by Bobi Conn
James, a boy from health class, called me a couple of weeks later and came over to go for a walk together. I told him I had gone to the movies with Shawn and wondered whether I should date him—as if I was asking for advice, since the two boys knew each other. As if Shawn wanted to date me and I had a choice in the matter. After a minute of silence, he responded that he didn’t think I should date Shawn, but he thought I should date him instead. I was shocked he asked me to date him like that—it was the very first time a boy ever asked me to be his girlfriend, and he became my very first boyfriend. He met my mom and stepfather, who weren’t impressed, but I guess they didn’t think it would last long enough to be of any consequence.
That summer, James decided he wanted to be a hippie, and he asked me whether I wanted to be a hippie with him. I turned fifteen, and he was sixteen; he would turn seventeen in the winter. All I knew of hippies came from listening to my mother’s one Janis Joplin album while we were still in the holler and from having a vague notion of what Woodstock was. James listened to the Grateful Dead and made me a mixtape of their songs, which to this day is the best mixtape I have ever heard. After giving up on pop music, I had turned to Chuck Berry and Sam Cooke, along with the Johnny Horton tape that my stepfather brought with him from Nevada—I had the least relatable music taste of anyone I knew. I was happy to give up on pop culture altogether, and James introduced me to another culture that made much more sense at the time—a counterculture that itself rejected the entire world I felt so rejected and battered by.
James also wanted to become a vegetarian that summer. At first, we went on a lot of hikes and took turkey sandwiches and apples from his mother’s house, but then we began eschewing the meat for grilled cheese sandwiches. His mother had salad all the time, and whole wheat bread—stuff that tasted and felt good to me but that my mom and stepdad didn’t buy. When he asked me whether I wanted to be a vegetarian, too, I said yes right away and ate whatever I could that didn’t clearly involve meat. How nice it was to have someone to be something with.
My mother refused to support my new diet and wouldn’t make any dish meat-free, or even a portion of the dish. Since she and my stepdad ate meat at every meal, I learned to cook fifteen-bean soup and potato soup. I taught myself to make bread so I could have whole wheat bread. She didn’t want to buy me soy milk, which I wanted to try, so I spent my own money to buy all the health foods I had never heard of until then. I didn’t get an allowance, though, so I ended up mostly eating the nonmeat side dishes they cooked—mashed potatoes, canned green beans, and the like.
That same summer, I had my first job, working for the United States Forest Service. They had an office right outside Morehead, by Cave Run Lake. I earned minimum wage—something close to five dollars an hour—and spent forty hours each week doing some sort of work with another girl from school who had also signed up for the employment program for high school sophomores.
By that time, James had reintroduced me to smoking weed. I had smoked with my father when I was thirteen or so, camping for the last time with our cousins from Tennessee. The weed had made me feel irritable, but not too long after, I asked my dad to teach me to roll a joint, hoping it would make me feel good that time. He did, but I still didn’t feel a high. I persisted with James, though, and finally developed a liking for it. After a few more tries, I was thoroughly enjoying it. I had intense hallucinations just riding in James’s mother’s car, listening to Jefferson Airplane or Pink Floyd. Sometimes I would ask my dad to get us weed, and sometimes he bought it from my boyfriend.
I lost my virginity that year. Didn’t lose it, really—I set it aside quite willingly.
Some of the older men at the Forest Service knew my dad, and some of them liked to smoke weed, so they would buy it from me, too. One guy took Mini Thin pills all day long for his asthma. I did other things out in the woods as we spread lime and seeds and fertilizer and straw to build ponds. I took off my shirt one day, wearing no bra, since it was as hot as hell and the older boy I was working with had his shirt off. I asked him whether he minded, and he said no—that seemed good enough for me. I didn’t think of myself as a girl in this boy’s eyes—just as a flat-chested, unattractive female he wouldn’t want to see anyway. Later it would occur to me that boys like to tell stories about such things and that I just didn’t have a good sense of what people expected of me or how much they could really accept. Much later, I realized that when it comes to taking off shirts, most boys his age do not differentiate between girls like me and other girls.
James spent most of that summer with his grandparents in Ashland. My mother wouldn’t let me call him from our house, even if I paid her back for the long-distance charges. That summer, I put almost all the money I earned toward phone cards and walked to a pay phone in town to call him, though occasionally I would try calling from our house if my mother and stepfather were in bed but I thought maybe I wouldn’t wake up his grandparents. Phone cards were terribly expensive at the time, and I managed to blow my entire salary on calling him and buying a few CDs.
When he came back and school started once again, we spent a lot of time at his mother’s house after school. Frank and my mother decided to crack down on that, so they had me come straight home after school to do chores—namely, loading the dishwasher and washing all the dirty pots and pans by hand. I would then walk to meet James, and we either went to his mother’s house until shortly before she would come home, or we went up into the woods behind the university’s radio station tower, where we had stashed a gravity bong for smoking weed.
