One Wild Ride: A Review of Million Dollar Red, A Memoir by Gleah Powers

Reading Gleah Powers’ memoir Million Dollar Red is like going on an impromptu road trip with a smart, funny, but not always reliable friend. There were times when I wanted to step into the story and protect the narrator from the reckless decision-making of her vain, much-married mother; there were times when I wanted to jump between the narrator and her own bad ideas. But throughout, the lively writing and the speaker’s pure, admirable instinct for survival kept me hanging on her every word.

The book begins with the ten-year-old Powers and her younger sister, Kimberly, being retrieved from summer camp by their mother. Our narrator — who, we’ve been informed in a head note, went by the name Linda then — clearly admires her trim, glamorous Mom, and as both girls run toward her yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!” we might be deceived into thinking that there will be familial sweetness in this story. Instead, their mother reveals a troubling surprise: along for the ride is her new, third husband, Jack, acquired while the girls were away.

“It means you can call him Daddy because that’s what he is now,” their mother says. While Jack works to woo Kimberly, Linda stews. “If I hadn’t been at camp, I was sure I could have stopped this,” the ten-year old thinks, wrapping her arm protectively around her sister. That sense of responsibility, and that awareness that the presumed adults in the picture cannot be trusted to care well for the two girls, falls as painfully on the reader as it does on the writer. And yet, there is no trace of self-pity in this book. The young Linda is as tough as she is intelligent.

Like many such young women, Linda becomes a kind of counselor and protector for her younger sibling and for various friends, none of whom seem to have her gift for survival. In a particularly haunting chapter, “Abortos,” Linda and her friend, Arlene, newly graduated from high school, drive from Phoenix to Nogales so that Arlene can obtain an illegal abortion. It’s 1965, and Linda has a clear-eyed view of the dangers: “I tried to conjure up a good outcome, but couldn’t help tensing the muscles in my chest and ribs, armoring myself for the possible butchering of Arlene that I would somehow have to handle. Raised Catholic, she feared God would punish us, and though we were almost in Mexico, I worried that if God didn’t get us, the U.S. government would.”

What ensues is tragic in every sense — a messy abortion in a roadside motel room performed by a “doctor” whose insistence on partying with the girls afterwards is broken-up by the arrival of Arlene’s gun-toting boyfriend, Leonard. In a reversal that feels all too real, Arlene, previously determined to break up with the abusive Leonard, decides his pursuit of the girls means that his love for her is true. She decides to return home with Leonard, dismissing Linda by cruelly accusing her of “always” being jealous of Arlene’s ability to attract boyfriends.

As with every chapter in Million Dollar Red, “Abortos” is written to be read as a self-contained story. Aside from the obvious commercial value of this structure — the stand-alone nature of the chapters makes them ideal for promotional excerpting — it also allows Powers to pinball about in her life story. Instead of following a single linear path, the reader scrambles through Powers’ memories with her, alighting here and there for a tense and telling anecdote.  What is lost in such a form is the sense of perspective that a more linear framework would allow. But the book mirrors the hectic, arbitrary twists and turns of the writer’s life.

Chief among these is a chance meeting in a Scottsdale bar with Ray, a costume designer in town to work on the Michelangelo Antonioni film, “Zabriskie Point.” Ray and Linda become a couple, and before long she is traveling with him, meeting a series of artistic and cultural luminaries who she finds alternately intimidating and inspiring.  One of the latter is Kathleen Cleaver, wife of Black Panther co-founder Eldridge Cleaver, who powers meets when Antonioni is filming the group in New York. Cleaver provides the narrator with a powerful life motto: “Imagination is the most powerful weapon we have.”

As Powers makes her way from LA to New York, the pace pics up, along with her artistic aspirations. She paints, she acts, she takes voice and dance lessons. As with so many artists, the day jobs she takes to feed those aspirations are sometimes tedious and sometimes outright weird, as when she is hired as a personal secretary to a “law enforcement philanthropist” who spends his time and his inherited fortune researching the history of law enforcement in the United States, establishing a small private museum of related artifacts, and receiving award from various sheriff’s departments. The narrator begins pilfering money from her boss and then, out of gratitude and guilt, has sex with him on a holiday visit to his parents. Powers concludes the brief, cringe-worthy encounter with her trademark wit and sharpness.

Before he passed out, he told me it’d been a long time since he’d been with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute. His therapist had been encouraging him to start dating.
“I’ll never forget this,’ he said.
I drifted off, wondering which category I fit into. For the first time in months, I slept guilt free.

