by Tracy Ross
By some miracle, she didn’t. She kept praying, closing her eyes again and tilting her face toward the sun. The calm on her lips made me close my eyes too, and I saw an image of God performing surgery on my knee. He stood over the operating table with a couple of lady angels in white feather bikinis. His long, grey hair brushed the top of a shiny, metallic jacket with the words HELLO, I’M GOD. written on the back. When he was ready to start cutting, he sliced into my knee with a scalpel made of light. The whole vision was so funny, I accidentally started laughing.
Oh crap, I thought. Mayz is gonna kill me. Here she is trying to help and I’m making fun of the whole thing. I shut my trap as fast as I’d opened it. But then Mayz started giggling. When I opened my eyes, she was two inches from my face and smiling. “I don’t know what just happened,” she said, “but the color in your cheeks just became a hundred shades brighter.”
And then we were really cracking up, the two of us at once. The harder she laughed the harder I did until both of us were clutching our stomachs. A part of me felt self-conscious about losing control like that. But we howled until tears were streaming down both of our faces, and then we stopped, and then we started up again.
I doubt either of us had any idea why we carried on until we were exhausted, sitting under an elm tree on that sweltering summer day. But it was fun, and I felt connected to something bigger than Mayz. I liked how she seemed to appreciate me for no other reason than who I was. And our laughter seemed to seal our friendship in a way that even praying couldn’t.
Later that year, I met another Twin Falls angel. His name was Andrew Durham, and we performed school plays and in the JUMP Company together. Andrew had neck-length hair, burnt-butter skin, and bones that stuck out above his waistband. We liked to dance in fields of dried wheat blossoms. I’d pick him up in my Volkswagen Rabbit, and we’d drive ten miles outside of Twin Falls.
“Watch this!” Andrew would shout, pulling at my attention. He’d place his viola behind his neck and try to play it, while hopping on one foot. I’d clap my hands and tell him what he wanted to hear: that one day he’d be first violin in the New York Philharmonic. Then we’d lie in the weeds, feeling cockleburs bite our skin.
I didn’t love Andy, who insisted I call him Andrew because it sounded more serious and lyrical. He was too weird and skinny, and he believed in things like chakra cleansing and breathetarians (they’re like vegetarians, but live on air instead of broccoli and tomatoes). But he knew of a place called Interlochen Arts Academy, a school in northern Michigan where kids like us—actors and writers, musicians and weavers—spent five hours a day practicing their art forms. Andrew’s brother, Paul, said Interlochen was like Fame, only older and more respected. The four hundred kids accepted there lived in dorms in the woods surrounding a lake. It was expensive—$10,000 a year—but the cost didn’t deter me. I had more than that sitting in a bank account my real dad left me when he died.
There was no conceivable reason why I should have gotten accepted. But I went for it, flying to northern Michigan with my JUMP Company director, Robyn McCracken. On the day of our arrival, we took a tour of the campus. It sat on 1,200 acres under a canopy of pine, oak, and maple trees. The air was cool, and small birds flitted through the branches. Dirt paths linked small buildings like the textiles shop, where, through a giant glass window, I saw a boy with long hair weaving a tapestry on a wooden loom. Wispy girls in leg warmers wove past kids with their noses stuck in Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. By lunchtime, I knew I would do anything to get in.
But to get in, I had to audition. So the following day, I found my way to a small, brown building called Grunow Theater. I knew the theater directors, Jude Levinson and David Montee, were seated inside. Jude was the big, bodacious director of the theater department, who caked her lids in bright blue eye shadow and always, always wore black. Slight and cerebral looking, with feathered brown hair and big, blocky glasses, David had joined Interlochen the previous spring and specialized in something called the Lee Strasberg technique.
I waited backstage until David called my name; then I went on and recited Blanche’s monologue from A Streetcar Named Desire. I sang “I Met a Boy Named Frank Mills” from the musical Hair. When I finished, I stood in the light, waiting for Jude and David to say something, anything, that would indicate whether or not they liked me. But all David said was “Thank you, Tracy,” at which point I walked, trembling like a grocery bag in a windstorm, out of the darkened auditorium.
