Gemini II
According to the Internet, about 30 out of every 1,000 babies born in the United States are twins. Roughly one-third of all twins born in America are boy/boy sets, and about one-third of all same-sex sets of twins (including girl/girl sets) are born as identical twins.
The odds of me being born into this world as an identical (also called monozygotic) twin were somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 in 1,000. That’s me to a T, and the “T” stands for twin. I beat the odds of birthing while shooting out of my mother’s womb a full two minutes ahead of my identical twin brother, Marshall. That’s a pretty good start in life.
But the odds were stacked against the Lilly twins from the start, too. We were born ahead of the game but bound for unlucky lives, or at least lives of unfortunate choices. In the end, we were just born to lose. Our double shooting (and a bit of sliding) happened in La Jolla, California, in June 1959.
That was a long time ago, fifty-three years to be exact. A lot’s happened since then, so much so that putting it all accurately down in this book will be next to impossible. Which is to say slightly possible? With the glass half full, perhaps all it will take to spin our mutual life story to unbridled life (or is it the other way around?) is a steady stream of conscious and concerted mind probing and memory shifting on my part, along with innumerable focused and habitual writing sessions needed to get the job done.
As daunting as it sounds, it’s now or never. So, it’s full steam ahead. Definitely worth the go. After all, my story is our story. I’ve named my book after the glyph for Gemini, the third star sign of the Zodiac also known as the sign of the Twins. This symbol can also be represented by the Roman numeral II (2), which depicts the symbolism of the duality of twins as originated in Greek mythology.
The Greeks named a constellation in the Northern Hemisphere Gemini because its two brightest stars reminded them of mythological twins Castor and Pollux. The rest is astrological history.
I have no idea how many twins are born under the sign of the Twins each year, but with a twin birthrate of 30 per 1,000 live births (of which one-third are monozygotic) and 12 astrological signs, the mathematical chances of being born an identical twin and a Gemini seem rather slim indeed.
It makes a fitting title, then, one that reflects both whimsically and matter-of-factly the starting and ending points of our lives as identical twins born into this world beneath the celestial and circumspect gaze of Gemini’s luminous, lookalike brothers. And if Geminis are anything as astrology describes them to be—most notably as having dual natures to the point of being two different personalities—then perhaps Castor and Pollux are up there right now, 35 light years from earth, having a good godly laugh at our expense.
But the joke was never really on us. Being born is always a gift, and the gift of life is rarely a laughing matter. Life was ours to take that day, and as most babies are born to do, we naturally took it.
The woman who hosted our come-as-you-are birthday-suit party was Marsha Anne Herman, who married Thomas Earl to become Mrs. Lilly, and the site was the original Scripps Memorial Hospital on Prospect Street in La Jolla.
La Jolla in 1959, can you imagine? The population of San Diego in ’59 was around 500,000 in the city and 1,000,000 in the county. Only about 15,000 people were living in La Jolla then. It was around the same year the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) was founded, and the movie Some Like It Hot, starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe, was filmed at the Hotel del Coronado.
Photographs of San Diego County at the time show more open spaces than developed ones, and real estate, including empty lots and ready-made homes, was well within the financial reach of most middle-class Americans. Plots and houses in San Diego that sold for tens of thousands of dollars in the 1960s are of course worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars today.
But that’s history. In the summer of 1959, La Jolla, like San Diego’s other sleepy beach communities, was a pristine and undeveloped goldmine of prime California coastline ripe for the picking. As a native of La Jolla (called the “Jewel City” by locals and historians), bits and pieces of my book will necessarily include certain times and circumstances when the arc of my life momentarily intersected with La Jolla’s turf.
But the majority of my San Diego story, and our story as twins, will focus on two other beach neighborhoods to the south, Mission Beach (MB) and Pacific Beach (PB). As we used to say back in the day, our lives in San Diego were more about being Toads than Snobs, which means we were born on the rich side of Mt. Soledad but grew up on the poor side.
The rivalry known as the Toads vs. the Snobs supposedly started in the 1960s for what appears to be socioeconomic differences between teenagers engaged in territorial surfing and competitive sports.
My life as a twin in San Diego centered on the later. My twin Marshall and I were high school basketball stars who played on the teams of three different high schools in the city: Mission Bay, Kearny, and Madison. How this happened is a big part of our story, but this will come later in my book.
The one thing about being born in La Jolla is that it always made me feel special—snobby, if you will—about my birthright as a native San Diegan. I was born in one of the most scenic, famous, cultured, affluent, and exclusive beach communities in California (or the entire West Coast, for that matter), and the snob in me always thought this was an important fact in my life that mattered. Well, it isn’t, and it doesn’t.
