CALIFORNIA IS A STORY. California is many stories. As Leslie Silko tells us, don’t be fooled by stories! Stories are “all we have,” she says. And it is true. Human beings have no other way of knowing that we exist, or what we have survived, except through the vehicle of story.
One of the stories California tells is this: In 1959, my mother met my father. Madgel Eleanor Yeoman encountered Alfred Edward Miranda. She was twenty-five years old, he was thirty-three. She had been born and raised in Beverly Hills; he had been born on the Tuolomne Rancheria (a California Indian reservation) and raised on the mean streets of Santa Monica. Her father (“Yeoman”) was of English descent, her mother (“Gano” or “Genaux”) of French ancestry and possibly Jewish. Al was Chumash and Esselen, his mother from the Santa Barbara/Santa Ynez Mission Indians, his father from the Carmel Mission Indians. Midgie was fair-skinned, black-haired, and blue-eyed. Al was so dark his gang nickname was “Blackie.” His skin was decorated with various homemade gang and Navy tattoos, along with the name of his first wife. Soon “Miche,” his nickname for my mother, would join that collection.
My mother was still trying to recover from the aftermath of her first, disastrous marriage, which had included the birth of three children and the wrenching, accidental death of one of them. But Miche still had a dancer’s body: 5’2”, one hundred pounds, able to dance tango and flamenco in high heels and tight dresses. She’d trained at Hollywood Professional High School with Eduardo Cansino, movie star Rita Hayworth’s father. The highlight of my father’s formal education came in the eighth grade of his Catholic school, when he took a bet from one of his friends that nuns were bald beneath their wimples, snatched the head covering off of Sister Theresa Anthony, and was promptly expelled. Somehow, I don’t think this was his first strike.
As a young man, my father married Marcelina, a beautiful young woman he’d grown up with, though the marriage didn’t last. By the time my parents met, Al already had four daughters: Rose Marie, Louise, Lenora, and Pat.
I would be his fifth—not his hoped-for son.
Miche and Al: colonizer and Indian; European and Indigenous; nominal Christian and lapsed Catholic; once-good girl and twice-bad boy. Heaven on earth, and hell, too.
It was Miche’s dancing that captivated my father. He met her in an East L.A. bar. Together—my father slim and muscular in his pressed light chinos and crisp shirt, my mother glowing in spaghetti-strap black nightclub best—they made a striking couple, full of passion and mutual joy. All the pieces fit, despite the fact that none of the pieces were even remotely from the same puzzle. They fulfilled each other’s romantic fantasies: he was strong, macho, suave; she was Hollywood lipstick and mascara, a classy, albeit wounded, dove.
Two worlds collided, just like in a good old sci-fi movie produced at one of the studios my mother had hung around all her young life. Miche knew how to dress, how to draw on eyebrows with a perfect arch, the exact deep blood-red shade of lipstick to apply. She was beautiful, on fire with suicidal depression, desperate for love. The death of her baby, Jenny, haunted her every day. It had happened just a few years before when a pregnant Midgie and her then-husband Mike drank and fought, fought and drank, leaving two toddler girls to fend for themselves; now, Midgie used alcohol and heroin to dull the visceral pain, speed to get up the next morning and get my half-siblings off to school.
Al told me once, “She gave up heroin for me.” He said it in a half-wondering tone of voice, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. I do.
Theirs was the kind of desire that happens only once in a lifetime, the kind of desire that eventually leaves you wishing you’d never tasted its soul-thieving mouth, the kind of desire you pray to forget. Desire that demands like demonic possession. Desire you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy; desire you hope to God your own children never know.
No wonder Midgie could give up heroin for my father: she always went for the most destructive drug she could find.
Romeo and Juliet had nothing on my parents.•
Excerpted from Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, by Deborah A. Miranda. Reprinted with permission from Heyday, © 2022.
