Beauty, Disrupted

by Carre Otis

  Elliott and I were taken back to the station in separate cars. My parents were called. A young officer with a bushy mustache spoke to my sleep-addled mother, who apparently insisted that I was still in my bed.

  “Ma’am, I apologize, but we do in fact have your daughter here with us. You need to come pick her up. Right now.” The officer looked at me as he spoke. I squirmed under the bright fluorescent lights. Somewhere Elliott was being interrogated. I silently hoped he wasn’t getting himself into more trouble. I could guess what the cops thought of a thirty-year-old man caught in the middle of the night partying with a fourteen-year-old girl.

  The mustachioed one hung up the phone with my mom. “Your mother says you have graduation tomorrow,” he said, shaking his head. “Uh, I guess make that later today, huh?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah.” I stared at the clock above the cop’s desk—4:25 A.M.

  My father arrived angrier than I’d ever seen him before. He’d been to jails many times as a lawyer visiting his clients. But he’d never had to release his daughter from one, until now. He walked past without even looking at me.

  The officer behind the desk handed him some papers. “If you’ll sign here, Mr. Otis, you’ll be free to take your daughter. But we need you to decide if you want to press charges against the man she was with.”

  My father looked taken aback. “Charges for what, Officer?”

  The cop hesitated, clearing his throat awkwardly. “Well, sir, for . . . um, statutory rape.”

  Great. I’d only said Elliott was my boyfriend. God knows what Elliott had told them. He was foolhardy enough to tell them the truth.

  My father went white. With his fists clenched at his sides, he slowly turned toward me, cocked his head, and looked me right in the eyes. I didn’t want to meet his gaze, but I couldn’t help it. We stared at each other for a moment.

  “No. That won’t be necessary.”

  Relief. Then confusion. Why the hell not, Daddy? I wondered. Don’t want the family reputation spoiled any more than it already is? I stood quietly looking at him. Searching for an answer.

  My father turned back to the cop. “Just tell that motherfucker if he comes anywhere near my daughter again, he’ll have a shit storm to deal with.”

  My father signed the papers and left. He didn’t wait for me. He walked briskly to the car, got in, and started the motor.

  Tears rolled down my cheeks as I slowly followed him. The air remained thick with silence the whole drive back.

  The sun was rising as we arrived home. My father shut off the engine and spoke to me for the first time.

  “Get yourself washed up for graduation. I never want to speak of this again. You will graduate, and then you will be grounded. The entire summer.”

  I sat staring straight ahead, forcing myself not to sob.

  Then he opened his door, put one foot out, and turned back to me. “And by the way, kid, you got off easy.” He walked into the house, slamming the door behind him.

  I was crushed. As inadequate as his response had been, he’d done the best he could do with the tools he’d been given. And who’s to say which was greater: his disappointment in me or my pain at having disappointed him once again.

  A few bleary hours later, I sat with my classmates in the school gym as we graduated from Adeline E. Kent Middle School. On our drive to and from the ceremony, my parents said nothing about what had happened. Simply one more denial in a long string of them.

  Just as perplexing was the sight of Elliott standing defiantly in the doorway staring at me, a faint smile on his lips as I walked across the stage to receive my diploma. I never saw or spoke to him again after that day.

  The summer of 1983 was a hard one. My parents and I barely spoke. I had already been grounded, so there weren’t many more privileges they could deprive me of. Clearly they were running out of ways to control me. Hoping that another private school might do the trick, they enrolled me in Marin Academy in nearby San Rafael.

  Academically, it didn’t matter much if I was there or at any other private school. But there was one difference that did matter to me. I started as a freshman at Marin Academy with a boyfriend. And not a boyfriend like Elliott either. This boyfriend was someone I could see in the daylight hours. Scott Hamilton Chase was everything Elliott wasn’t. He was bright and athletic, and he came from a well-known family in the community. He was heading into his junior year at Branson, Marin Academy’s elite rival in nearby Ross. Scott was also handsome, charming, and age-appropriate. Miraculously, even my parents approved of him.