Territorial snobbishness is a game for fools. It reeks of social conditioning, which is the stuff of partisan puppets. The invisible strings and machinations of American culture and society have been shaping and molding the minds of San Diegans (native or otherwise) since the city was first controlled by the United States Government in 1848.
The truth is that San Diego was inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years (around 12,000, to be more precise) before Spain, and later Mexico, took over the territory. White Americans like my parents and grandparents were the top dogs of the turf for only about 100 years or so before my twin brother and I joined the Lilly-Herman clan.
Inflation and adjusted dollars aside, my twin and I were born at a time in San Diego’s history and development when the environment and economy were about as pristine and prosperous as they’d ever be. But again, that’s all history and this book will naturally include some of that.
But this story is more about the Lilly twins, what, when, where, why, who, and how everything happened in our lives. It’s about happenings, key moments and incidents that played out and went down in the short span of our mutual lifetimes. At present, our lifespans are very much in progress. For now, at least, I’m still here; we’re still here, in the here and now and the present moment, alive and breathing, thinking about the past and wondering about the future.
If life is but a dream, then merrily, merrily, merrily our story still goes, along with every waking moment and experience that comes with it. Unfortunately, I’ll be dead and gone in what seems like the blink of an eye.
Perhaps at the end of my life the only thing that will really count are the moments and memories contained in this book, my life and times as an American identical twin born in the crown jewel of America’s “Finest City,” which can be read by anyone still alive who cares enough about me or my life to do so, which is the closest thing to immortality as it ever gets. And for this aging, agnostic, Gemini twin “Born in the 50s,” as Sting would one day sing, it’s close enough.
My earliest childhood memories are like so many faded, tattered postcards filmed in nostalgic soft focus of a B-picture dream sequence. The vintage reflections in the camera-eye of my mind flicker in black and white only. My flashbacks are literally without color. Like so many other underachieving Americans of my generation, my life has been a B-movie for sure, but as the saying goes, it’s the only life I’ve got.
That sort of philosophy makes me feel a little bit better about the actions and consequences of my somewhat troubled existence. But regardless of my minor misfortunes, the majority of my childhood was about as idyllic and carefree as it ever gets in modern-day America.
What I remember most about growing up with my parents, twin, and two other siblings is the happy and comfortable contentment of an extremely easy breezy life. We were and always have been a nuclear family of six: Father Tom, Mother Marsha, twin Marshall, older brother Byron, and younger sister Anne.
One of my earliest boyhood memories is when our family was living on Bayside Walk in South MB. There, on that picturesque and ever-so-rare peninsula of finely weathered sand between Mission Bay and the majestic Pacific, my life as a boy—son, grandson, nephew, cousin, twin, and brother—was the stuff of American dreams.
We lived in a rented house near the jetty, next to the sidewalk, with a volleyball court right in front. That jetty area, which years later would be developed into Mission Point Park, was relatively rugged and unspoiled then; a rustic seaside habitat covered with bushes and tumbleweeds strewn upon deep piles of brown sand where wild birds regularly made their nesting grounds.
It was the natural habitat of many species of birds. Marshall and I used to chase fledglings around in the sand, occasionally trapping and catching them in our hands against the screeching and swooping protests of their mothers. We never injured or killed them. We were mostly good kids with kind hearts. But we got into our share of trouble.
One time we decided to paint our neighbor’s short brick wall along Aspin Court, so we got some paint cans and brushes from our garage and went to town on that wall without asking or telling anyone about our intentions. That neighbor finally came out and caught us red-handed, but luckily for us he took our trespass in stride; without making too much of a fuss he simply told our parents to have us repaint the wall and cover up our mischievous handiwork.
That man had liked us because as identical twins we were cute as buttons. Other times our devil-may-care temperaments were more sexual in nature. In the same garage we’d found the paint, we made girls take off their clothes and a few times even their panties. Sometimes we exchanged underwear with them, putting on the girl’s panties before quickly changing back again.
Once, while exploring the jetty rocks on the oceanfront side, we found a cave large enough for us to crawl into and sit in. With saltwater air and sea spray rushing in and out with the tide and black crabs with bubbling mouths sidestepping along seaweed-covered cracks and crevices in the moist boulders, we plotted opening our own strip club, complete with cocktails and dancing girls on a center slab of rock for a stage.
Our harum-scarum ways followed us everywhere. I’m not sure where our happy-go-lucky attitudes came from, but they wreaked havoc on our lives from start to finish.
