“Golden what?” snarled Peppy, lighting another long brown cigarette.
“Stag. Like a buck. A male deer. The Golden Stag appears to the lost hunter and guides him to safety. It appears in quite a few European and Asiatic mythologies; it’s a symbol of regeneration and virility, knowledge, life beginning anew. Its antlers grow back when they’re broken.” Gerald smiled his smug hippie smile. “Maybe your antlers are growing back.”
The only buck Peppy noticed in the film was Leroy, the hot black dancer guy, who certainly was an inspiration but not of the beacon-in-the-dark-night-of-the-soul variety, per se. Still, Fame definitely suggested a new path, toward art and freedom. Peppy went around for weeks announcing to people,” Fame is my Golden Stag.” But nobody had any idea what she was talking about.
(Curious Reader: The Romanian version of the Golden Stag fable bears an uncanny resemblance to Hansel and Gretel: small children are purposefully abandoned in the woods by weak and selfish parents. The young boy transmogrifies into a Golden Stag and carries his sister to safety.
Coincidentally, Babes in the Woods —the poster in Noreen’s sewing room—was also a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. There is something pan-continentally compelling about the image of little children, abandoned by their parents to the hostile elements in the dark woods. Who hasn’t, at some point in the forced march of life, felt as helpless, and deserving of unqualified sympathy?)
First Peppy put the Reno house on the market, where it quickly sold. With the proceeds, she purchased a yellow Honda Civic station wagon and a commemorative tattoo—her personal “Feelin’ Groovy” homage to the thing that crushed her. Rejecting Yosemite Sam and the bucking bull (“not ladylike,”) she opted for a horseshoe over her left breast, signifying three important life-things:
1 How Johnny stomped on her heart.
2 How she will nonetheless remain emotionally available “to whoever the shoe fits.”
3 How her botched suicide proved to herself she was both lucky and indestructible as pig iron.
During their final session, Gerald the Therapist told Peppy he liked the tattoo a whole lot. Peppy blushed with pride.
Peppy embarked on several car trips along the coast of California, intending to move the kids closer to Hollywood, as a baby step toward New York. She got as far as Fairfax, a town on the outskirts of Marin County, near San Francisco, for it was there that she took a pit stop at the Lady Tamalpais Café/Bar and befriended a gay couple in their late thirties, Mike LoBato and Ike Nixon.
Mike had been a pot-smoking Santa Cruz surfer until the Ziggy Stardust album came out and he was cupid-struck by a love of Glam Rock. When he paddled out into the lineup at Steamer Lane early one morning with high orange hair, silver eyeshadow, and a lightning bolt stenciled on his wetsuit, Mike got the shit beat out of him, which prompted him to hitchhike to San Francisco, where he enjoyed all the wild high life of the gay San Francisco 1970s, eventually working backstage for rock-show impresario Bill Graham.
Soft-spoken, compassionate Ike, who had grown up in a farming community in Sebastopol, had been on the fast track to Franciscan priesthood when he met Mike at the Mill Valley lumberyard. Mike was instantly attracted to Ike’s kind, subtle demeanor and gravitas, while Mike’s black-Irish coloring, swimmer’s body, and leather pants put a halt to Ike’s religious ambitions altogether. Ike left the seminary to help Mike carry speakers for the last leg of Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies Tour, and the two were inseparable thereafter.
Finally exhausted by the all-night, rock ‘n’ roll party lifestyle, Mike and Ike were now freelance handymen, comfortably settled down into a quiet, happy suburban degeneracy.
The funky charm of Mike and Ike, in conjunction with the sleepy wealth and cultural intelligence Peppy perceived in Marin County, was all she needed, along with a few Harvey Wallbangers, to put in a bid on one of the town’s dilapidated landmarks: the old Fairfax fire station, a quaint, large, two-story clapboard structure that had been abandoned and had fallen into disrepair after the fire department was given a larger, new, windowless, popcorn-stucco building that looked like an oversize Pizza Hut.
Her love for the building’s “vibrations” made her rash and impulsive. The firehouse had been subjected to the whims of unchecked entropy—extensive water damage made the ceiling of the top floor sag and peel down in the corners like moldy paper, termites had eaten sections of the joists and the main support girder until it was as spongy as coral, cockroaches and earwigs were firmly entrenched in the marrow of the wall studs. The minimal kitchen was embalmed in dusty grease; the bathroom contained a wall of urinals.
“I dunno,” said Ike, blowing a rich, piney vapour of pot smoke down the hole in the second-story floor where the fire pole went through. “Considering what they want for this crate, you’d think they’d at least throw in a couple of firemen. Black firemen.” He smirked, hugging the pole to his plaid chest and squeaking down out of sight.
“They should have torched this dump. Who’d accuse the fire department of arson? Nobody,” countered Mike, following Ike down the pole.
Peppy didn’t care. Her brain was romping on its wheel. Nobody could tell her this firehouse wasn’t the repository of her future good fortune; the promised sunny clearing after suffering through the dark and predatory woods: the castle of the Golden Stag.
To rehabilitate the firehouse Peppy was going to need more money; she eventually bullied Noreen into selling her Reno house to come live with her in Fairfax. Noreen abhorred the idea of giving up the modest security she had so patiently assembled, but her fear of what would happen to Ned and Liza if Peppy raised them alone outweighed her worry about her own future. With great reluctance, Noreen allowed red-jacketed realtors into her home. “A gem,” they proclaimed it. “I know,” Noreen responded, knowing full well how much elbow grease she had frenziedly rubbed in over the years, keeping it free of rust, grime, and decay, and hopefully, sin. When Noreen saw the chewed-up firehouse for the first time, she was shocked by its decrepitude and cried a little. But she liked Fairfax, a little valley tucked inside round, dark green hills that gave the feeling of a soft catcher’s mitt lying open, cool and snug. The air was piney and quenching. Noreen had forgotten about the appeal of green areas, her yard in Reno having contained only a tendrilled century plant, some small cacti in pots, and a ceramic lawn-burro loitering in a semicircle of decorative pink rocks. “The kind of garden you’d have on Mars,” as Ned called it.
“The kind of garden you’d have on Mars if all Martian landscapers were blind,” as Peppy called it.
“And Mexican,” added Liza.
Peppy rejected three pricey contractor bids and hired Mike and Ike to perform the renovation, boldly tearing up her city work permit and opting to do the construction on the cheap and sly. Mike was a reasonably competent plumber and builder; Ike was a talented finish carpenter and master electrician. Dressed identically in plaid lumberjack shirts, red suspenders, and skin-tight jeans, they filled Dumpsters with sooty lath, plaster, and urinals, sistered a few joists, and hammered up fresh drywall. They left the fire pole and installed, where the fire engine once resided, a stage with a proscenium arch, a respectable theatrical “black box,” replete with a backstage area and rest rooms (retaining an original urinal on the downstairs level, after deeming it “quaint and nostalgic”). In the area before the stage, where future audiences would sit, Mike installed a wall of mirrors and ballet barres. The firehouse was painted bright red. Peppy had a brass plaque made, thereby christening the former firehouse:
THE NORMAL FAMILY DINNER THEATRE EST. 1981
Noreen, Peppy, Mike, Ike, Ned, and Liza posed for a photograph next to the sign. It was May; Fairfax was in bloom with furry yellow acacia.