  I met Scott at one of my sister’s parties just before the start of my freshman year. We bonded over our mutual love of ska music. My favorite album that summer was the English Beat’s Special Beat Ser­vice; Scott was into another English group, too, called Madness. He rode a Vespa, the signature ride of all the cool kids. We quickly became a ­couple. For the first time, I was allowed to date openly. My parents were so relieved that I was seeing someone still in high school and someone from a well-to-do family that they agreed to relax some of the restrictions they’d imposed on me at the start of the summer.

  I loved Scott, and I loved the attention we got as a ­couple. But he was also a mystery to me. He kept a lot hidden behind his popular, happy-go-lucky persona. One thing I did find out quickly: Scott used a lot of drugs, even more than Elliott. I wasn’t always sure if it was because of or despite being high on cocaine that he managed to make it through his rigorous classes and varsity sports so successfully. He was a golden boy who got away with everything. Or so we all thought.

  I’d been in high school less than two weeks when Scott showed up at Marin Academy unexpectedly one afternoon. I was on the track for PE when I heard him calling my name. As I walked over to him, I saw that he was sweating profusely. A thick, white, foamy paste caked the sides of his mouth. His eyes were wild and unfocused. He grabbed me by the hand and led me away, his grip damp and hot.

  Scott tried to speak, but nothing came out. His mouth moved but could only form shapes around a disobedient tongue. There was a silent, desperate exchange between us, with me knowing he was in trouble yet also knowing I was completely in over my head. I had no idea what to do. He was high, higher than I’d ever seen him. Much too high.

  My hand reached up to touch his forehead. I gently wiped the trickling sweat from it, pressing the moisture into my now-dampened sweatshirt. He leaned back against a redwood tree, staring off into space, his body shaking.

  “Are you okay, Scott?” It was all I could get out, the answer obvious before the question was asked.

  He grabbed me with a trembling hand, his eyes briefly focused. In a flat and cold yet clear voice, he got out one sentence: “I lost my soccer match.”

  And with that, Scott ran, breaking into a sprint, heading for home. I took his place against the redwood tree, watching as he disappeared. I could have run after him. I could have told someone. I could have seen the obvious warning signs. But he hadn’t been my boyfriend for long. I didn’t know him as well as I had wanted. And it was just a soccer game, I reasoned.

  After school I hung out with a few friends before heading to the bus stop. It was nearly seven; the sun was starting to set as I took my seat on the plastic bench and waited. I hadn’t been sitting for more than a minute when instead of a yellow school bus I saw my mother’s old yellow Volvo approach. Both my parents were inside. My first reaction was pleasure at the thought that they’d come to pick me up. My second was confusion. My mother and father were very rarely in the same car these days unless they had to be. I stood up and walked toward them. I saw my mother’s expression, her mouth pulled tight, her hand inexplicably gripping my father’s, her knuckles white. I took a step back, inhaling sharply, knowing that news I didn’t want to hear was coming.

  My father leaned over toward me, his voice a single crackling whisper.

  “Scott’s dead.”

  I remember my body beginning to shake as my insides unraveled. The rest was a blur: my mo
ther’s mouth moving, my dad lifting me in his arms, placing me gently into the car, helping me out again when we arrived home, and carrying me to my room, where only my bunk bed, a heating pad, and my stuffed rabbit consoled me.

  When Scott left me that day, he ran straight home. After eating a chocolate chip cookie with his mother and sister, he went up to his room and wrote a note on his monogrammed Ralph Lauren stationery. He then took a handgun from his father’s dresser and shot himself in the head. He had died instantly.

  The note he left contained messages for his parents and his sister, but it was addressed to me. He had signed his name and added in parentheses, “See you later, maybe.” The police showed it to me, hoping I could shed some light on what Scott had been thinking and doing in his final hours. But I had no explanation to give them. We’d been together barely a month, this beautiful, funny, golden sixteen-year-old boy and I. What I did know was that he had come to me seeking my help that afternoon, but whatever it was that he’d needed from me I clearly hadn’t been able to give him. I also knew that on one occasion before this I’d been capable of standing squarely between Elliott and a gun, yet I couldn’t do the same for Scott. In my mind and heart, I felt partly responsible for saving one life and equally responsible for not saving another.