My acceptance letter came on a day in May when the wind whipped my hair into a million different directions. I ran to the mailbox, crossing all of my fingers. The shining white envelope seemed to warm the cold, steel container. I held my breath and peeled open the back flap, which was sticky, I was sure, with the spit of a creative genius.
By the time I saw the word “Congratulations,” I was already screaming.
My parents drove Andrew and me to Interlochen. They used up all of their vacation time to do it. I remember singing as we pulled up to the bucolic campus. Sun-dappled cabins peeked through columns of giant pines. The entire school was tucked in the woods between two shimmering lakes. Loons called through the mist, accompanied by the sounds of violin, flute, and bass.
My classmates poured out of cars with license plates from New York, California, and Rhode Island. Most of them, I’d later find out, started at Interlochen when they were freshmen but had practiced their disciplines since before they could write their own names. I had done approximately two community theater shows when I arrived there in late August of 1988. But despite my lack of professional experience, Jude and David made me a part of the theater company. During the first week of school, I auditioned for and was cast as the understudy for Ruth Hunsdorfer in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Ruth was the perfect first role for me; she, too, was the product of abuse.
Overnight, my life not merely changed but vaulted upward at Interlochen. The place seemed designed specifically to crack me out of my shell of shame. I knew that I had escaped something dangerous, potentially lethal, in Twin Falls. I sensed how close my reckless behavior had brought me to killing myself, which made me all the more thankful that I’d found Interlochen’s artistic Eden.
On the musty stage of Grunow Theater, Jude led us through improvisation and visualization exercises meant to free us of our inhibitions. We lay on the floor and imagined ourselves as another person, in another life. I had been doing this for most of my existence, so transporting myself was effortless. Over the course of the year, I scored the roles of Tiresias, the blind seer in Antigone who is punished by the gods when he reveals their secrets; and Hattie, a scrappy, single mother of four who shuns the abusive men in her life in James McClure’s Laundry and Bourbon. Over and over, Jude and David praised me for my ability to “inhabit” a character, while also pushing me to do it better. And each time they pushed, I felt myself expand into a braver version of myself, a person who had talent and worth. For the first time, I was good at something that was all my own; for the first time, I felt connected to the girl I might have been if the abuse had never happened. As we rehearsed our scenes from various plays, Jude would yell from the back of the theater, “That sucked! Do it again!” But while the other students cringed at her crassness, I reveled in it. I became free to reconstruct the girl I knew myself to be, and Jude gave me the tools to expedite the process.
It helped that the campus was surrounded by thick, dark woods. Most kids went there to do illicit things like drink and smoke pot, but I remember retreating to them to fill up. Not since I’d been to the Sawtooths had I seen such thick, dark forests. With my friend Jessica, I’d slip out the door of Thor Johnson Hall and ride my bike into the state park, adjacent to the campus.
We’d pedal across the leaf-strewn earth until we found a spot where we knew we were hidden. Smelling the rich, musky scent of rain mixed with rotting oak leaves, we’d drop our bikes and start pretending. Jessica liked to perform scenes from The Lost Boys,
which had come out the previous summer.
But more than the characters we chose, I remember the smell of those crisp, cold, fall evenings. Jess and I both liked cigarettes, so my memories are tinged with the scent of smoke. I see the sun, dropping behind the lake, and birds—chickadees, pileated woodpeckers—darting through the mixed-wood forest. At Interlochen I found a world that was clean, and unblemished, and filled with people who were dedicated to a higher power. The power was art. And in its reflection, I saw myself.
That Christmas, I rode the train back to Twin Falls. I wore my navy blue corduroys and light blue oxford, the Interlochen school uniform. I didn’t have to wear it—I should have been dying to change into anything else after donning it daily for four months—but I held on to Interlochen as tightly as possible in the hopes that it would protect me as I made my reentry home.
