Amazon Dreams: A Woman's Quest to End the Struggle Between Men and Women

By Anna Randolph

Paula Deland has collapsed.

As her life flashes in front of her, she relives the astonishing events of her life, sustained by her dream to end the struggle between the sexes.

And now everything depends on restoring the laughing part of her soul - the part that knows nothing is impossible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 10, 2000
• ISBN: 9781477172681

Anna Randolph

The author enjoyed flying small aircraft prior to entering the San Francisco Police Department where she worked for eight years. She served as a Field Training Officer, a police liaison with the community, and as an instructor at Field Training Seminars throughout California. She has spent most of her life in the San Francisco Bay area and feels grateful to have grown up in South Central Los Angeles.

Book preview

1

WHEEL

The bedroom sways. Her hands grasp for something to hold onto as she crumples to the floor.

Slipping in and out of time, she hears a piercing sound from a distant place.

Light pours in as two men rush through her doorway and maneuver one on each side of her. They move as shadows blocking the sun, floating across the sun-bleached curtains, while the remaining light slices into shreds around their medicine kits, oxygen tank and backpacks. Gasping for air, Paula’s mind explodes with faces and things she can not speak of.

The stocky man glances down at the woman’s body, at the torn blue boxing shorts she wore, her long hair, the tear on her cheek.

All right, let’s get to work. He looks over at his partner.

The blond man on her left lifts her arm away from her side and takes her blood pressure. His eyes ping-pong from the blood pressure cuff dial to Paula’s chest.

A third paramedic enters the dimly lit bedroom then wedges himself into a corner, standing clear of the woman and other two attendants. His eyes begin to adjust and something catches his eye.

Moving in closer, he scans the assorted papers and pieces of identification strewn across the dresser.

Now a sensation of warmth from their bodies drags her heart across memories of laughter and love—her loves and love affairs—all of them now dead or gone—and it makes her appreciate the moment with the strangers all the more.

Months earlier, she would have been startled at being vulnerable, found half naked by a bunch of strangers. Now she simply longed to let go, not think about survival—if only for a moment—curl up and feel that the world was safe, cradling her, feel connected to others in that world in the arms of a stranger. No matter how fleeting.

She tries with all her strength to lift herself. If only she could speak or put her arm around the nearest one, postpone the aloneness of her last breath.

Okay… miss, take it easy. The stocky one speaks without looking in her direction, pressing her back into a lying position.

As her head falls back, she plunges into the pain of each breath, her lung squeezing dry like a twisted rag. It is easier to endure pain, she tells herself, than be surrounded by people yet feel all alone.

At least the ambulance crewmen weren’t cops. She took their threats seriously, and she had no choice but to wire herself. Only Domingo knew she had recorded one of their dreadful encounters.

Now the images return. Faces, murmurs, pictures flash before her eyes.

Early in her life, Paula had imagined that before a person was born, when one was simply a nascent organism, each soul determined how eventful his or her existence on earth would be by spinning a huge Wheel of Life.

Pictured on The Wheel were all of life’s possible adventures, challenges, and lessons in a collage of images splashed like graffiti.

A strange presence guarded The Wheel, not like the game show hosts she had seen on television. This apparition stood as a magnificent angel with lasers for eyes that burned all places to hide.

She had watched herself step up to The Wheel no better than a trembling dog that had lost control of where to relieve itself.

Now struggling for every breath, Paula thinks that she must have spun that Wheel really hard.

Just as the stocky paramedic lowers a plastic oxygen mask to seal her nostrils and mouth, pictures and symbols of events in her life begin to spin.

Her eyes plead for help. Now, she must return as an adult and see the laughing child she once was, to the memory she had tried to erase before she collapsed.

The Wheel returned her to the beginning, to the man who had become her father, who was actually her grandfather. It placed her inside Grandpapa’s drugstore in South Central Los Angeles—to the incident that set the stage for her life on the streets.

