It was a Tuesday morning in late October, and my Halloween costume was awaiting a few final details. Jennie and I were dressing up that year as the Cycle Sluts from Hell, a silly metal band we had seen on Beavis and Butthead a few months earlier. We stole most of the stuff for our outfits from the nearby Target—the black lipstick, the spray cans of hair dye, the garters with little plastic guns. I was putting the finishing touches on a practice run of my makeup—swoop of black up to the brow line, gray on the eyelids—when the phone rang.
I picked up, and it sounded like I was catching Jennie midscream.
“Please, you have to come over!” she choked out. “He’s hitting me again and I can’t take it! Come over as soon as you can!”
I had heard this before, but something in her voice sounded different. I decided to push my luck.
“Please, can we go over to Jennie’s really quick?” I asked my dad. “I know we might be late for school, but it sounds really important this time.”
“No way, José. Time for school. You’re going to miss first period.” Dad was worried about getting to his job at Goodyear. Dad couldn’t wait until I got my own car and could drive myself to school. Dad was, frankly, sick of Jennie’s shit. He had heard this whole routine—the tears, the overwrought claims of child abuse, the hysterical pleas to come over—before. By the time I ran the two blocks to her house, she was always fine—in fact, she would brush off my concern so effectively that even I started to wonder if she just liked the attention. “At some point, you have to just let her deal with her own problems,” Dad said—and he was the one behind the wheel. So instead of driving around the block to check on Jennie, we argued in the Volvo all the way to school.
“I’m really worried about Jennie.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“But what if she’s not?”
“She always is.”
“You don’t understand—her parents aren’t like you and mom. They’re really awful.”
“People make their own problems.”
“Dad . . . please?”
“No.”
Jennie didn’t show up at school all day, and she didn’t pick up when I rushed home to call her that afternoon. Twisting the phone cord anxiously between my fingers, I called Robert, then Chris, then Jennie again and again and again. Finally, her sister Debbie picked up. It was hard to make out what she was saying through the tears.
“Jennie’s.” Sob. “Jennie’s.” Sob. “Jennie’s dead! We found her on the bathroom floor this morning. She took a whole bottle of her pills. I have to go!” Click.
Death wasn’t part of my vocabulary. Almost all my relatives were still alive—even my great-grandmother, by now confined to a nursing home and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Had Jennie dropped clues, said things like, “If things don’t change, I’m going to kill myself!”? Of course she had. We all had. It wasn’t supposed to be literal.
The rest of the afternoon clicked by in fragments. The kitchen clock, stuck on 4:44 for what felt like hours as I slid down the kitchen wall. The sound of someone pounding on the door. A line of ants, crawling aimlessly along the ground. Chris and me, slumped in each other’s arms on my front stoop, the weather unseasonably cold for late October in Houston. Slamming my head into the fuzzy blue carpet of my bedroom over and over and over, shouting, “No! No! No!” Crying between two pillows in my twin bed in the dark. My dad coming into my room to tell me—for the first time I could remember—“I love you.”
And: “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t go to Jennie’s memorial. I stayed away when they planted the tree in her honor at our school, and glared at the kids who acted like they were her closest friends. I walked out of class and wrote moody poems about death and eternity. I listened to heavy metal and sat sullenly through family therapy, where an earnest young counselor asked me if I was thinking about self-harm while my parents looked on, wet-eyed and worried. I started hanging out in the occult section of the local Half Price Books. I bought a secret wardrobe of black clothes and changed into them at school, and dated a guy with a white stripe through his long black hair, who claimed his legs were so short because he had done too much acid before he hit puberty. (My taste in men would get only marginally better over the coming decades.)