I arrived three days after leaving northern Michigan, and immediately realized that my parents had established a new order: abuse would be in the past, something we didn’t bring up. Chris took me partying, bragging about how his little sister went to the same school as the mom in Family Ties. “Don’t forget about the guy who played Mozart in Amadeus,” I added, laying it on even thicker. Mom made us all go to Christmas Eve mass, which we did, buzzing on beers and eggnog and belting out We Three Kings without caring that we were off-key. Mom had found her comfort or at least her compromise; she clung to her prayer book and kneeled.
As for Dad, he was distant, but I kind of liked it that way. Now that I went to a fancy boarding school, I didn’t feel like listening to his simplistic philosophies or stupid jokes. When he talked I listened, nodding my head and squinting to show him I was interested. But Dad had never been book smart; his spelling was sixth-grade level at best. Finally presented with an opportunity to show him how far I’d overreached him, I used words I knew he’d have to ask me to define. He never did, and maybe my attempts at belittling him flew past him. But I knew that I’d superseded his intelligence, and it made me feel better than amazing.
One night toward the end of my stay, Dad asked me to join him outside. It had been snowing, and we kicked our feet at the dirty piles of snow. Dad reached in his pocket and produced a bottle opener and a cold Bud, which I guzzled while he told me about a job he was applying for in Las Vegas at a natural gas company. When it was my turn to catch him up, I recited a few lines from Arsenic and Old Lace.
Nothing about my old life in Twin Falls appealed to me anymore—not the football games, the school dances, or the Antichrists. How could I return to that after delving into Dostoevsky? With his hands jammed in his pockets, Dad reminded me of the pre-Interlochen times. He shook his head and looked up at the streetlamp we were standing under, where great lacy snowflakes appeared out of the darkness and spiraled into the light.
A part of me wanted to ditch him, as I’d ditched the rest of the boys in Twin Falls. But because I loved him, and it was Christmas, I stayed, even when I got cold.
“I’m proud of you, Tracy,” he said, taking a swig of his beer and clearing the clog out of his throat that had been there since the night I ran away from here. “Not only because you’re the biggest thing that’s ever come out of this place, but for getting yourself out of this mess.”
After Christmas, Interlochen lay buried in snow. For weeks on end, the wind howled, and the temperature hovered around zero. Most of my classmates stayed in their dorm rooms, drinking chamomile tea and listening to James Taylor. But an old passion rekindled inside me. The hint of sun drew me out of my cramped room and onto the flat, white sheets of snow that covered the campus. I donned sweatpants, a Patagonia fleece, and a pair of L.L.Bean cross-country skis Reed had bought me for my eighteenth birthday and headed across the highway into the trees. I found my way back to trees and rocks and snow, the absolutes of the world, which I had once relied on and cherished. As I skied, a sadness crept over me, and I welcomed it, because I couldn’t let it creep in on campus.
My sorrow was an old puddle, flecked by pieces of treebark and soft white fuzz. I could look in it and see the girl I once was. I knew her—then, still—because she hadn’t left me. Despite all my successes at Interlochen, my old, wounded self still roamed along the edges of my psyche.
She wanted things: retribution, an apology, a nonsexual hug. She wanted them from her father, not her mother. She felt alone, even though her mom sent her cards on her birthday, Valentine’s Day, even Feast of the Ascension Day. She wanted one person who could know her and understand her and still love her even when she failed, or felt robbed or broken.
I skied loops and loops through the forest, burning through the pain in my chest. It was for a lost father, followed by a bad father, followed by all the people who refused to help. But the trees never wavered.