She had remembered that day quite clearly. Afterward, it had taken him three days of scrubbing to remove all the red streaks from the plate glass windows. It was a moment when time halted, except for a husband and wife engaged in a shouting match in front of her Grandpapa’s store windows. Pedestrians who paused to watch had now fled.

The light was blinding. Her eyes shut tightly.

***

Bright light flashed through torn seams of the drab green awning at the entrance to her grandfather’s drugstore. The light illuminated the back of a head, a sliver of a shoulder from an occasional passerby, scattering rays of sun and dust particles onto the sidewalk.

Out on the street, the asphalt steamed like hot coals, so hot, the air above it vibrated like a mirage in the blaze of the afternoon. Directly across from the drugstore stood a scorched stucco building, the white contrasting with the intermittent shadows cast by those dull-green shades.

The front door of the drugstore, mostly glass, stood midway underneath the awning and bisected a larger plate glass window on each side, allowing intervals of sunlight to filter in. Two miniature plant gardens flourished in brick beds on both sides of the entry.

It was not long after her Grandpapa had had the gardens planted that she watched him prior to opening time having to cast out old dark men, who had passed out on the plant beds, some still clutching their wine bottles from the night before.

Grandpapa never spoke about it, but he grimaced while performing this task. It was not so much the destruction of the plants, nor having to cover his nose with a handkerchief at the fumes of alcohol and piss-soaked clothing, nor having to clean up after someone who had curled up in his own vomit—it was not any of these things but something else—something that swelled inside him as he would rouse these black men, the weight he could hardly bear as he pulled them up and leaned their backs against the wall, emotions he could not afford to feel, yet was torn by, as the men reached out and pulled on him, just the same.

Grandpapa had told her how he had sometimes envied the blacks when he was a boy growing up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. If I were black, then at least I’d have had the black community for support. But, the blacks didn’t trust me because I passed for white, and the whites hated the part of me that was black.

As Grandpapa helped the men stagger to their feet, half of him knew how close he had come to being tattered like these men, had he not moved to California before both sides tore him apart.

Left with their bottles and feces, he glanced at the storefront—the one thing that carried him through—the drugstore he could finally call his own. Now, he had the sole responsibility of a granddaughter to raise, and a business to run; he gave compassion, not permission.

That morning the plate glass revealed a different pair of dozing winos. Instead of frowning, Grandpapa turned on the sprinkler system he had installed. The dark men twitched and twisted, their fingers and feet dug deeper into the soil. Then, by degrees of wobbly movements, they sat up on their own accord.

On this day, Paula wore her pajamas and celebrated. Nothing in particular. At four years of age, she simply celebrated. She sat on the floor near the windows, at the front door of the just-opened store.

Sneaking up behind her, Grandpapa ran his fingers through her light brown curls. No one imagined that his fair-skinned child had a speck of black ancestry. Or, that just around the corner, she would be baby-sat from time-to-time by a black spiritualist with protective hands, her Auntie Annie, a real black madonna whose skin shined like a crow’s. Paula’s hair would have turned out nappy like his, except that she favored her mother—part Cherokee and Latina.

He was the only father she had known. Her real father and mother, his son and daughter-in-law, had perished in an automobile accident when she was an infant. And recently, he lost his own wife to divorce. So, to Paula, he was Papa, mostly father or Dad, which sometimes got shortened to Pops. And so, to him—having lost so much, so quickly—she was now the only child he had.

I’d love to sit down on the floor with all these toys and join you, but… He looked down into her clear blue eyes.

"Yes! Please play with me!" Her face lit up with childhood enthusiasm.

Abruptly, he stood alert. She watched his eyes appraise the winos who waved their fists and cursed as they staggered down the street.

As a druggist, he knew how to find the answers to most of the customer’s questions. As a parent, he had no answers to the noise inside his head. Before the divorce, Paula’s grandmother had often pulled the child behind the folds of her skirt when certain customers entered the store. In his rush to own his own business, had he been selfish? Would it matter that the drugstore just had a view of Rocky’s liquor store? That he was raising her in a neighborhood where no houses stood on their block, nor on the block across the street? That a house of prostitution was just a mere block-and-a-half away?

