The Men from Camarillo

In late January, the winter of my mother's suicide, the skies opened up over our sleepy seaside town of Ventura, California, and unleashed a torrential downpour. On biblical scales over the next forty days and forty nights, three storms --the first two warm, semi-tropical systems arising over Hawaii, the final a cold front from the Gulf of Alaska—delivered a two-three punch that left locals reeling and digging out from under tons of mud and debris.

Overall, the storms dumped a record-breaking 68 inches of rain on Matilija Canyon, the hardest hit section of the county's watershed. That's nearly six feet of water falling over roughly three five-day periods, separated by a scattering of semi-clear days between.

The normally arid scrub-and-sagebrush-dotted hillsides couldn't handle the deluge. Run-off flowed to creeks and rivers, which eroded and overflowed their banks, washing away houses, roadways and railroad tracks. Orchards and farmlands were flooded, bridges demolished, and entire hillsides transformed into rivers of mud. Thousands were forced to flee their homes and businesses and at least a dozen people drowned. Early estimates placed the county's financial damages at $60 million.

A pervasive sense of vulnerability and dread spread through a populace already off-balance from events on a national scale. The year was 1969. In the previous April and June, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy had been felled by assassins' bullets nine weeks apart, almost to the day. The war raged on in Vietnam, with escalating American casualties fueling a growing anti-war movement. In August of 1968, demonstrations exploded on the streets of Chicago, where they were met with a level of police violence never before unleashed against middle-class college students. Television cameras broadcast the shocking images to even small, out-of-the-way places like Ventura, where we sat hunched over our TV-dinners while we watched the cops with Billy clubs advance on young demonstrators.

Saturation bombing of North Vietnam and secret invasions of Laos and Cambodia were just beginning, still the war-juggernaut hungered for fresh blood. My brother, 22 at the time and just married, had dropped out of college the previous summer, and his draft notice was quick to follow. The week before he was to report for his physical, however, my mother cryptically reassured him, "Don't worry, honey. I'll take care of it."

None of us had a clue what she meant at the time. Although she was making no bones at all about voicing her intentions to kill herself, I naively believed the false adage, much in circulation at the time, that stated if somebody said he was going to kill himself, he never would. That sentiment comforted me, 17-years-old and preoccupied by teenaged concerns. I was lulled into a false sense of security. Especially that Friday morning in early March when my mother told my father and me, "If you don't take me to Camarillo, I'm going to kill myself. I swear it!"

Camarillo! That was the nearby state-run psychiatric hospital. I'd heard horror stories about what went on in those snake-pits, with helpless mental patients at the mercy of sadistic staff. No way I'd send my mother there. Besides, saying she was going to kill herself meant she wouldn't, right?

In denial, with most of my thoughts on a party the next evening at the house of a boy I had a crush on, I headed off to school that morning. My father called my brother, who took the day off from his job as a grave-digger—his last position before he dedicated himself to a lifetime of selling cars—and he came over to keep my mother company. No one, not one of us, thought to remove the .357 magnum handgun, which my father had purchased from an ex-cop friend, from its shelf in my parents’ closet. There it sat, with its fat, shiny, snub-nosed bullets rolling around loose, in a frayed cardboard box.

It wasn't raining that day. The third and final storm had slammed into the coast two weeks before, causing the Santa Clara River to burst a levee southeast of town and flood the newly-constructed Ventura Marina. The muddy surge snapped moorings and swept away some 540 boats—hundreds washed out the harbor mouth where huge waves forced them back onto the rocks of the twin breakwaters. Ten days before my mother's death, beach-dwellers woke up to the spectacle of dozens of yachts, masts broken, white hulls split-open, and cushions, charts, clothing, and other water-sodden possessions strewn helter-skelter along the shore. Amazingly, no one was hurt or killed.

The destruction, however, deeply disturbed my mom. Bedridden with a bad case of the flu, she didn’t rush down barefoot onto the chilly morning sand to witness the wreckage firsthand, like I did. Instead, she read about it in the Ventura County Star-Free Press, lingering over the sensational photo spread.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, my mother had, in her 56 years, forged a strong emotional attachment to the Pacific Ocean. Strolling its beaches, or gazing out on its constantly-changing surface, often lifted her out of what were becoming deeper episodes of depression. Now, the images of those yachts, broken to pieces and foundering, seemed to drag her down with them.

Never very emotionally stable, she was subject to strong mood swings. By turns playful and despondent, she was also jealous and possessive, quick to anger, and a heavy drinker. Slender, tall, with broad shoulders, large breasts and a regal bearing, Dottie—as her friends called her—was a beauty, with an expressive face dominated by high cheekbones and flashing green eyes. She and my handsome father made a striking pair as they entertained friends. Invariably, though, the parties ended with terrible, shouting matches, often started over a perceived flirtation on his part.

The weeks leading up to her suicide, however, saw a dramatic change in my mother, especially after she suffered anaphylactic shock after a penicillin shot. Unaware she was allergic, she had received the shot to treat fever, congestion, and a debilitating cough—lingering symptoms of the virulent Hong Kong flu that swept Ventura county that winter, eventually claiming nearly 34,000 lives nationwide.

I’d been laid low by it, too, around Christmas, spending ten days dozing feverishly in my sleeping bag on the couch in front of the TV and beside the twinkling Christmas tree. Then I gave it to my mom. The penicillin shot almost killed her. She collapsed on the floor of the medical clinic and was only saved by an adrenalin shot to jumpstart her heart.

Nonetheless, they sent her home straightaway, rather than keeping her for observation. She never was quite the same after that. Her depression worsened, disrupting her ability to go about any daily routine. She became afraid to leave the house, even to walk a block to the corner store to buy cigarettes. And she became consumed by paranoia, convinced my father and I were talking about her behind her back.

In one routine I found unnerving, she'd get up out of her sick-bed, trade her Hawaiian-print muumuu or worn bathrobe for one of her best outfits (including overcoat), and plop herself down in an armchair in the living-room, feet planted side-by-side and hands folded on the purse in her lap—a prim picture of decorum far different from her usual self.

If questioned, she'd respond that she was waiting for “them to come pick me up.”

“Waiting for who to come?” I'd ask.

“The men from Camarillo,” she'd say.

I'd try to talk her out of it, sometimes spending hours at the task—displaying a fierce, teenaged dedication—all the while convinced that committing her would be the worst possible thing we could do. “We didn’t call anyone to come!” I’d insist, over and over. Until eventually she seemed to believe me.

That is, until the next time I’d find her in the armchair.

Where was my father while all this was happening? He was fleeing the reality of his deteriorating marriage through long hours at work, emotional distancing and heavy drinking. Not an uncommon scenario in the late 1960’s.

In her final days, my mother remained mostly bedridden as she recovered from both the flu and her allergic reaction to penicillin. During this time, she suffered panic attacks in which she felt she couldn't breathe. One time, I was home alone with her when it happened and I completely went to pieces.

I was sure she was dying, I didn’t know what to do, so I raced around the house, from her bedroom to the kitchen to the living-room and back, in a whirl of ineffectual motion, while my mother slowly regained her composure—and her breath—on her own.

When it was over and I finally slowed down and reassured myself she was okay, I got so angry at myself. “She could have died!” I thought. “And if I’d been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, instead of giving her CPR or calling an ambulance, it would have been my fault.”

I vowed, “Next time—if there is a next time—I won't fail her!”

It was a promise that set me up for a fall.