Perhaps it was our parent’s own liberal style of parenting—lackadaisical approaches that may have lacked certain aspects of discipline and practicality—that, with or without their knowledge, shaped us into becoming less disciplined and pragmatic human beings than originally planned.
To make things worse, we also seemed to lack a certain sense of morality. For some reason, we never seemed to learn or know the subtle differences between right and wrong. Ethically speaking, making choices based on black and white principles was always a loosey-goosey proposition for us; morals were a puzzling mixture made up of many different shades of grey.
Of course, we instinctively sensed the differences, and usually knew when we were making decisions and doing things that were wrong. In the end, though, we always focused more on the benefits than the bottom line. This became the name of the Lilly twin game: if we could get away with it, why worry about the consequences? Talk about a can of worms!
But again, we were far less mean spirited than rash and irresponsible. We liked sports and acting, loved meeting people and making new friends, and above all, we enjoyed spending time together. Like most twins, we were constant companions, best friends one minute and bitter enemies the next.
While growing up we got into fierce shouting matches one minute only to make up and kiss in the time it takes to make a cup of instant noodles. When we fought, we socked each other hard on the backs or shoulders; luckily, our unrestrained punches never ended in spilt blood.
We loved each other too much to actually try to hurt one another. But I seem to be getting ahead of myself. I tend to do a lot of that. This book will run in chronological order as much as possible, starting with my earliest memories from the time I was around five or six years old.
We were living in San Diego, in MB, where in the 1940s my grandparents had purchased a double lot on Ensenada Court for around $1,500. I remember bits and pieces of that two-story home where my mom grew up, a house her parents (mainly her mother, and my grandmother, Mollie Belle Herman) had bought in Hillcrest, near downtown San Diego, and then moved to the beach.
A few years earlier, Mollie and my grandfather, Marshall Herman, had rented a little house for their honeymoon kitty-corner from their place on Ensenada Court. Mom says Mollie probably moved there because it reminded her of that. But Mollie’s father, my great grandfather, had also owned a summer house on San Rafael Place in North MB.
Back in those days, people were much less keen on living year-round at the beach. But the beach was very much a big part of Mollie’s makeup, and Ensenada is where she dropped that house and set up her family nest. As of this writing both houses are still there!
Sadly, Mollie passed away from hypertension and subsequent heart failure the day before her 57th birthday. My grandfather, a WWI veteran who later captained the city’s downtown fire station and skippered a fire boat on San Diego Bay, passed away of heart failure at age 66. He was given a military funeral, complete with three-volley salute, in Rosecrans National Cemetery on a grey winter’s day in 1966.
I remember crying in the back of our woody station wagon all the way back to the beach that day. After Grandpa died, they sold his house for 50,000. Today, the property is worth at least a cool million.
Other haphazard recollections from my childhood in MB include the time my brothers and I almost drowned in the ocean along the jetty. We’d gone out for a swim and the riptide had pulled us out. This sort of memory rarely goes beyond the event itself; as a near-calamity it ranks up there as a major scene on my timeline, but the details are too nebulous for my mind’s eye to accurately reconstruct. The drowning incident occurred, but like skin divers trying to spear fish in murky water, it’s hard to distinguish actual details from blurry ones.
Truth be told, certain aspects of my childhood would be erroneously recast were it not for the wonderful help of my mother, who wrote a cookbook that included our family history and was always willing and ready to fill in the holes of my fading memories, not to mention the gaps in my tree of family knowledge.
A neighbor, family friend, and fellow South MB resident, Jean Odmark, was the woman who saved the Lilly brothers from drowning that day. The undertow had dragged us out over our heads, whereupon the choppy surf instantly began pushing us underwater while driving us precariously close to the sharply jutting jetty rocks.
I remember feeling small and powerless against the great force of the sea. Dogpaddling with all my might against the immense strength of the ocean swells, my brothers and I were quickly being tugged out to deeper water while getting tossed closer and closer towards the jagged boulders in the breakwater. We were scared, exhausted, and drifting further and further apart when suddenly another face appeared in the whirling torrent of sea-gulping whitecaps: the face of our rescuer, Jean Odmark.
The rest is a blur. Within minutes, Jean had pulled Marshall and me out of harm’s way, depositing us atop a flat wedge of wave-splashed boulder in the surging tide along the bottom of the seawall. Before being plucked from danger, however, I remember seeing Byron floating bravely on his back in the rolling swells, his eyes intently focused on the blue sky above. Luckily, my older brother knew how to do the back float, which gave Jean the time she needed to dive back in and tow Byron back to safety, too.