The threat of violence roamed the streets like a presence—lingering in the grocery store next door, hiding in a slender doorway, targeting a pedestrian in the abandoned lot, or tailing the hookers and their johns past the greasy fries joint into the back alley.

They’ll be back, he muttered when the winos had gone. Sometimes, as in that very moment, he’d forget how old she was and would tell her what she had to know. "Winos and everything else is child’s play, compared to a confrontation with a heroin addict…

"Inevitably, an addict will see our sign ‘Drugstore’ and figure that this is the place to get heroin." His face got red hot just thinking that every other week he had to toss someone out onto the street. Every other goddamn week… and the previous week had been quiet.

But Pops had made a promise to her. He’d fight to make the drugstore a place where she could have the childhood he never had. And he would do whatever it took, send her to costly private schools if necessary, to keep his young Paula off the street.

"I must tend to the customers honey, but you can sit here and play! You’re safe inside the store. Just don’t go outside. Promise me that you’ll stay inside the store where it’s safe. Do you understand?"

Yes. I am safe inside the store. She wrapped her arms around his pant leg, Please, Papa. Please don’t leave.

Stealing time to kiss the top of her head, he acknowledged that family came first. But when he said, I’ll try to be back, he would later explain that it was his business that fed and sheltered them.

Look at all the customers! See, you won’t be alone. He looked down at his child and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She had the bluest eyes and now the biggest lower lip. A lip that seemed to be dragging on the floor.

You save a place for me, okay?? I’ll try to be back later. He wiped the moisture from his spectacles and tore himself away to greet a customer at the far end of the store.

With several toys at her feet, plenty to share, she wondered if this would be the day when the big people would bring their children inside the store. If not, she had her ragged old doll stuffed with sawdust. At the end of its limbs hung small silver bells.

You’ll play with me, won’t you? She hoisted the doll, shaking it close to her ear. Whirling, ringing, tinkling, jingling. Laughing and screaming in ecstasy, she shook it again and watched it fly around her, protecting her, like fairies in her story books.

A new toy now pulled on her attention. Instantly, a kaleidoscope became another world of glass and angles cutting corners—bits of drab green and golden light, white stucco, and black concrete broken into diamonds.

Then, out of nowhere, two brown figures came into view. Paula rotated the glass, heard yelling and watched as the figures fragmented. Setting the toy down, she stared out the windows towards the sidewalk to see where the noise was coming from.

The wife stood tall. Thin lips framed an exceptional set of white teeth, brilliant against her dark skin. Her delicately rounded cheekbones appeared strikingly prominent. A sheer, flowered housedress revealed the upper part of her chest and a black triangle between her legs. The fragility of her beauty, the uniqueness of her height, were provocative yet dangerous—a Venus fly trap with legs.

Placing both hands firmly on her hips, she appeared spread out—hawk-like—wings expanded when threatened. She thrust her torso forward to confront her husband.

Inside the store, the customers sitting at the soda fountain swiveled their heads as curses spewed from the woman’s mouth.

Paula watched as the lighter-skinned husband paced and stomped underneath the awning, shouting at the woman with tears in his eyes.

Standing only to the height of the woman’s shoulders, he appeared young-looking in his baggy gray trousers held up by black suspenders, almost juvenile with his thin puny mustache, except for his eyes which bugged out in the heat.

He waved something sharp and shiny above his wife’s head. It caught the sun’s reflection for a flash of a second.

The woman screamed.

You have NO business following me! You damn fool! She flicked an imaginary speck off her housedress as if swatting her husband like a fly.

He flashed angry white teeth, snarled and circled the woman. Toying… stabbing the air with his knife.

Paula’s eyes grew wide. The bad man can’t get me. The bad man can’t get me! I am safe inside the store.