The author’s boldest move is her concluding one: for her final chapter, she switches from Linda’s pint of view to that of another character whose own story seemed a minor part of this particular book. This device, used in novels such as Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover and Don DeLillo’s The Names, gives the reader a brief jolt of displacement until the “ah” of recognition settles in. I will offer no spoilers here about the identity of this character, but as with the DeLillo and Sontag books mentioned above, what first comes as a surprise is, by the last page, such a satisfying narrative decision as to seem inevitable. Such a bold move suggests to me a writer who is still growing in ambition and range. I’m already looking forward to Gleah Powers’ next book.

Robots, the Scientific Method, and Dying

Sorry for the radio silence, everybody. Today we have a special five-part guest post from Amber Nelson that takes a scientific approach to T&T, and manages along the way to connect the novel to Susan Sontag and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Definitely a must read!

T&T: Robots, the Scientific Method, & Dying

1. Ask a Question

In season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we are introduced to a new villain: Adam. Adam is a scientifically engineered monster—part man, and part bits of various monsters—a modern-day Frankenstein's monster. When he wakes, he kills his creator and goes out into the world. In the world he meets a boy. He asks the boy "What am I?" and the boy says, "A monster." And he asks "What are you?" and the boy says "I'm a boy."

In Today & Tomorrow, we are without a mystical guardian endowed with the strength and speed to slay all the monsters. Instead, we have an unnamed narrator on her birthday. A curious girl. Throughout the novel, we frequently flashback to certain memories.

"I'm a taxidermist." He turned away. "I know what taxidermy is."

"You should stuff people," I said.

"What?"

"You should kill people and stuff them and put them in life-like poses in their homes. Like a serial killer. You could murder and stuff whole families and arrange them carefully in their homes. You know, life-size dioramas--like playing Monopoly or eating a home-cooked meal—meat-loaf, or fish-sticks—or arguing about what TV shows to watch. You could be famous, the taxidermurder."

"Why would I want that?"

"Why does anyone want anything?" I picked up my audio-tour head-phones and placed them on the taxidermist's head. (70)

Our narrator asks a simple question. Why does anyone want anything. As human beings, we don't need much—water, shelter, food, etc. And yet we want so much. But to ask the question also admits to lack—she doesn't understand her humanbeingness. People do want things. Even our narrator mediates her experiences and observations around desire. Early on in the book, she admires Julia, the pretty WalMart cashier's, arms. "I want to remove Julia's arms and place them on my body and wear them like I'm Julia and like Julia's arms are my arms." (7)

And somehow, despite her living in the world going to McDonalds and AM/PM and drinking coffee, she is apart from the world.

[Merna, the sister, says] "Tell her about your work. Are you in school? We don't know anything about you. Be a person. Send an email. A card, with pictures. Anything."

"What do you mean? Be a person? What could you possibly mean? I'm not a person? What am I?" (155)

2. Observe

Mother was a behavioral-psychologist. She worked at a university research facility with other psychologists and a thousand white mice and mazes and little white sound-proof rooms. She often told me about the white soundproof-rooms. "We keep the mice in there," she'd say. "I wish I had a room like that. I'd take you with me to the soundproof-room… and stay there until all you can hear is your body-sounds, like your heart and lungs, your pumping blood, your lungs holding air like a machine, you know?" (76)

Several times throughout the novel there is reference to the human as robot, the body as machine, our narrator comparing various body parts to machines or robot parts. That, coupled with her violent fantasies and lies, her awkwardness in social situations, diverting attention away from feelings or talking about feelings, I can't help but be reminded of The Sarah-Connor Chronicles. In this (really atrocious) television show based on the Terminator, Summer Glau (of Firefly fame) plays Cameron, a newer version of the Terminator model sent back by old John Connor to protect young John Connor from the evil Skynet and their evil robots. But Cameron, while she looks human, is often awkwardly not. She has to fake it to get by in a human world and without attracting unwanted attention. Because she lacks  a true understanding of human emotions and human social interactions, she makes several amusing guffaws. And yet, it's in those amusing guffaws that the character does manage to express some kind of feeling, some kind of struggle. She tries to appear more human, and she tries to understand these human feelings. At one point, there is even a reference to her being "in love" with John Connor (and he with her).

Our narrator is not actually a robot (so far as we know). But she does seem, in her interactions with other people, conspicuously uncomfortable, awkward, wrong.  And in being this way, she makes other people uncomfortable.

So she's left with that question "Am I not a person?"

She has family: sister, stepmom/grandmother, grandfather, memories of an absent mother and father and sister. She also has two "lovers." One lover, Erik/Todd, calls her "so fucking hot" and mentions her tits. She has desires, like going to Lisbon, holding up an AM/PM, Julia's arms. She has memory. She lies.

