The Spell: Topanga Canyon, 1969
I am standing in a meadow at the edge of a forest, wondering how the ocean can possibly be sending surges of white water up into the grass, when a half-man, half-rabbit darts past me and heads into the trees. I follow. He stops at a massive oak and takes a few steps down into the tree’s trunk, where he opens a door and disappears. I approach, and see that the place is a crowded, boisterous saloon.
I step inside and listen unobtrusively to the man-rabbit’s conversation with some friends at the bar. He’s waxing on about a girl named Jan, who apparently gives him great sexual pleasure, and his friends laugh with ribald approval. Suddenly the rabbit-man realizes I’m standing there and shouts, “What are you doing here?” and I wake up.
It’s 1969, and I’m making my final short film to graduate from UCLA Film School. I’m also in love with a pretty, long-haired girl named Jan H., and we live in a tiny Airstream trailer perched on a hilltop in the concrete footprint of a long-demolished house. We’ve made the foundation into a fabulous deck overlooking a bucolic valley. We trip pretty regularly, and I’m partial to Afghani hash, which I get from Muhammed, a fierce-looking fellow film student who I have no doubt became a mujahideen when he returned home and killed countless Soviet soldiers. Hopefully he lived, but he didn’t seem to give a damn about dying.
Anyway, the dream was a sign to me that my intense, year-long relationship with Jan was on shaky ground. My rival was a totally unexpected character: Danu (no other appellation needed), a fiftyish wizard (yes, wizard) who lived in a schoolbus by a creek on the leeward side of our hilltop. On the surface, his long gray ponytail, long beard and gaunt, snaggle-toothed mien were no competition to my virile youth, but there was apparently something charismatic about him that attracted Jan, who was on a search for spiritual knowledge. He gave her books on metaphysics, which she read voraciously. I realized that my logical arguments, and my nascent film career, meant nothing to her, and I was left unruddered in this strange new sea.
One day she brought home a smooth stone he’d painted for her with a spiritual symbol. I was so threatened that, when I was alone, I launched it down the hill into the dense chaparral where it could never be found.
That evening, it was back in its place by her bedside. Yes, wizard.
Then he began sending visions to her at night. When I expressed doubts about this, he started sending them to me, then asked me the next day if I’d seen the spirals in my dreams. Damn, I had, and I realized with increasing dread that I was in a war with a very powerful enemy. Only my youthful arrogance kept me in the fight, but it was already over. One night I awoke to find her side of the bed empty, and my heart fell. I dressed and made the long walk down to his place. I called to her from outside the bus, and when he answered I asked to speak to her. A moment later I saw her silhouette rise from his bed, throw on her jeans, and reluctantly step outside. The pain was breathtaking. We walked back up to our place in heavy silence. I implored her to end this crazy relationship with a man way too old for her, but she responded with quiet certainty: she was going to stay with him. My path was not her path. Totally defeated, I began packing at dawn. I remember editing my film with tears streaming down my cheeks.
Her friends and family thought she’d gone off the deep end, so much so that her wealthy parents (her father was a doctor) sent her to a mental institution. I lost track of her after that, and followed my career path into the film world and other friends and lovers.
***
Thirty-two years later I was vacationing on the Big Island with my second wife, Anne, and our seven-year old daughter and three-year old son when I returned to our hotel room one afternoon after playing golf. We’d had the same sitter for the days when Anne wanted to hike, or just be alone, but I’d never met her. She was a local who lived in a trailer on the north shore some 45 minutes away. The next thing I knew Anne was asking me at the door if I remembered “Jan.” I was confused by the question. Jan who? Why was she asking me this?
And then I saw a woman with long gray hair standing by my kids, a sheepish smile on her face, and realized who it was. My jaw dropped. She had figured out who I was from our last name, and probing questions of a three-year old boy (our daughter went to the hotel’s kids camp). She had confessed to Anne that day that she wept when she drove home from our hotel; she had chosen a life without a husband or kids, and to see me with everything she wanted was devastating. How her life might have turned out…if…
I didn’t know this until Anne filled me in later, and our interaction was stilted and awkward. She truly was a lost soul, both when I knew her and in the years since, apparently. Danu had died a few years later, leaving her with nothing but worthless icons and a schoolbus on cinderblocks. I pictured her living in a commune eventually, reading Tarot cards at fairs for a bit of cash, and following a lonely road on a search for meaning she never quite found. I may not have had the life I imagined, but I’d had lots of good friends, several long relationships with great women, a pretty good screenwriting career—and a loving, wonderful family, so I was blessed.
For Jan, I felt only melancholy. She was one of the many casualties of the ‘60s counter-culture, nothing more or less in the grand scheme of things. Had she been from the previous generation, she would have married a doctor, had kids and ended up sauced every night. It may not have been better, but at least there was a defined roadmap, however unfulfilling it was. Our generation’s road had never been taken; there was no map, and many of us fell by the wayside, never to get back up.
But I had loved her in 1969 and naively thought I knew her. Clearly, I hadn’t.