  I would never let that happen again.

  Soon it seemed as if everyone in the county knew that Scott’s note had been addressed to me. Some ­people were sympathetic, others judgmental, and of course there were those who just gossiped behind my back. Two weeks into my high-school career, I was desperate to get out of a very unwelcome spotlight. Because of the circumstances of Scott’s death, a lot of kids at Branson and Marin Academy pledged never to do cocaine again. I, on the other hand, couldn’t take that pledge. Scott was gone. The new friends I’d made through him were gone, too. But the impressive stash of coke that Scott had given to me was not. And in the days and weeks after his suicide, I slowly but steadily made my way through his supply.

  One blustery late-September afternoon, desperate to get off campus, I invited an older fellow student to share a few lines with me. We drove her car to a tree-lined street above the school and parked under an old oak stand. Using her open glove compartment as a makeshift table, I cut two long lines of coke, pulled out a straw, and snorted. As I lifted my head, I came face-to-face with a cop, who was staring straight through the passenger’s-side window. I was busted again.

  It was in everyone’s best interest to keep the misdeeds of the town’s rich kids out of the courts and the newspapers. So rather than arresting us, the cops drove us back down to campus and turned us over to the headmaster.

  Marin Academy was a “progressive” school. Rather than dismissing me in private, I recall the administration gathering the student body together the next day to settle my punishment. I was made to stand at a podium in the auditorium before my classmates as they voted to expel me. The results weren’t even close. My career at Marin Academy ended nearly unanimously, less than a month after it began.

  By the start of the ninth grade, my formal education was over. At this point I was numb. Scott’s suicide, my guilt, and my public scapegoating for his death had done more than enough damage. Being kicked out of my second private school in three years seemed to have hardly made an impact on me. (Of course, now I know how far from the truth that statement really is!) I was so overwhelmed by the drama and the disasters that I didn’t even react when my parents told me they were sending me away.

  True to their liberal beliefs, they had no intention of shipping me off to a traditional reform school. But they were at their wits’ end, and in all fairness they were truly worried about me. So they sent me to a place where parents like them had sent kids like me before: to John Woolman, an unconventional Quaker boarding school in the Sierras. Woolman had a history of dealing with troubled teens, but in a countercultural fashion. Rather than taking away their freedoms, Woolman gave young ­people far more freedom than they’d ever had before, hoping that it would lead to a willingness to take responsibility for themselves. For some kids it worked. In a way it did for me, too. In fact, it gave me enough clarity and courage to drop out of school altogether.

  While I know now that my parents didn’t see their actions as abandonment, I sure as hell felt as if it was when they left me off at Woolman after the long drive up from Marin. Yes, they had tears in their eyes as they headed back to their car; but my eyes were completely overflowing. I wanted to run to them, to tell them I was sorry, to beg them to do anything but leave me behind. Instead I simply watched as their car rounded the corner and pulled away.

  The school had the feel of a hippie commune. Girls and boys lived in A-frame cabins. The showers were single-sex but communal. The students cooked the meals, cleaned the cabins, maintained the grounds, and grew vegetables and fruit in Woolman’s gardens and orchard. The faculty and administration practiced a deeper democracy than even Marin Academy. Every major decision was made with student input, and every student was invited and encouraged to be heard. We were given rights, and yes, responsibilities. We learned that our voices mattered.

  A lot of the students at Woolman were like me: misfits from well-off Bay Area families. Not surprisingly, there were as many drugs at Woolman at the time as there had been at Marin Academy or Branson. But the drug of choice among the kids I knew wasn’t something as suburban as cocaine. Here in the mountains, the drugs were designed to do more than get you high. They were intended for exploration and discovery. One of those drugs was LSD.