3. Construct a Hypothesis

"It's good. You're a good person," Merna says. "You can be a person." (155)

Being a human can simply mean being a homo sapien—a sack of skin, bones, organs and viscera. Being a good person often has more to do with how you deal with conflict, struggle.

“Well.” Grandfather watches television for a little while. “I think it’s comforting to know that things have an end, small scale, lives etc…, and also large scale, world, universe. It’s good to know that things end completely.” (83)

Her grandfather is sick. He's dying. Imminently. And while this may be a comfort to him, how does somebody who questions whether they are a person try to understand what it means to die—something with which people who are comfortable in their personhood struggle to come to terms?

It's our narrator's birthday. "On birthdays I always feel closer to death," Merna says. (152)

4. Experiment

It's clear, throughout the novel, that our narrator is a liar. But that does not mean there is no truth in the narrative. As Susan Sontag says in Regarding the Pain of Others, "Memory has altered the image, according to memory’s needs." And memory is one of the most direct ways that our narrator's particular...eccentricities... are revealed in their true form: as complexities.

I was eight. A car had hit the raccoon, bisected it. The little raccoon-legs still shivered and pulled forwardly as though, through raccoon-persistence, it could drag its bleeding half-body to the field beyond the road. I thought I should hurry home, half-raccoon slung over my shoulder, place it in Mother's hands or Merna's--hand it to Grandfather maybe, beg him to repair the raccoon, to reassemble it with superglue, rivets, a rivet gun, to get the power-drill from the garage, to drill clean holes through which we could reconnect the raccoon with rope or string, steel wire, something, to sew the raccoon-pieces into one perfect whole, maybe, to resurrect it. I poked the half-raccoon with a stick, flipped it, inspected its fleshy holes and jagged misshapen bones, its little pink muscle-tears and everywhere the thick black blood. I understood that death was normal, boring, particularly for raccoons, and imagined my body bisected, just as the raccoon was, little arms twitching forwardly, a girl in a pink corduroy jumper slowly poking me with a stick, transfixed as a half-lung oozed from my open abdomen. I heard a little gasp. It was Anastasia and Anastasia was small with long brown pigtails, her white crepe dress crinkled near the sleeves and around the lacy hem. Anastasia's mouth was open, her eyes little black dots. "I found it," I said. "It's our new pet." I poked the half-raccoon again. "Come look. It's a mutant raccoon. Look at it's funny waving legs. Look here, what should we name her?" Anastasia stood next to me, hands clasped before her. "We should operate," I said. "We'll call it Flossy, make an experiment. Play with the raccoon-muscles and the lungs and heart and stuff. Remove the lungs, collect lungs, petrify them, put them in formaldehyde, keep lungs, and livers maybe, hearts, petrified in jars on your bookshelf. You'd like that, wouldn't you? the formaldehyde-smell. We could make our own shelves for them. We could eat them. Or take the lungs, sew them together. An experiment, so we can discover things about lungs."  (133)

It's a long excerpt, I know, but important. While her tone is almost cavalier, apathetic, it is not. As Sontag says, "The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration." Our narrator isn't the kid shooting squirrels and torturing cats. Here, we glimpse our narrator as a little girl facing death for the first time, grappling with what it means to die. She wants to study death to understand.

Let's go back to Adam, from Buffy. After the little boy calls him a monster, Adam ends up slaughtering the little boy. He cuts him open and hangs him from a tree, investigating the boy's insides, trying to understand what makes something human.

Our narrator doesn't actually cut anybody up. But we do see this attempt to understand through her rich fantasy life.

...instead I imagine slaughtering a small white kitten, a dozen white kittens, carefully cutting small kitten-pieces and placing the kitten-pieces in a large silver bowl, a billion kitten-pieces from a million kittens. Worldwide suffering must be like that, incremental and ongoing.  (88)

It's not a simple desire for violence. It's the less simple desire for understanding. It's observing something, gathering data and constructing a hypothesis.

"Merna's hand touches my shoulder and we're touching slowly and tenderly. Strange and human, I think. Strangely, I think. "Human," I say." (181)

5. Analyze Data

In the end, Today & Tomorrow is a book about understanding, a book that asks questions in an attempt to understand what it means to be human, and so also what it means to live and to die.

"Artistic expression and stuff. I wanted to show the 'innate ephemerality’ of the human-body as object.'" (142)

She is a person. She feels. She has fantasies. She eats. She sleeps. She can be injured.

But in the end, she is changed. She maybe learned something.

The body doesn't move and the room temperature doesn't change. There's no sound and I don't think or want anything. I watch the digital-clock. I slowly lie next to Grandfather. I look at the body. I close my eyes. (252)