” The other Mark, wry at all turns, held up the book as evidence. “Where does a person like this even come from?” He punctuated the question with a gaped mouth, then read some pages aloud.

     “I think it’s kind of sweet.” Their roommate Kathy had a stubborn Long Island nasal drawl. She still smelled of garlic, having come from waitressing at one of the oldest Italian restaurants in North Beach to put herself through law school. “Sweet, with definite shades of delusion.”

     “Amen, Sister Kathy!” Marc, a native Alabaman, played up his Southern accent and waved his hands in the air, revival style. “Come on, y’all. We cannot keep Monsieur Foucault waiting.” He took one last pull off his beer and ushered us out to the lecture, where I understood nothing beyond the introduction.

 

Mary and Alan and I now hung out together, often meeting at Juan’s Place, their favorite Mexican restaurant in South Berkeley, a lively, wood-paneled family establishment festooned with papel picado, oversized sombreros, and iconic images of toreadors and campesinos. I didn’t mind being the third wheel. Alan and I had school in common, and he regaled Mary and me with the latest dramas in the architecture studio, where students routinely worked overnight. Mary, who didn’t seem to have any other friends in town beside Alan, had an ally in me by virtue of proximity. Her skin was so pale that she looked like she might glow in the dark. And she had a habit of tilting her face upward, lips closed in a smile and looking as if she were about to hear a secret. I was close by, a convenient stand-in for one of her sisters, just to listen or to laugh with. For months, though, Mary’s notebook stayed on the counter, taunting me. I felt guilty every time I glanced at it and wondered why she didn’t put it back in her room, considering how personal its contents were.

     Another weekend when Mary and Alan were away, Tim from Santa Cruz called and asked if he and a friend could crash at the house after a concert at the Greek Theatre. I was done studying for the night and welcomed the company. Tim was the charismatic centerpiece of a Santa Cruz contingent of acquaintances, a six-foot-two anarchist surfer/model who hand painted T-shirts. He had slept with most of the women in the extended friend circle and some of the men, his swoon-inspiring good looks and nonchalant manner attracting anyone who stumbled into his magnetic field of charm.

     Tim arrived with an Argentine musician/drug smuggler in tow, Fabian, who had shoulder-length black frizzy hair and a Zen calm about him. The three of us talked all night, drinking Jameson whiskey, smoking cigarettes, and snorting lines. I got out Alan’s guitar and Fabian played songs by Víctor Jara, Carlos Gardel, Silvio Rodríguez, and The Beatles. I sang along as best I could and faked the lyrics I didn’t know. We were all so high and connected to the universe and one another, it didn’t matter.

     “Ay. No sé cantar.” I apologized after the third or tenth song.

     “Pero, sí, estás cantando, Ana.” Fabian, who made money by flying bundles of cocaine into the United States in his anus, and other people’s anuses, too, reassured me of my musical abilities. Fabian reached for my copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost and thumbed through it before reciting two poems by Pablo Neruda from memory. He recounted the parable of the Buddha about the priests sworn to celibacy who came upon a woman stuck on the side of a river. He went back to strumming something like a tango and walked around the living room, looking out the window at the lights across the Bay, serenading Tim and me, reclined on either end of the overstuffed couch from Goodwill. Fabian stopped strumming and glanced down.

     “What’s this?” He picked up the sparkly notebook and turned it around, inspecting the shiny decals.

     “Look at it. Go ahead. It’s been there for months.”

     Fabian put down the guitar and studied the pages, holding them close to his face, quietly, as if reading Scripture. “Who wrote this?”

     “My roommate Mary. It’s crazy, huh.”

     “Es precioso. Profundo.”

     “You don’t think it’s a bit much?”

     “Mira...es totalmente sincero. It is from the heart, a private conversation with the universe. Que locura de amor. De ‘goodness.’ Alucinado. Puro corazón.” This from Fabian, with whom I had fallen in love over the last few hours. His words had weight.