She rescued all three of us from the oceanic riptide that day. Our mom eventually presented Jean with a plaque to honor and thank her for saving the lives of her three boys in such heroic fashion!
Byron had learned how to do the back float at The Plunge, an indoor, Olympic-size swimming pool at Belmont Park, an oceanfront amusement park that opened in MB in 1925. We swam in that celebrated pool many times as a family.
From the dim depths of boyhood remembrance lingers the pungent odor of conspicuous chlorination and the echoing clatter of frolicsome swimmers congregated within the moist bowels of the cavernous aquatics center; the dizzying height of the high dive and unconquerable fear of climbing its steep, formidable ladder; and above all else, the shadowy figure of my frogman father climbing to the top of the monstrous 10-meter tower, his agile, sinewy body dripping with pool water as he ascended the ladder steps, traversed the platform to a standing position, and dived from what seemed like the rafters into the rippling, reflective surface of the deep end below.
One of my clearest memories of The Plunge at an early age is the time my father told me to ride on his back while he swam from one side to the other underwater.
“Hold your breath, hang on, and don’t let go!” he instructed me.
I put my arms around his neck, locked my hands, and away we went. It was a blurry, jarring, and frightening torpedo ride from start to finish. After a few of his frog kicks I lost my grip, and my hands slipped down to his trapeziuses, which I tried to hold onto, but his slippery skin made that part of his neck and shoulders hard to grasp.
I opened my eyes and dug my fingers into his shoulders, but after a few more breaststrokes I lost my grip there as well. Slipping away, I frantically grabbed onto the next thing my hands touched: the waistband of his swimming trunks. I was hovering above my father now, jerking like a bareback bronco rider on the fuzziest underwater piggyback ride of my life.
Yanking on the stretchable strap of his swimsuit like a surcingle, I rode him like a bull shark, ripping and tearing at the stretchy band of rubber with all my might, pulling it taut on the recoiling strokes of his forceful frog kicks, and feeling it slacken like a deep-sea fishing line each time his arms and legs reset beneath the blurry water.
I tried to make him stop, but he just kept going, forcing me to watch the sturdy kinetics of his freckled shoulders with frightful fascination as he propelled us through 400,000 gallons of chlorinated H2O.
I had been too afraid to let go. When my dad finally surfaced on the other side, I was mad at him for not coming up sooner.
“Why didn’t you stop dad?” I complained. “Didn’t you feel me pulling on your suit?”
To which he replied, “Sorry son, I just thought you were just hanging on for dear life.”
My brothers and I also spent many days frolicking at Belmont Park, playing miniature golf right on the ocean in Fun Land, an area of the park with its own rides and a funhouse with slanted floors and whacky mirrors. When we were older kids in our teens, we used to pee in the funhouse. I still remember the strong smell of stale piss in the damp, dimly lit rooms and corridors of the wooden building.
Belmont Park closed in 1976; all of the amusement facades and facilities in the southern section of the park were finally torn down and replaced with a giant blacktop parking lot. Only two original structures from Belmont Park remain today: the historic wooden rollercoaster, the Giant Dipper, and The Plunge. Both were ultimately renovated and reopened as National Historic Landmarks.
On what used to be the central promenade, on the northern side near the Giant Dipper, was the batting cage. This old-time arcade favorite was free to watch and spectators were often lined up along the metal fencing behind home plate and the batter’s boxes. The rest of the cage was made of soft but durable netting.
I faced the pitching machine a few times with little success. Most of the time I just stood and observed folks stepping up inside the elevated pen and walking to the plate for their shot at hardball glory. What I remember most is the voice of the wrinkled cage attendant, a chain-smoking old-timer who mechanically recited batters’ scoring summaries after each round like a pro baseball announcer.
His tinny but steady calls now resonate in my mind like so many sad, nostalgic cries for the much simpler times of bygone days: four singles, three doubles, two triples, one homerun…and that was it.
There are many more MB memories too. Like the time a small pelagic shark swam into Mariner’s Cove (the first small bay next to the jetty) and our dad snorkeled out to find that the fish had been shot and was dying. Later that day, our neighbor, Tom Wilson, tracked the dorsal fin around the bay with a spear gun and killed the trespassing beast.
The mortally wounded shark was already relatively harmless when it entered the channel, but it still seemed like such a brave thing for the grown men to do. By the time Mr. Wilson hauled it back to shore it was already dead. I examined that shark for a long time. It had been an extraordinary living creature of the sea, and then suddenly it was gone. Life is like that; all living things must someday die, no matter what.