We would often smoke a little and then go down to the university library and into the basement, where they kept the bound periodicals. We did our homework completely stoned, and one night, after doing a lot of Algebra II homework, I ended up hallucinating the quadratic formula. We would also have sex in the basement, in the woods, in his mother’s house, and wherever else we thought we could get away with it. I knew how pregnancy worked but never thought about condoms or birth control.
I loved the sex, but I also learned that I shouldn’t enjoy it to the fullest—I had to rein myself in a bit and not enjoy it too much. He didn’t like it when I orgasmed, so I learned to hold my orgasms back. I wanted to have sex all the time, and he called me a nympho. One time, he didn’t want to have sex at all, and I rubbed myself lying next to him in bed. When I was finished, he looked at me and asked with disdain, Happy now?
Even as a very young girl, I somehow knew that sex was a problem all around me. It was when my father rubbed calamine lotion on my poison ivy–covered legs and said, You know I’m not doing anything wrong, don’t you? and when I was five and slept in the bed close to him one night and tried to put my foot on his leg, and he moved away. I didn’t understand why he didn’t want his daughter’s affection. It was every moment in which an older man looked into my eyes and smiled knowingly, the moments in which my father would lose it and call me a whore or a slut or whatever else. It was like I wore a flashing sign that said, Take what you want! and it took many years for me to remember who the first really was, who really took my virginity, to whom I lost something. But we never really forget—we just tuck things away, and they quietly creep into each of our actions, our thoughts, our words, our principles, and our fears.
I learned so much the year I was fifteen. I lied to my mother and told her I was spending the week with my father so I could go to my first rock concert—all the way to Providence, Rhode Island. There, I took LSD for the first time—not a large dose, just enough to feel something different happening with my senses. Over the next two years, I tried opium, mushrooms, a few more doses of LSD (with a little more oomph to them), and DMT. It was a mother’s nightmare. I stopped wearing deodorant and smeared patchouli oil on my armpits instead. I smelled like body odor all the time and did not care. I wore bell-bottoms that had actually been around since the 1970s and huge tie-dye shirts with Grateful Dead logos or mushrooms on them.
Although James and his older friends helpe
d me feel like I finally belonged somewhere, I was still angry with the world, and now I had a language to help me articulate that feeling, however imprecise. I didn’t think I was rebelling against my parents—I still came home after school to do my chores, and I was never more than a couple of minutes late for curfew, which was whenever the sun set, regardless of how early that could be in the winter. Thinking that I was rejecting some system or broken culture allowed me to say, I can’t do this anymore, and I do not belong here. I found a reason for my not feeling okay that made my environment, my society, the problem—not me, not something inside me.
And that helped. It helped me to say there was something wrong with hierarchy, something wrong with societal norms, something dreadfully wrong with our culture of exploitation. It let me practice saying, I don’t belong here, before I had to face the family and community who still claimed me. I learned to say, I can’t be a part of this, to an audience that wasn’t listening, and that experience helped me eventually say it when it counted.
While I was finally excited about my not belonging, I still felt compelled to achieve academically, though it felt a bit like a game at that point. I didn’t take my classes seriously, and I didn’t take my teachers seriously, but I enjoyed having mastery over the work they assigned me. I was a smart-ass in class and often still stoned from the weed we smoked in a cemetery on our way to the bus stop. Still, several of my teachers managed to have an impact on my thinking, whether they knew it or not.
In my sophomore Algebra II class, my teacher one day suggested that we take a practice test at home to prepare for an upcoming test. I raised my hand and asked him whether we would receive points for the practice test, and he said no. In typical fifteen-year-old fashion, I asked with a smirk, Why would I do it, then? He stopped in his tracks and stared straight at me to respond, To learn.
That was the first time a teacher had ever really made me think there was an intrinsic value to my learning. I had always thought of my good grades in school as being for others—to please my teachers, to please my parents. It was one of the few ways I received positive attention, when I did: She’s a smart little thing.
I went home and took the practice test that night, then checked my answers and made sure I knew how to do all the problems. I scored higher than anyone in the class for the rest of the year, and since I earned almost every single bonus point our teacher offered, I ended the semester with a grade of 105 percent. The other smart kids who were in the accelerated classes with me wanted to pair up anytime we got to work together. They wanted something I had at that time, and though I did not like them, I would partner up with them and proceed to do most of the work.
The best part about dating an older boy and smoking lots of weed with him was that I found myself once again in the woods much of the time—smoking at our hidden spot or hiking the trails behind the university lake, walking in the woods around my house, or climbing the cliffs that sat above my granny’s house and marked the border between her property and the Daniel Boone National Forest, along the ridgeline of the hills that cradled her fields and garden and home. We would often smoke and sit quietly, or my boyfriend would talk to a friend while I watched the leaves and noticed their perfect arrangement along the branches. I discovered that flocks of birds flew in perfect synchrony with one another and in time with heartbeats. That the wind loved the trees and that the forest floor loved the leaves, that the heat and the cold and the sun and its setting were all singing a love song. That the wordless joy of the forest was not lost in my past.