Eventually, things improved. The guy with the skunk hair wouldn’t stop offering to relieve me of my virginity—he said it like he’d be doing me a favor—so I dumped him and started dating Mike, a skinny kid with thick, wavy hair and Coke-bottle glasses. As a sophomore and a popular theater kid, he was out of my league, but I wasn’t worrying about that so much anymore. Mike was sardonic, smart, and a little bit edgy—the kind of guy my parents wouldn’t love, but wouldn’t insist I break up with, either. We wrote each other sappy poems and made out in the stairwell after school, and one afternoon when my parents were out of the house, we lost our virginity to each other.
We were both half-formed—him, skinny and smooth-chested, me, still settling into my new teenage body—but I never thought twice about what we were doing, or felt like it wasn’t my choice to make. All the lessons I’d learned at church about what happens when a girl loses her virginity—that she becomes like a used-up tissue, or a flower with all the petals plucked off—had long since receded, replaced by a world-weary impatience to skip past the squares on the board marked “adolescence” and head straight into adulthood, where no one would tell me what to do or who to be friends with or what colors I was allowed to wear. Sex? Sex was nothing—something to get over with, so I could say I’d done it.
But I was still a child in the eyes of my parents and the Texas school system, and there was a lot that my parents and the Texas school system hadn’t taught me. I knew what sex was, roughly speaking, but the precise mechanics were a mystery I assumed would become obvious when the time came. My formal sex education had consisted of a one-hour lesson in elementary school, when the girls in our class watched a video about periods and pregnancy, and my informal sex education came from movies like Mermaids, where Winona Ryder hikes her skirt and clenches her teeth while an older man grunts and thrusts. Mom tried to supplement my education by handing me a pamphlet she got from a rack at the local Walgreens—a little taupe-and-brown number with a title like “What Girls Need to Know”—but the best information I had on the subject came from the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves I had bought at Half Price and hidden away in the back of my closet.
We took it slow—fumbling around under the scratchy sheets on my twin bed until we figured out what went where. No one had warned me that it would feel like my flesh was being ripped apart. Tears spurted from my eyes; the room went dim. “Are you okay?” Mike asked. “Do you want to stop?” “No!” I managed to gasp, my ears roaring. “I want to do this. I’m fine.” I had to get it over with sometime, I figured. Did I want to be one of those girls who got all the way to college without losing their virginity? I stared at the popcorn ceiling, looking for patterns in the bumps, while he finished. It didn’t take long. When it was over, we held each other for a long time, panting. “I love you,” he said. “I love you, too.”
Safe sex was a given. It was the early 1990s, when HIV was still seen as a death sentence, and if I had ignored the lectures about how drugs would fry your brain, I had somehow absorbed the ones about pregnancy and STDs—especially pregnancy. I knew my mom was on the Pill, because I had seen the pink plastic pill compacts in the drawer next to her bed, but I was about as likely to ask my mom to take me to Planned Parenthood as I was to ask her how her sex life with Dad was going. So we made sure to get together only after school, before my parents got home, and we always used condoms.
I was sitting in my room, on the phone with Mike, when I heard my mom’s voice ringing out from down the hallway. She was talking, as she often did, to the dog, but her tone sounded strange—confused, upset, a little panicky. “Ozzy . . . You’re not supposed to have that!” later became the
punch line to a joke I told at parties, but when our dog trotted up to my mother with a used condom in his mouth, it was the sound of a door slamming shut. I tried every lie I could think of—the condom wasn’t ours, we only did it once, what did she expect when she wouldn’t even discuss sex with her daughter?—but she wasn’t having it. “It’s not the having sex that I mind,” she said. “It’s the dishonesty.” For the record: I’m pretty sure it was both. Before the evening was over, I was banned from seeing Mike ever again, and within two weeks, a woman named Ana started showing up every day when I got home from school and staying until just after my parents walked in the door. Her official title was “housekeeper/cook.” Her actual job was “Erica’s security guard.”
