by Amy Asbury
I started throwing up my food at home. Fingers down the throat, touching the little punching bag. Everything came up. I tasted it all over again. If I didn’t drink enough water with my meal, the barf got stuck in my throat and I thought I would choke to death. My eyes watered, my nose ran. I never did it at school, because I only did it near my parents. At first, it was kind of a novelty. I thought, Can I do this? Then I started doing it all of the time, hoping my parents would catch on. They didn’t.
I became dangerously bulimic at the end of eighth grade. My sister was upset by it and begged me to stop. I puked up everything, most of all fried bologna sandwiches with jack cheese and mustard, if you must know. I started to throw up without even using my finger. I just leaned over and heaved. My parents didn’t notice my extreme weight loss. They didn’t pick up on my immediately leaving after eating, going to the bathroom and retching and then coming back wiping my mouth. They didn’t notice the sour smell of vomit anywhere. I got worse and worse. I thought, Help! Somebody come to my rescue! I want attention here!
I lost a lot of weight that summer. Weight loss wasn’t the reason I started throwing up my food, but I was happy with my new figure nonetheless. I thought, Whoa…this shit works. Not just boys, but men started really checking me out. I started to like the attention. I fantasized about dressing sexier, but I was scared. I spent time in my room in large, white, men-sized T-shirts, pulling them tight around my figure to see what I would look like in a tight dress. I twisted them up and tied them in a knot under my boobs. I started cutting my long skirts into short ones. Skirts that I got for Christmas -once all the way to my ankles- were now just past my ass. Things slowly became shorter and shorter. I started doing bust exercises and sit-ups every night, like a maniac. I did calf lifts and laid in the sun a lot.
Now that I was starting to look more attractive, I wanted to do exciting and daring things. I couldn’t waste my looks on sitting around watching Charles in Charge and picking my ass. I needed to break up people's relationships, steal boyfriends, have evil plans, and gaze up at people through smoky eye shadow. I also dreamed of being able to say gutsy lines and flip my hair back in slow motion.
I watched nighttime soap shows like Dynasty and The Colbys. Initially, it was just so I could go back to school and join the conversation with Mark Poletti. He watched Dynasty, and always turned around and discussed it with the people behind him in class. I initially sat and listened as they talked about the show. Then I secretly began watching it so I could interject with something interesting. I think when I finally did, it backfired on me because I tried too hard. I brought up Dynasty so much, that Mark started getting irritated and stopped talking about it. Eventually he made some comment about not even liking the show any more. It was most definitely so I would shut up.
At any rate, I watched the shows and took note of two things. One: the glamour. The wardrobes consisted of jewels, gowns, furs, and large hats. There was overly-styled hair and an ocean of makeup (the more evil the woman, the more makeup she wore). Two: the balls. No, not a ball like the one Cinderella attended, but balls as in testicles. The women had balls. They said vicious things to each other and managed to look cool while doing so. They told someone off or slapped someone in the face, and then had a great exit where they turned and walked away effortlessly. No tripping on a pebble. No feeling nervous or regretting anything. And of course, they had a very glossy lip and beautifully blended eye shadow in shades of peacock. I cared not for the designer gowns, because I knew nothing of designers (and if I did, I would sure as hell not be into Nolan Miller, best believe). I did not know anything about jewels (I thought rhinestones were the shit). It was the confidence of these women that I wanted to emulate. I was a damned fool for taking nighttime soaps so literally, but I wanted to be like these women. I wanted to be brave, daring, and beautiful. They were my role models.
If the women on Dynasty were interested in a man, they seduced him. I paid close attention to that move, because it was ultra-ballsy and it looked so scary to do in real life. I mean, could I seduce one of the Middleton boys? I started to think about who would be my ideal boy to seduce. It wasn’t anyone at Middleton. It was Jeff Hunter, the super cute Heavy Metal boy in my fifth and sixth grade classes at Tadley, who let Tiffany Nixon sit in his lap. I daydreamed of walking up to his door with my new look and improved figure. He lived only a few houses down and around the corner. I imagined his rocker eyeballs popping out of his head, and then him grabbing me and making out with me. I wished I could make myself go over there, but I knew I would be too scared to even try. I kept it as a daydream.
In the back of my mind, Heavy Metal was where it was at. The Middleton kids were goody-goodies, wearing collared shirts with Reeboks and watching Moonlighting. Ninth grade was coming up. It was my last chance to be cool at Middleton; my last chance to avoid going down in history as a loser wearing my dad’s sweaters from Gemco. There would be no one in the grade above me to scare me or make fun of me if I wanted to try a new look. Even Eric and Zack were going to change schools and wouldn’t be there in the fall.
