Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold Page #3

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into tears when John came in to report

what the obstetrician

who delivered her said.

'I have a beautiful baby girl at

Saint John's, ' is what he said.

'I need to know if you want her.'

Later, we stood outside the window

of the nursery at Saint John's

looking at an infant...

with fierce dark hair...

and rosebud features.

The beads on her wrist

spelled not her name

but NI for 'No Information.'"

Well, I mean, there was no question.

This baby was gonna be ours. Yeah.

Almost everybody I know who has ever...

had a child...

is afraid before the baby comes

that they won't be up to it.

The reality couldn't have

been more perfect.

I remembered leaving the hospital

with her and driving.

We were on the

San Diego freeway going home.

I always thought of myself as

bonding with her on the San Diego.

These pictures are from

Quintana's christening,

two months after

John and Joan brought her home.

John might have been a lapsed Catholic,

but he was Catholic to his core.

The idea that something could happen to

Quintana during those two months,

sending her to limbo, was a risk

John just wasn't willing to take.

So, on their first night home...

unordained John

waited until Joan was asleep

and he snuck Quintana into the bathroom

and baptized her

right there under the sink.

We had to move out of the house at

the beach because they didn't want a baby.

We were not "writer, wife."

We were "writer, wife, baby."

In the years I'm talking about,

I was in a large house

in a part of Hollywood

that was once expensive

and was now described

by one of my acquaintances

as a senseless killing neighborhood.

Since the inclination to rent

an unfurnished 28-room house for a

month or two is a distinctly special one,

the neighborhood was peopled mainly by

rock 'n' roll bands, therapy groups,

and by my husband, my daughter, and me.

They had this wonderful old

Hollywood house on Franklin Avenue.

Big, not too much furniture.

I lived there a while. I was trying

to remember why I lived with them.

She would come down

fairly late in the morning.

I'd be in the kitchen.

She'd have a cold...

Coke in the bottle from the refrigerator.

She'd be wearing sunglasses... silent.

I had to have Coca-Colas

in the refrigerator.

And they had to be really cold.

And if anyone took my last Coca-Cola,

we would have a scene in the kitchen.

There was always a big case of canned...

uh, salted almonds

which her mother sent her,

I think, for Christmas each year.

It had to be more often

because she ate them so quickly.

And she would open a can, I remember

the sound. You know that sound.

I'd sit there with my coffee.

And she'd sit there in her sunglasses

with the Coke and the nuts.

But neither of us speaking.

I like to sit around

and watch people do what they do.

I don't like to ask questions.

Jim Morrison, I did a piece on.

Rock 'n' roll people

are the ideal subject for me.

They will just

lead their lives in front of you.

- Did you like The Doors?

- I was crazy about The Doors.

- What is it about The Doors that drew you?

- Bad boys.

I was doing a piece on

the Haight-Ashbury in 1967.

And it seemed to me that we were

seeing the tip of something important

that wasn't about "hippies," you know?

That it was about

disaffected children, Let cetera.

The idea that you could

write the history of your time,

which, I think, is what Joan has done

through the essay,

and could be a form

which would be as supple,

and as versatile,

and as nuanced as fiction,

is something extraordinary.

She makes it do things that

nobody ever made it do before.

The center was not holding.

It was a country of bankruptcy notices,

public auction announcements,

commonplace reports of casual killings,

misplaced children,

and abandoned homes and vandals

who misspelled even the

four-letter words they scrawled.

It was a country in which

families routinely disappeared,

trailing bad checks

and repossession papers.

Adolescents drifted from

city to torn city,

sloughing off both

the past and the future

as snakes shed their skins.

Children who were never taught

and would never now learn

the games that had held society together.

Children were missing.

Parents were missing.

Those left behind filed

desultory missing persons reports

then moved on themselves.

I had a 2-year-old at the time

I was working on that.

So, it was particularly vivid to me

to see these other children.

It was vivid to me

because I was away from the 2-year-old...

and feeling slightly

cut off from her, yeah.

When I finally find my contact,

he says,

"I got something at my place

that will blow your mind."

When we get there,

I see a child on the living room floor

licking her lips in concentration.

The only thing off about her is

that she's wearing white lipstick.

"Five years old," the contact says,

"on acid."

What was it like

to be a journalist in the room

when you saw the little kid on acid?

Well, it was...

Let me tell you, it was gold.

I mean, that's the long

and the short of it is...

you live for moments like that...

if you're... doing a piece.

Good or bad.

Obviously, we being repressed,

miserable...

dank English folk,

we loved the sound of hippiedom, you know?

Uh, we thought San Francisco

sounded absolutely great to us.

And so, you know, Joan Didion

reporting from the heart of, um,

Haight-Ashbury about

what it was actually like

came as a bit of a bracing shock to us.

That's not how we thought

the whole thing should be seen.

But I can see that very early on

in that early reporting,

there's a sort of horror of disorder...

which is very much

a feature of Joan's writing...

and Joan's personality.

I was living in Los Angeles.

And the magazines I was

writing for were in New York.

And so, I was reporting on

a lot of stuff that they weren't seeing.

Sometimes, you hit a piece that seemed...

That it could take a longer length

than a magazine could give you.

I might do a non-fiction book someday,

but I didn't do one for a long time.

It comes from that Yeats poem,

When what rough beast slouches

Toward Bethlehem to be born

It was reviewed by someone

in The New York Times.

They said what made this book special

is it emphasized

what used to be called character.

And it was boom.

And all of a sudden, you were a figure.

Someone once brought Janis Joplin

to a party at the house

on Franklin Avenue.

She had just done a concert,

and she wanted a brandy

and Benedictine in a water tumbler.

Music people never wanted ordinary drinks.

They wanted sake,

or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat.

Spending time with music people

was confusing.

That party was...

Was maybe the biggest party we ever had.

About midway through the party,

we realized that people

were missing their cars.

I pointed this out to the parking guy,

and he said, "What can I do, Mrs. Dunne?

How did I know you lived in

a terrible neighborhood?"

The horrible thing I remember is

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