One Saturday afternoon, not long after Ana started, another door closed when I came home to find my dad putting new locks on the liquor cabinet. Although neither of my parents were big drinkers, our house had a large, mirrored wet bar just off the living room, and its glass shelves were always stocked with gleaming bottles of Jack Daniel’s, Beefeater gin, and Absolut Vodka, which my friends and I considered the height of sophistication. Beneath those bottles, whose backlit reflections created the illusion of a bar that went on forever, were cabinets filled with more obscure libations, like the sweet Yugoslavian wine from my parents’ trip to East Germany in 1989 and the milky crème de menthe that came out during baking season.
For months, my friends and I had been stealing nips here and there while my parents were out of the house, and refilling the bottles of vodka and gin with water. I can’t say exactly when they figured it out—like so many things that happened in those years, there was no discussion, only consequences. But I didn’t spend long mourning the loss of easy access to liquor, because by sophomore year I had found more interesting things to ingest. Besides LSD and pot, I had discovered Mini Thins—convenience-store speed, now illegal, which made every pore tingle and vibrate with nervous intensity—along with whatever pills my friends stole from their parents’ medicine cabinets. Certain drugs remained off-limits—crystal was for dropouts, coke was for the girls whose moms took them to Brazil to get boob jobs over winter break, and heroin was for skinny white guys who lived in New York City. But hand me a pill and say, “This will make you feel awesome,” and it’d be down my throat before you could follow up with, “Actually, I’m not sure what those are.”
Was I trying to numb myself, to escape from the pain of losing Jennie and the boredom of high school? Probably. Drugs and alcohol may elevate mood and reduce inhibitions, but they also numb some feelings (grief) and intensify others (euphoria). When I was high, I wasn’t thinking about whether I would get into the college I wanted, or how hard it was to get close to new people after losing my best friend.
Drugs provided a social buffer that made me feel distant and superior to other people—from my science teacher, Mrs. Robinson, who tried in vain to teach me how to make a functional mousetrap car, to my wannabe druggie friend Meredith, who bought fake construction-paper “acid” and ended up freaking out in the school nurse’s office. They also broke up the monotony of public school, which was, let’s face it, designed to either bore kids into docile submission or incite an uprising.
Picture it: a flat, uninspiring two-story building flanked by vast parking lots, with a few scrubby trees casting pitiful shade. A student body the size of a small liberal-arts college, organized into the usual caste system of jocks and nerds and weirdos and nobodies, all lorded over by the straight-toothed popular clique. Football the dominant religion (with Christianity coming in a distant second), and even the arty kids, like me, conscripted into participating by painting run-through signs for the players to destroy at every home game. Hundreds of faculty, some attentive, some aloof, and still others a bit too attentive to their female students, offering stress-relieving back rubs during closed-door after-school study sessions. Enough mandatory conformity to inspire rebellion (a senior-year slideshow set to “Chickenshit Conformist” by the Dead Kennedys; dress code-compliant shirts worn braless and half buttoned), but enough academic rigor to keep those same kids on the path to elite scholarships and lucrative careers in finance and technology. In some ways, my high school was engineered for kids like me—left-brained memorizers with strong communication skills who could ace standardized tests through half-closed eyelids. In other ways, it was engineered to torture kids like me—easily bored overachievers who tore through the coursework quickly and didn’t understand why they had to sit through classes.
It took a while, but eventually I stopped crying every day. Mike and I broke up, but I found a new crush, and started spending Friday nights with him, drinking half sugar, half coffee at the local IHOP. I fooled around, nothing serious, with a couple of other guys—David, a rich kid who introduced me to Monty Python; Chris, a punk rocker from Lake Jackson who I met at AstroWorld when we both chickened out while our friends rode the Zipper. On Saturdays, my new best friend, Sarah, and I would get high and sneak into Houston, where an artsy/gay/hippie district called Montrose beckoned with all-ages punk shows, no-ID foam parties, head shops, and occult bookstores. I started to find my niche at school as an editor and combative columnist for the school’s weekly paper, the Ranger Review, and decided that the inkling of an ambition I’d had since I was five—the thought that maybe I could be a journalist, like Barbara Walters or Molly Ivins—wasn’t just a fantasy, but something I could actually do. The cloud of despair that descended after Jennie died began to lift, and I started to understand the difference between depression and mourning. I had no reason to stop using drugs, until I found one.