     “It is like a prayer, una oración. Increíble.”

     And like that, I had to rethink everything I thought I knew. I had considered Mary’s writings cutesy and childlike, innocent to a fault, evidence of a simplistic nature. But here was a tango-strumming, Pablo Neruda-steeped, Che Guevara-quoting South American philosopher, musician, and drug smuggler impressed by Mary’s private journal. Fabian spelled it out. Mary’s expressions of delight and gratitude for humanity and life’s beauty were not for public consumption but written down out of pureness of heart. This was remarkable, exceptional.

     Finally, around four in the morning, I called it a night and went to my room. Alone. The next day, after the boys had returned to Santa Cruz, a mutual friend called. Tim told her he’d been hoping for a threesome.

     It wasn’t until a few days later, after I’d dropped the acid Fabian left as a thank-you gift and was in line at Blondie’s Pizza on Telegraph Avenue, that it hit me. I felt the sensation of warm goodness unlike anything I had ever felt gush open my heart, a sublime, heavenly sense of well-being emanating from me and embracing every sweaty straggler jammed into the small, airless storefront waiting for their pizza slices, and showering droplets of the golden light of unconditional love over these and all children of the universe. I saw Tony and Bob and Mary and Alan and Fabian and Tim and all the people ever, all the faces of life. We were pushed together, shoulder to shoulder, expectant, impatient, wanting to be nurtured. Our bodies melted into one warm, beating heart, and that I finally understood. Maybe this was the essence of Mary’s notebook.

     (Two years later, I hit my bottom with booze, cocaine, ecstasy, and other mind-altering substances and thus began a slow and painful ascent in recovery. I was nonetheless grateful for the handful of hallucinogenic trips I had taken, principally on mushrooms and LSD. Grateful for each psychotropic transcendence that freed me, temporarily, from crippling self-consciousness and despair. Blessed to have escaped the nightmarish experiences others sometimes reported. These days, as in those early 1980s, when acclaimed pundits, clinicians and seekers are extolling microdosing with ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA and the like, or even ayahuasca, for enlightenment and relief from spiritual, psychological, and mental ailments, I figure I had my turn. Maybe not in a therapeutic or shamanistic setting, but I had seen, felt, and even been the light.)

     One Friday night, my closest drinking buddy/pool partner and I were waiting to meet Mary and Alan at Juan’s Place. We ordered beers and ate chips and salsa in the meantime. But Mary and Alan never showed. “They must have had car trouble or something,” I offered, a half-hearted excuse for my friends not showing.

     Alan’s little Toyota truck was forever breaking down. (And it would be six years before any of us even held a brick-sized cell phone.) They weren’t home when I got there, either. But soon after, the house phone rang. It was Alan. Gone was the laid-back surfer lilt. “We’re at the hospital. Mary started feeling really weak. They’re doing tests. We don’t know what’s the matter.” If I hadn’t heard it in his voice, I wouldn’t have been overly worried. Both of my parents had been hospitalized many times. I was used to hospitals. Alan’s voice broke, cracking the veneer of a domestic pattern we had fallen into without noticing.

     Mary had been tired lately, but she and Alan figured it was fatigue. Now the hospital was admitting her. By Monday, Mary was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, and the doctors were discussing a bone marrow transplant.

     Mary’s mother and two of her sisters flew up. All her siblings volunteered to be tested to see if they might be a match. But it never got that far. The doctors were clear; it was too advanced. She probably wouldn’t make it longer than three weeks. Mary was twenty-three years old. And she was still a goody two-shoes in my book. Way too clean and healthy to deserve anything like this. As it turned out, The People’s Lawyer didn’t provide health insurance. Mary’s family and Alan were on the phone nonstop, strategizing ways to get her the medical treatment they hoped would save her. But from what the doctors were saying, money wasn’t the issue. Still, the scoundrel of an attorney who called full-time employees “contractors” for tax purposes was a satisfying target for my anger.