The woman bent to his level. Squatting and laughing, she performed her own dance on the street. Fingers fisting, legs kicking and spreading.

Through the tears in the drab green awning, light beams captured the husband and wife, spraying a profusion of golden dust, obtusely angled everywhere, bouncing off the motion of their bodies.

Inside the store, the song, My Only Love, sung by Bobby Reese, played from the jukebox. I was dancing with my one and only love. And in walks an old friend. We mingled, we laughed.

But like a whispered secret, the melody began to fade behind the shrieking and shouting.

The overwhelming heat, the pulsation of the music, the rhythmic motions of the man and woman, and the silence of everyone else around was hypnotic, slowing time… and everything… down.

Her mind tried to break free, wander into make believe to shoo the fighting away.

More screaming.

I am safe inside the store. I am safe inside the store.

Paula covered her ears and turned her eyes for something else to look at—the adults inside the store. The big people will do something. They’ll do something to stop it! But, the screams grew louder and she had to peek. This time, she’d only peek at something else inside the store.

To her right, her old doll rattled shamelessly. A tall male customer, attempting to escape from the store unnoticed, stepped on and segmented its worn out limbs, shaking the bells with each of his awkward movements.

Instead of crying about her mangled doll, she stared up at the big man who tried to escape. The big people are supposed to know everything and protect. Why don’t they do something to stop it?

The tall man stood frozen just inside the entryway.

In the background My Only Love, oozed from the jukebox. The hours passed. He asked you to dance.

Tell me who he is, or ELSE, bitch! The husband wielded the knife.

A spoon hit the floor. A customer at the soda fountain lowered his cup and dropped his mouth.

She sensed her papa was removed to a distant world where his hands were tied having to wait on customers. A world where he was at least comforted that she was safe inside the store.

Somebody gasped.

Paula reached for something… anything… her kaleidoscope.

At the far end of the store, Paula’s father stopped typing prescriptions and dialed the police.

The woman now slammed herself against the plate glass window, her nails clawing the glass. Her eyes searching, begging for someone inside the store to save her.

Paula peered inside the kaleidoscope, rotated the glass. This time the woman fragmented into bits and diamonds that reddened.

The big people aren’t doing anything!

Red splashes streamed across the windows.

Gushing out relentlessly, the music beat on. I fell for you, never thought I’d get burned. You fell for him when my back was turned.

More splashes.

She shuddered at the shrieking sounds, then reached for something to hold onto—the doll—but its arm dropped off. Streams of sawdust spurted from the limb. Leaking down its legs, more dust formed a pool at Paula’s feet.

Paula looked over at the adults inside the store. The big people aren’t doing anything. The big people aren’t doing anything!

Suddenly, the screaming stopped.

The woman did not die right away as Paula had expected. She simply gulped once for air, then staggered backwards in a trance, making the sidewalk, and everything else around her, ruby red.

One more time, Paula looked up in horror at the big people, her little chest struggling to stop the trembling.

Now she could barely see through the windows as the police and ambulance crew hauled the couple from view.

When the ambulance and patrol car doors slammed, her body jolted. And as the taillights of the emergency vehicles disappeared, Paula screamed and ran to the door, crying inconsolably at being left behind with the zombies.

***

The blood pressure cuff loosens finally, and the paramedics move quickly into their positions. Doors slam and Paula’s body jolts once again, feeling cut off from all that is secure and innocent.

Surrounded by the ambulance crew, yet the sense of separation remains. How ironic that it was but a memory that brought on an isolation so penetrating her body simply collapsed.

Her mind registers the crew shouting, and she hears someone yell, Her name’s Paula Deland. She’s a cop!

One of the first women cops… she muses about her life—the outer experiences that lead to an initiation into a world of men—her inner life entwined with other women who dared to walk their own true path—an uphill path overlooking the struggles between men and women. At the hilltop, men and women have gathered to lay their struggles to rest. She sees herself climbing to reach that dream.