I started to get really into a Heavy Metal band called Ratt after seeing the music video to their song “Dance.” I thought the singer, Stephen Pearcy, was hot. He wore all white and had a black headband around his head like he was going to work out with Olivia Newton John. He had a scratchy voice that hooked me. I saved my allowance and bought their record, Dancing Undercover. I played it over and over and over until I memorized the entire thing. Then I saw another Heavy Metal video that inspired me: Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again.” There was a flashy redhead in the video, who flipped her long, messy hair back without fear. She was lifting herself out of a car window while her old decrepit boyfriend drove through a tunnel, looking like he was thinking about his mortgage or what he should eat later. She was rolling around on Jaguars in white flowing clothes, appearing super confident. Wow! I wanted to be like that! I was starved for attention. My main goal in life suddenly became doing a forward walkover on a Jaguar XJ without making dents in the hood.
I was figuring out what kind of person I wanted to be, what kind of image I wanted to portray. As a kid, I thought for sure I would at least be the CEO of something. I thought I would be walking around with a briefcase or sitting in a huge office, running the world. Or at least Paramount.
But as soon as I hit puberty, I found myself lacking the confidence to make any of my dreams happen. I almost felt like a fool. Looking around, I saw that women did not run businesses (some did, of course, but I didn’t know that).They were supposed to be sexy, pretty, thin and more or less subservient. They were supposed to be in the background unless they were a sex object, in which case they were openly ogled.
The women who were really sexy were the only ones who had any power over anybody. Guys fell down to their feet drooling and hitting themselves on the head with a cartoon hammer. The nice, un-sexy women were secretaries, teachers, and housewives. Wallflowers. I look back and I realize that part of the sadness and depression I felt as a teenager was the mourning of my old self. I knew I gave up on everything I ever wanted to do, and I was so disappointed in myself. I knew I lost my spark and my drive. I quietly buried it all and just drowned myself in makeup and turned up my records. It was a waste if I ever saw one.
Where did I get the message that I couldn’t be something other than pretty, sexy and thin? There is the obvious: music videos, movies, TV- every piece of popular media to which I had access. It was 1987. The images and messages I grew up with were at an all-time high in sexism. I think back, and the only chance I would have had is if the movie Working Girl would have come out a year earlier. I wasn’t exposed to any other message for girls other than you had to be sexy or you would be ignored, considered boring and be doomed to a life in the background. Screw that. I wasn’t going out like that.
I also picked up on how my father talked about women and the things he saw as important in a woman. He was probably no different from other men duri
ng those years, but this is what I noticed: women had to be thin. That was most important. Whenever my father described a woman, he first mentioned whether she was heavy or not. It was never if she was a good person or not, or any other value she had- it was always her weight. It also didn’t help that he had tried to talk me down from my ambitions, sometimes resorting to mockery. The other, stronger, message my father gave me was that I was desired sexually. I honestly remember thinking more or less, Okay, this is my value. This is what I bring to the table. This is my angle.
I was intelligent enough to know it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right, but that seemed beside the point. I remember thinking that it didn’t matter whether or not I agreed. Things were going to go on as they were and I needed to work with it. I had to adapt. I wasn’t confident enough or mature enough to take a stand and try to change things; I was determined to play the game. And believe me, I wasn’t in tears thinking of having to play the friggin’ game- I was excited. I was like, Yay! I’m gonna do something bad!
My parents were paying very little attention to me, so it was the perfect time to try something risky. I decided that my new look would be a Heavy Metal chick. It was not nerdy. It was cool. I would make myself into Jeff Hunter’s dream girl. I figured I could probably pull off the look, because it didn’t require a bunch of expensive clothing. The rock look was just black concert T-shirts, short skirts and high heels. I had most of that in my closet already.
The problem with me was that I saw everything in black and white. I was very extreme. When I set my mind to be cool, I was going to be cool no matter what it took. If something didn’t feel right to me, I wouldn’t stop and re-evaluate. I would barrel right past the feeling and push myself to follow through with the plan. I didn’t consider that there were many subcultures of cool and uncool. I just knew there was good (boring, nerdy, wallflower), and there was bad (sexy, pretty, cool).
I chose bad.
CHAPTER THREE
Balls of Steel
*Cue AC/DC’s Back in Black*
I busted through the glass doors of Middleton in slow motion, with my hair flowi- (needle scratches record)…wait…it was too stiff with hair spray to flow. Anyway, I strutted into the school and unveiled my new look: lots of leopard skin, short skirt, tight shirt, high heels and of course, my usual ton of makeup. My mother bought me all of the clothes. I don’t know if she realized what she was buying, but I know she regretted it. I felt powerful and sexy with my new slim figure and newly bigger boobs (my dedication to bust exercises propped my C cup boobs up into the air). My nightly sit-ups made my stomach flat and my waist small. I was wearing more form fitting clothing instead of big, baggy sweaters. Upper middle class jaws dropped all through the school. I wasn’t interested in any of the guys in my class, so I enjoyed the fact that they were suddenly turning into blubbering jackasses around me. I wanted to stamp out a cigarette in front of them like Sandy in Grease. I felt powerful, intoxicated by the attention. I was no longer a wallflower, the girl in the corner being ignored. The other girls in my class looked like children suddenly; they didn’t intimidate me anymore. They could go ahead, group up, and sing some Pet Shop Boys on the way to P.E. I could steal any of their boyfriends now. Bring it, I thought.
