I Blame Dennis Hopper Read Free Page A

her and slowly walked back to the house. I ran and found my older brother. He was busy watching the hippie girls who had started to undress to go skinny-dipping in the pond. Their ponchos and jeans hung on the branches of a nearby tree as if it were a dirty hippie Christmas tree.
    I said, “Mom says we’re poor!”
    My brother looked up from the naked girls swimming and said, “No shit, Sherlock.” As the child of Dennis Hopper, I was expected simply to accept our new hippie lifestyle with delight. Didn’t I get to wear headbands and celebrate Earth Day? Roll little joints with my little fingers—separating the seeds in the lid of a shoebox to the delight of all the other hippies? My brother went back to watching the naked girls swimming. Their laughter echoed up the hill as I saw them splash around in the pond. I walked back to the house, and in my own act of rebellion, I poked holes in my father’s Easy Rider poster. Right through Dennis Hopper’s eyes.
    Back when we were rich and socially accepted my mother had belonged to the garden club. Once a month all the ladies would meet at our house. They drank tea, ate little cakes, and talked about floral arrangements. When they saw my mother’s new hippie lifestyle, they looked down their noses at it, so she quit their club. “They were a bunch of snobs anyway,” she said at the time, but years later she confessed that she quit because she was embarrassed to have people see how we were living. We were living with Dennis Hopper and his merry band of hippies from Easy Rider ! Who wouldn’t have been embarrassed?
    Here’s how much damage one movie can cause: One day my father unscrewed every chandelier in the house and sold each of them at auction. He needed money to support The Studio. It was the early ’70s, and he was living there permanently now.
    My mother said, “I look up at the ceiling where my lights used to be and all I see are wires.” The rain dripped through the wires into a bucket she had put on the dining room table.
    Just as Easy Rider changed my father, our new economic circumstances changed my mother. She became an Italian Catholic drill sergeant. She took to standing outside the bathroom door while I took a bath or shower. “Time!” she’d yell if I’d run the water too long. I’d barely fill the tub before I’d hear, “That’s too long! We can’t afford hot water. We’re poor now!” That became my mother’s favorite expression. The thermostat stayed at 58, and we wore sweaters and hats to bed; in a letter I sent to my grandmother, I actually asked for a sleeping bag. My mother instructed me to save tin foil as if we were in World War II, carefully folding it out and putting it back in the drawer until it had been used so many times that it disintegrated in your hands. I wanted to try out for my school band, but a clarinet was “too expensive,” so my mother got me a plastic recorder instead. You try learning “Eleanor Rigby” on a plastic recorder. You feel poor!
    She traded our beloved Buick convertible for a used Volkswagen bug. The Buick—the last vestige of our old middle-class life—was gone. It was official: We were hippies. Poor, grimy, Volkswagen-bug hippies! One time I had a party to go to, and the VW—aka the poormobile—couldn’t make it up the snowy hill, so I had to skip the party.
    I blame Dennis Hopper for making me miss that party.
    My mother started taking classes at night and got a teaching job to support us. I used to watch her drive down the driveway in the morning on the way to school, gray smoke billowing out of the poormobile. We got a tip from one of the hippies about free bread, so on Wednesdays we would drive to the Stop & Shop to get the day-old bread that was given away in a large brown bag. Sometimes there were doughnuts. I hid in the car when she got them, but they tasted pretty good