When I graduated from Interlochen in late June of 1989, I’d been accepted at Los Angeles’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts and Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts and was wait-listed at Hampshire College. My new best friend, Amy Burtaine, got into Brown, Harvard, Hampshire, and Sarah Lawrence. Unsure of what we would do over the summer, I scored jobs for both of us in a place called the Escalante Desert in southern Utah. With zero experience in either desert travel or peer counseling, a company called The Challenger Foundation hired us to lead troubled teenagers on 130-mile treks across the desert. We would work with the most rebellious teens: kids who’d robbed places, become addicted to drugs, run away, or been overly promiscuous. Their parents paid our new employer $15,000 to “kidnap” them in the middle of the night. Blindfolded and still in their pajamas, they boarded planes from wherever they originated and flew, guarded by college wrestler thugs, to a remote airstrip. From there, they were blindfolded again and driven deep into the Escalante, where our future bosses, Horsehair and Wallwalker, would meet them. Horsehair and Wallwalker sounded like the names of people who belonged in the Anasazi Pueblo. As it turned out, they were actually fat, white ex-military guys who’d had some success using forced marches and applied starvation to beat the rebellion out of children. At least their reputation was such that desperate parents turned their kids over to them as a last resort.
The program was infamous for its last challenge—called “Handcarts”—during which the teenagers would have to push thousand-pound wooden handcarts (similar to the ones the early Mormons used to transport all of their belongings to Utah in the 1800s) for three weeks through the searing heat. The kids took turns sliding under a metal crossbar and rolling the contraption across the desert. They’d end their three-week hell walk by running down a two-track road into the arms of their hopeful, expectant parents.
Amy’s and my job, for which we were paid $1,000 a month, was to force the delinquents to survive in the worst desert conditions—in 120-degree heat, amidst scorpions, rattlesnakes, and a host of other dangerous critters. Challenger’s founders believed that this regimen would awaken the kids to what was important in life and correct their hostile, destructive behavior. Privately, I wondered who I was to pretend to be a role model for these kids. I wasn’t sure if I should be jealous—or relieved—that my parents were too oblivious—and poor—to have sent me someplace like Challenger. But the lure of the wilderness won me over—I bought a new pair of hiking boots, tank tops, and shorts, and borrowed one of my dad’s old military-issue backpacks.
I felt an instant camaraderie with the “campers” the first time I met them, during their transition from Primitive Camp to Handcarts. A kid in a filthy, soiled red headband whispered, “My parents don’t give a shit about us, but they think my sister and I should be angels.” He was smart and articulate, the kind of boy I liked to hang out with. Then he pointed to a skin-and-bones girl who was sucking on a handful of juniper berries, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. I looked around to make sure Horsehair wasn’t watching, and then nodded. Most of the kids looked like they could use a giant steak dinner—or ten—just to put some flesh on their skeletons. I knew that part of our job was to cleanse our charges of the drugs and alcoh
ol coursing through their bodies, but I also knew how hungry I felt after just days in the desert. All we ate during our three-week walk was water and half a cup of oatmeal for breakfast, a dry package of ramen noodles for lunch, and a cup of rice with canned corn or peas for dinner, so it was important that someone knew how to forage the rest. Wall-walker warned us that the kids we’d be counseling were prone to run away, starve themselves, fake all kinds of illnesses. But it was obvious from the second I met them that they were truly suffering for their indiscretions.
My first night on the job, a scorpion headed for my bedding—with me in it. When I say “bedding” I mean a single wool blanket. None of the kids or low-level instructors were allowed to bring sleeping bags and inflatable air mattresses. We slept on the cold, red earth, shivering beneath our one layer. The most incorrigible of the kids, a boy named Xavier, who allegedly broke into someone’s house and stole a stereo, came to my rescue—sort of.
“I’ll stab that motherfu…. if he gets too close to you, but if he stings you, I ain’t going to be the one to suck out the poison,” he said. I countered his hostility with understanding. My abuse, and the pitiful way I tried to deal with it (by freeing myself and then recovering, but giving in, again and again), made me a conduit for Xavier and the rest of the delinquents.
I felt our similarities poignantly when a little girl named Chicken asked me to walk with her to the top of a rocky outcropping. It was days into our expedition, and Chicken had been trouble all along, cussing and refusing to share group chores like cooking and cleaning the dishes. Standard Challenger procedure was to punish kids who cussed by making them hike alongside the handcart while carrying an eight-pound rock. Not only did the rock detail compound the exhaustion of the person carrying it, but it made the other kids mad, because it meant one fewer person to push the handcarts.