And I felt hope.
CHAPTER 15
Love and Marriage
I cheated on James shortly after we started dating. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to cheat on him—it was just that one of his friends made advances, and it didn’t occur to me that I should say no, that I could say no. I told James but wouldn’t tell him who it was. He broke up with me but decided to forgive me not too long afterward. There was a lot of forgiving yet to come, between the two of us.
James started college at the university in Morehead the same semester I started my junior year of high school. He made new friends, older college students who lived in houses they rented and had parties in. James moved in with them for a portion of the semester. I was part of his night life sometimes, on the rare occasion I was allowed to stay out past dark.
My stepdad went through my purse around that time and found the clay pipe I had made in art class—a ceramics project I had hidden in a bigger clay pot and fired in the kiln. I was grounded for a while, and then my mom sat me down at a fast-food restaurant and laid out some new ground rules: I would start shaving my legs. I would start eating meat. I would stop smoking pot. These things I was doing, they made her look bad. Everyone knew about it.
I quickly told her I would stop smoking pot, since it was illegal and I was living in her house. I thought that was fair. But I figured what I shaved and what I ate didn’t really affect anyone but me. When I did find myself around someone telling me, It’s okay to smoke a little—she’ll never know, I just said, No, I gave her my word. Somehow, that still meant something.
Sometimes, when I couldn’t go where James was going, I asked him to stay with me, to skip the party. He didn’t, though, and I had a nagging sense that something was changing, that he was further away from me than it seemed. I was scared of losing the one person I thought would ever love me, so I just quietly worried and waited to feel good again.
One of his older friends decided to tell me one day that James was spending an awful lot of time with one of the college girls who sometimes came to their parties. I didn’t believe he would cheat on me, but I was filled with jealousy and a new kind of anxiety I had never felt before. Each time I came to their house, I scanned the room for the blond girl whom I never really met, whose name made my stomach hurt.
Then James failed out of the university. After Christmas break, he transferred to Eastern Kentucky University, all the way in Richmond. I was working at Arby’s, and once again, I spent all the money I made on phone cards to call his dorm room. Sometimes I left messages with his roommate. Mostly, the phone just rang. I would stand at the pay phone closest to my house and listen to the endless ringing, another taunt I could not fit into my mind. I wrote him letters and waited for his responses. My intuition told me something was wrong, but I desperately wanted everything to be okay, so instead I hoped that I was wrong, that my gut was wrong, that there was just something wrong with me.
There seemed to be an impenetrable wall between me and whoever was near. Then I fell in love with a friend’s younger brother. We shared one kiss—in my excitement at finding him and his wit, his mind, and his love for music that I had never heard and that became the soundtrack for those months of my life, I kissed him lightly in one of the sweet groves of trees near my trailer, though he was not enthusiastic in the way I thought he would be. His face seemed to be made like a painting, eyes that narrowed just a bit, lips always on the verge of a smile.
He wanted me to break up with James, who was so far away by now, but I wouldn’t. And yet, I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t in love with the younger boy, in love with his whole family. On school mornings, I walked to their house just to be around their laughter and their apparent understanding of one another, which seemed to extend even to me. I visited the sister after school sometimes—she was a year older and mostly seemed to tolerate me. She wrote me a letter one day, telling me to choose between her and her brother, as I couldn’t be friends with both of them. I chose him, the one who had not given me an ultimatum.
I thought she would understand, just as I expected him to understand why I couldn’t choose him over James. I showed up with a loaf of homemade bread once, and only the parents spoke to me, the kids all busy in their rooms, and it slowly dawned on me that something had changed. I’d walk to the bus stop near their house for a while longer, but there would be no laughter for me, no belonging with their family, and finally, I caught on.
Jame
s returned from school just as I ran out of other people to love me, and he hadn’t made good-enough grades to go back the next semester. I had just turned seventeen that summer, and my mother and stepfather told me we were moving to Elliott County, which offered even less to entertain a teenager than where we were living. They said I could finish my senior year at my current high school and continue working at Long John Silver’s—Arby’s didn’t last all that long—but I would have to drive straight home every day unless I was working, and no socializing. I knew what that meant—no more seeing James unless he could find a way to drive the thirty minutes to our new house, which would sit along a high ridge near the narrow, winding road that he and I often drove to our pot dealer’s house as we meandered along the country roads, listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, me sometimes writing poetry. I was devastated. I didn’t have a lot of friends, but this move would mean that I only experienced the worst of school and work, and none of the good things—hikes with James, going to his friends’ houses, trying to be friends with the few people who still talked to me.
When I told him, James and I decided we should try to live together. I knew that my mom and stepdad wouldn’t let me see him if they managed to take me to Elliott County, and I was certain I would lose him. I was sure he was the only man who would ever love me, and I clung to what we had, no matter how unhealthy or unhappy I sometimes knew it to be.