His name was Josh.
Four
No One Understands You Like I Do
I met Josh, who was a year younger than me, in journalism class, where we bonded over our mutual antagonism toward Mr. Streich, a former newspaperman who seemed to bear the weight of generations of students’ disdain on his sloping shoulders. Mr. Streich had it in for me from the beginning, just because I spent class time painting Wite-Out checks on my black Converse high tops instead of paying attention to his lectures on the inverted pyramid and journalistic objectivity, and he had it in for Josh just because he was always picking fights with the cheerleaders and mouthing off. Although I was a druggie and Josh was a nerd, we had something more important in common: We hated the same people, and isn’t that the foundation for many a stable and lasting relationship?
Josh was mordantly witty, moody, and mercurial as the Houston sky. With his creamy, near-translucent white skin and slicked-back swoop of thick black hair, he looked like a hero in a manga comic book, or a character in the Anne Rice novels everyone was carrying around that year. Everything with Josh was always life and death, right from the start: If I ever did drugs or even smoked cigarettes again, he would hate me forever, and he’d kill himself if he caught me flirting with another guy. Finally, I thought, I know what love feels like. It felt like almost drowning, then coming up for gasps of air.
Josh and I spent as much time as our parents would allow in each other’s company, watching Mystery Science Theater at his family’s oversize brick house in a subdivision called New Territory near the county jail, playing card games at the Just Desserts coffee shop off Highway 59, and breaking into construction sites to make out inside the unfinished houses on the edges of suburbia. Now that I had my own car, a silvery blue 1984 Corolla, I was responsible for getting myself to school after my parents left for work, and Josh would wait around the corner in his green Ford Explorer until he saw my mom’s Plymouth, then my dad’s Volvo, round the corner of our cul-de-sac. Three minutes later, I’d hear the familiar tap on my window, and I’d give him the thumbs-up and come around to let him in. All clear.
Our fights were volcanic.
Their usual theme was loyalty; specifically, mine.
“How do I know you won’t just leave me when you go to college?”
“I won’t, I promise.” (Hadn’t I chosen a college close
to home specifically so we could stay together while he finished high school?)
“Would you die for me?”
“Of course I would.”
“If I find out you’ve been dating other people when you go off to college, you know I’ll kill myself, right?”
“I would never do that.” Somehow, nothing I told him could ever convince him that I wouldn’t cheat on him, betray him, or leave him as soon as someone better looking, more popular, or less volatile came along.
No one liked Josh, which made me love him more; they couldn’t see his humor, his wit, or his piercing intelligence, but I could. I defended him to my friends when he yelled at me and called me a slut in front of them; I begged my parents to let me keep seeing him even after he kicked the glass out of his bedroom window during one of our epic fights. I made excuses to my old friends when he told me to stop hanging out with them, and told myself that it was for the best: If I did see them, they’d probably just nag me to break up with him. What my friends couldn’t see is that it was my fault for wearing an outfit that was too revealing, for refusing to walk out of class with him when he was having a really awful day, for bringing up my “wild” past, which sickened him. “I can’t believe you fucked that guy,” he would tell me, jamming pizza in his mouth. “Why should I believe you aren’t still fucking him now?”
When Josh wasn’t lecturing me about sex, he was lambasting me about drinking and drugs, which he considered crutches for weak people who couldn’t handle real life. “What is wrong with you? Why would you do that to yourself?” I told him the drinking and drugs were in the past, that I didn’t need those things now that I had him. (Hadn’t I quit drinking and doing drugs for him? How many times had I told him that I only got high because I hadn’t found anything meaningful in my life until we met?) We screamed at each other until our voices were ragged, whispered on the phone at night until both of us fell asleep, pulled each other’s hair and threw things until we ran out of things to throw.
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