But now she is falling, thrown back, enough to get lost.

The Wheel has begun to spin.

I must stop this. My life can’t end this way.

Could she bear to see how it happened that there is now no one around to love her?

If this was the end, did anything really matter?

As the men hoist her onto a stretcher, and her body lurches then becomes weightless, she realizes she has been thrust to a place in which no one is truly prepared.

Just let me love again.

Now the men speak rapidly to each other in words that seem to need translation as they place her with a thud into the ambulance.

Tell me when you get to a straight stretch of road, so I can get an I.V. started! the stocky man hollers to the driver who switches on the siren.

Merritt General Base, this is California Medical Unit 122. We’re en route with a 35 year old female with moderate to severe respiratory distress. The patient has an altered level of consciousness. Our ETA is five to seven minutes. The stocky man braces himself against the wall of the rig as the ambulance takes a sharp turn.

Her eyes strain to open.

Now The Wheel takes her back to the time when she was 23. To a time of unlimited love and orgasmic dreamscapes.

To a spirited time when she had the advantage.

It was nevertheless a time when her warning instincts had not yet been fully developed, not about what lurked outside her door—but about what she thought would bring a world of happiness.

As her life spins away, she watches herself leave the ambulance, the attendants; her surroundings drip away into the backdrop like splashings of fresh paint.

2

GIFTS FROM THE DEAD

In the candle glow of her bedroom, the full length mirror caught flickers of her image as she swung into a lunge and deflected a strike. With every block, counter, and attack, Paula’s reflected double stepped with her into a training of body and spirit, into a world where she could convert a disadvantage into an advantage in one swift move. Here, she lit Chinese Temple incense and remembered the dead—the ghost she could not tell her father about. The one who gave her a taste of what it meant to be female. This ghost appeared after she was forced to leave home at the age of 16 and had moved to San Francisco in the mid-1960s.

And although she could not erase the past, she stood ready to face what had haunted her. Now, in the Oriental art of combat, she would make the moment golden, and never let it happen again. Never.

Raising her fists at the ghost, she faded into that Saturday night when she felt her own spirit move in the heat of bodies packed inside Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium. In fevered rhythm she danced to electrifying rock recordings of The Doors and The Jefferson Starship, amid a dazzle of bare-chested men offering their wild seed of free love and bohemian women raising their arms as if to snatch or massage notes of music out of the air. Bending, swaying, spinning, some moving in hysteria, others in sweat-soaked blasts of oneness with the sound.

The frenzy of the moment made the outside world unreal. Hundreds writhed in darkness to psychedelic lights projected onto a giant screen. Possessed by loss of self, the crowd gyrated as one mass sensation to swirling dreamscapes and orgasmic inkblots resembling a daisy chain of lovers engaged in sixty-nine.

She made her way around scattered lines of single men and women to a less crowded corner, away from the glowing lights, where the shadows could help drive out thoughts about her own broken relationship. He was like a fresh breath, unlike any man she had known—a virgin, open to new sensations, until he dove into excess then refused to rise even briefly into air. The last time she had cleaned his vomit from her car it all caught up with her like a sob.

On this night she found herself questioning the prospect of meeting someone sober, high in drive and imagination, someone who wouldn’t remind her of the men who staggered in front of her father’s drug store windows.

Gazing across the auditorium, over the tops of bobbing heads, it was ironic that after living in South Central Los Angeles, when Pops could no longer afford to keep her, she had driven to San Francisco to find stability. In the 60s, when she was focused on finding a place to live and a suitable job, she found that she was dropping in when most of her peers were dropping out.

Yet tonight, while hemmed in by dancers in front of her, standing pressed against warm bodies on both sides, she interpreted this closeness as the next best thing to affection and was reluctant to leave. But three-quarters of the way through the show, after exchanging glances with too many restless faces, an unexplainable chill crept over her, and she sensed she had to leave before something terrible would happen.