  I first did acid shortly before Thanksgiving break in 1983. I’d been at Woolman just over a month, and I’d already been teased quite a bit about my LSD “virginity.” A large group of us crowded into the little cabin I shared with my beautiful earth mama of a roommate, Andrea. We lit candles and put them on every inch of flat surface. The Grateful Dead played on the stereo. Our friend Troy pulled a sheet of paper out of a little plastic bag. There was a giant image of Mickey Mouse on the sheet, made up of tiny perforated square images of Minnie Mouse. Cooper handed me one little square.

  “Seriously, Coop, is this enough?” I asked naïvely. It looked so tiny.

  “Hell yeah. More than enough. Girl, you’ll be flying high and right within the hour. Stick out your tongue.”

  I did. And soon the tapestries on the walls turned to waves and the music from the stereo began to ripple with light. All night long we tripped and bonded with one another. When daylight finally came, I felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. For the first time in a very long time, I was happy. It wasn’t just the LSD that was liberating. It was everything about the place: the nature, the democracy, the students, the relentless encouragement, the absence of judgment. My dyslexia didn’t matter, my past didn’t matter, all my perceived shortcomings didn’t matter. What mattered was my ability to grow and to feel more connected to others.

  I spent less than one full year at Woolman, marinating in its hippie broth. They were wild times, when lifelong friendships were formed and when I experienced more laughter than I ever had before. But it couldn’t last. By the time spring rolled around, the magic was wearing off. The LSD trips weren’t the same; the periods after coming down were growing more prolonged and depressing. And seeing one of my stoned classmates climb on top of the biology teacher’s car, drop his pants, and take a shit on the hood certainly sealed my disenchantment.

  I began to spend as much time as I could in nearby Grass Valley, the closest town to the school. Tired of tripping, I moved on to the risky routine of hiking through the forest, crossing the streams on the other side, and jumping a fence to get to Highway 49, where I could usually thumb a ride for the twenty-minute drive into town. In the spring of 1984, Grass Valley had a thriving music scene and some great coffee shops. I became a regular. One night near the end of the school year, a small group of us from Woolman caught a visiting band from San Francisco, the Guardians. They played infectious and infinitely danceable world-beat music. During the
ir set my eye kept wandering to a guy with a star-shaped tattoo who stood near the stage swaying to the music, his gaze increasingly directed back at me. As soon as the set break arrived, I introduced myself. He was Kenny, and he was with the band. He seemed to ooze trouble. I was instantly infatuated.

  When the spring semester ended and I’d moved back to Marin, I broke some unsettling news to my parents. They were on the verge of divorcing, and when they asked me what I planned to do next, I told them I’d made my decision: I was dropping out of Woolman, dropping out of school altogether, and I was moving to Berkeley to live with Kenny.

  I was sixteen. I had a ninth-grade education, but I had another adult boyfriend and a hunger to leave Marin once and for all. “That’s the plan,” I repeated stubbornly to my exasperated parents. What other plan did I need?

  THE FIRST RUNWAY

  Living on my own at sixteen turned out to be nothing like what I thought it would be. I discovered that it wasn’t only a plan that I lacked, I had no money to pay for food or rent either. I had dropped out of high school and moved in with a guy who was a good ten years older than me.

  Kenny shared a rental in Berkeley with three roommates: Vicky, a cute blond lesbian with a lisp; Janelle, her tough, punk girlfriend; and Les Claypool, the bassist and lead singer of the cult punk band Primus. It was a wild group. Kenny was a roadie for various East Bay musicians, including the Guardians, and while he was working, I tried desperately to get my feet back under me. I didn’t know whether or not anyone frowned on Kenny for bringing a minor into the house to live, but I did know that my lack of money was a real issue for the others. Everyone there slaved to make ends meet, and I was the only one who was unemployed. Most of the jobs I applied for required someone of legal age, and I was shy of that by a good year and a half.

  Under that one roof, everyone was an artist of some kind or another. It was very intimidating. On the nights when we’d go out to the clubs and hang backstage with Kenny, I would always borrow a pair of his Danskin leggings and wear them with a long men’s shirt and my soft-soled jazz shoes. The best and only look I had was the borrowed look. I couldn’t afford anything else.