     It was a cruel karmic joke of inverse proportions to the rainbows and unicorns that were the logos of Mary’s life. It wasn’t fair. Maybe the Satan of her Irish-Catholic upbringing had prevailed in the end, scoring a bigger jackpot by bagging a rare specimen—a truly kind, good soul plucked from the masses of greedy and repugnant humans. Was it all there in Milton? Death procuring the ideal innocent? I needed to make sense of Mary confronting her own mortality with no warning. Imposing a moral framework around an arbitrary illness was a defense mechanism. A protection. What would Mary write in her notebook now if she’d had the strength to lift a pen?

     I visited Mary those three weeks in the hospital as much as I could. Her sisters, her mother, and Alan took turns making sure she wasn’t alone. A Grover Washington Jr. cassette tape played on repeat at a low volume on the boom box Alan brought from home. One day, I stopped in between classes and, for once, it was just Mary and me. She was getting thinner by the minute. I tried hard not to burden her with my sadness. But she saw through me, even though she couldn’t lift her head from the pillow and seemed extra sleepy on meds.

     “Don’t be mad at God, okay?” Her voice was small. Even then she tried to smile. But how did she know?

     I repressed a snarky retort. Under the circumstances, I knew better. I pulled the chair closer to the bed, careful not to knock any of the equipment or lines hooked up to her. “What do you want, Mary?” I was ready to listen. “Tell me. What can I do?”

     “Be happy. Love people and be happy. Be good to Alan. He’ll need help.”

     It sounds like a load of crap now. Even so many years later, it sounds impossible. Like I’m making this all up. But remember the notebook? Way too out there to be real, and yet it was. “Promise me, okay. Just be happy.” Mary didn’t want anything more. That was all she asked.

     I walked back through campus to my last class that afternoon, past students wearing blue and gold for the upcoming football game, past a group riling up passersby, shouting through a megaphone, announcing the next anti-apartheid protest. I hated them all equally. It wasn’t fair for everyone to just go on. They were self-absorbed, too pleased with themselves. I wanted to scream, “Stop talking, idiots!” I deserved to be angry, wanted to smash every oblivious smiling face in the milling swarm that filled the plaza beneath Sather Gate. Especially the perky ponytailed girls with glossy lips and sweatshirts with Greek letters announcing sorority membership. Then I spotted it. The glitter. A student of the ilk I was prone to judge and dismiss, a blonde in a Gap denim jacket with the sleeves rolled up and carrying a baby-blue backpack, was wearing a sparkly pink cuff bracelet. She raised her arms to adjust her hair scrunchy, and the bracelet glinted in the sunlight.

     I could do this. I had told Mary I would at least try.

     I had been wrong before. Had believed myself to be tougher or a little bit wiser because I’d seen and done things. I had judged Tony and Mary. Thought I understood things. But Mary made me promise that I would try to be happy. And not be angry at God, the universe. I could at least force myself to pretend.

     Her family wanted me at the funeral service in Los Angeles. They insisted I stay with them, in the crowded house with way more people than beds, the sisters and their mother crying and cooking, their father comatose with grief, and the brother and Alan running any and all errands necessary. The mess and the tears and the laughter were unlike anything I had ever been part of. I slept on a cot in the corner of a room with two of her sisters, who kept asking if I needed anything. And I woke up lighter, different. It didn’t make sense. For the first time in memory, I didn’t wake with a feeling of dread, weighed down by dreams that left me feeling anxious. I could not remember ever feeling so loved. And it wasn’t even my family. The world wasn’t so heavy, even if it was tragically sad. It was as if someone had jabbed a tumor of hope deep into my gut while I slept. The smallest sliver of possibility, slow-growing, but with me, nonetheless.

     Before I left, I thought about asking for Mary’s notebook. To keep as a reminder, a corny-ass amulet. But I figured Mary’s family might need it more. Besides, I had read through it enough. Had touched the sparkles and glitter. I got it.