She had seen crowds become impersonal when it was time to leave, and she did not want to be crushed or treated as a body to be groped by the masses.

With the music and sights still faintly vibrating in her head, she stepped out into the night, convinced that she could entertain herself, that a four block walk was nothing. It could be worse.

After a minute or so, she turned a corner and disappeared down an unlit street, then thought she heard footsteps behind her. Scarcely could she see her own hand, yet rainbow love juice squirted across the giant screen of her mind as she walked past one parked car after another. Now the sound became more distinct.

She walked faster, all the while listening for the footsteps behind her to fade, to stop at a car door, hear the door creak open and then the sound of a vehicle taking off.

But there was nothing except the beat of footsteps which now altered themselves to match her pace.

A shiver of apprehension rushed through every pore. Sweat froze on her hands and face. Making her forget every goddamn thing, except this place and time, where she had gone too deep into darkness. Where she was now an animal being stalked and it was too late to turn around now.

She hurried faster, past dark vacant store fronts, or were they? Past plate glass windows where perhaps only a child was watching?

Is it my turn to throw myself in front of the windows, scream for someone inside to help me, only to be butchered in front of a child?

No, it was not that way at all. There was no crowd watching, not even a child. There was no one she could seek out for help. The street was empty, except for her and the footsteps behind her.

Pressing onward, she tried not to think about her scent of perfume that he could track in pitch blackness. She struggled not to drop more hints—to move swiftly like an Indian without the sound of footsteps. With great effort, she tried to race within her women’s shoes, the heels not made for running. Her eyes looked into darkness as she sensed the soft body of her flesh. Flesh that had not engaged in serious exercise since she had quit college to look for work.

The sight of her car parked at the corner near a street light gripped her in the chest. Another obstacle. It’s heaviness settled on top of her. The dread of failure.

Walking faster, she envisioned the hunter slashing her, then erased it.

Another image appears. A black madonna with protective hands. Her Auntie Annie could disappear into the night and not even a hunter could find her. If you can hear me, please help me.

Keeping a safe distance until she could close in, she knew she would have to present this ghost with a variety of tactics, forcing him into a reaction position. The moment he inhaled, she started with false attacks, driving him into revealing his speed and skill. And as the vapors spiraled upward, her bare feet and hands struck from all angles. Chinese Temple incense was not overly sweet or perfumey. Her offering had more of a musky, earthy aroma.

Aiming her key at her car, she broke into a sprint. Huh, uh, huh, uh, huh, breathing in bursts of terror at the sound of running feet behind her. The thumping closing in, her hands shaking.

Time took forever as she shoved the key into the door, as she slipped into her car, one foot after the other, positioning herself, then turning and pressing down the knob to lock herself in.

Panting behind the wheel, safe behind metal and glass, time flew. Starting the engine, she caught the man’s face under the illumination of the street light. It appeared as a shadow cast at her driver’s window.

Can you drive me to the hospital? I’m injured! The dark shape called out.

Inside her fighting dance, mirrored flashes of her double struck him with a hook kick, knocking the weapon from his hand. This was followed by a right jab packed with power by snapping her right shoulder. Then came a series of high punches and kicks to open the vulnerable low-line areas.

Frozen in the driver’s seat, the big picture flashed in front of her.

If I let him into my car, he’ll torture me to the point where I’ll wish I were dead, then he’ll rape me, then he’ll kill me. I’d rather die than let him into my car.

Her head turned toward the shadow and shook side-to-side.

In the next second, she looked down the black hollow of his revolver. A life-sucking pit he had pressed against the driver’s window and aimed at her head.

Let me into this car!

On impulse, she stomped on the gas. As her car sped off, she sank low in the seat, hoping she wouldn’t crash, figuring the back of her brain would blow up at any second, and prayed he was a bad shot.

Her foot that had been glued to the gas pedal, running all the red lights, daring any cop to stop her, launched into jerking fits when at last she made it home. There’s an insane war out there, and it looks like I’m in the wrong uniform.