My mom let me go through my metamorphosis, although she flat out told me that I looked like a ‘street walker’ in certain outfits. My dad angrily told me I looked like a whore. I was hurt; I thought I looked cool and fashionable, like a girl from a Mötley Crüe video. My mom tried to warn me a few times about dressing so promiscuously, but I ignored it. Promiscuously? What did that even mean? Please. What did she know? She wore glasses, had frizzy hair, and was not sexy. I started getting dress code violation citations at school for too much makeup and too short of skirts. My mom started to get pissed at me, but I told her the woman who wrote my citations wore ten times more makeup than me and she was out to get me.
Things got very low for my mother at the end of 1987. My grandfather was diagnosed with bone cancer and had only months to live. It was very sudden. It put her into a tailspin to see her father in such a state. She was the only person he would let take care of him. He passed away that winter, right around Christmas. My mother was absolutely destroyed; she could not function. She loved her father more than anything. The sad thing is, she never snapped out of it. I don’t know if I ever saw her truly happy again.
As soon as her father passed away, she had even less tolerance for my father. She seemed tired; she seemed to have given up the fight. I was selfish about the whole thing- I was just happy I could do more of what I wanted. I dressed even skimpier, and started to tape pictures to my wall. Madonna? No. Puppies in a basket? No. Duran Duran? No. I taped pictures of Stephen Pearcy grinding his microphone stand and pictures of Nikki Sixx with pin-pricked pupils and an extended tongue. I took the pictures from my new favorite magazines: Circus and Hit Parader. They were certainly not the same as Seventeen or Teen- instead of quizzes and skin care tips, I was reading about wild tours, drug abuse issues, and sexy women. Even worse than my reading about those things at fourteen was my sister reading about them at twelve. Her wall became so packed with pictures of Poison, Bon Jovi, and Cinderella, it was a collage all the way to the ceiling (she filled in hard-to-reach spaces with pictures of rockers she didn’t even like all that much, like Billy Idol).
Because of my mother’s creeping depression, my sister and I were sent to my newly widowed grandmother’s house in Canoga Park each weekend. We didn’t know why we were being sent there, but we didn’t care. Instead of spending time with our grandmother, we went off on our own and became hooligans, shoplifting important items like makeup and more magazines. I remember feeling completely thrilled. I felt so free walking around in my acid washed jean jacket with Becky and Karen in tow. Men honked at us as they drove by, and my ego ballooned even further. It didn’t matter that they had leaf blowers and lawn mowers in the back of their trucks and no green cards, I was getting attention. My sister and I went to Karen’s on the weekends that we weren’t at our grandmother’s house and we watched her video tape of The Lost Boys (starring Jason Patric and Keifer Sutherland), about three thousand times.
We rented a video camera that winter. I was overjoyed because I loved filming things. I had always filmed in my head, meaning as I lived my life, I tried to see everything through a camera lens. I really loved the idea of capturing our life on film for the first time. I had so many things I wanted to film. One of the first things I wanted to capture was my favorite place in the world: My childhood friends Christopher and David Ashford’s house. I begged my mom to take us there. I forgot if Karen’s dad took us, or my mom took us- I don’t remember how it was set up, but we did go over, and I ran around trying to capture all of my memories with the camera. I filmed every part of Christopher and David’s house. I had grown up there and I wanted be able to always look back on it. Carol, their mother, was not home that day.
I can’t remember exactly how it went down, but Carol heard that we were there filming and blew up. She was really upset that I was filming her house when she thought it was messy. I didn’t see mess- I just saw the house I loved my whole life. It looked as it always did. I don’t know what words were spoken between my mother and Carol; I just knew that Carol and my mother’s friendship ended that day. We were told that we were not allowed back at the house, and that our families were no longer friends. We could see Christopher and David again when we were grown-ups, on our own time. I was absolutely floored. I didn’t understand. Not see Christopher and David again until we were…adults? Wait…what? I couldn’t accept it. It was as if someone had just broken the news of a death. We had been friends since we were babies. Our families were so close! I was devastated.
One day while I was looking for money to steal out of my mom’s room, I found a letter in her jewelry box. It was from Carol Ashford, who wrote that I had a big mouth and some other mean things. I already thought I was a piece of shit so it didn’t surprise me that someo
ne else thought so too, but it wounded me to my core. I was deeply, deeply hurt to hear what she thought of me. Had my mother defended me? Was that why they were no longer speaking? I didn’t know.
Later that year, Carol started to do some troubling and strange things and was admitted into a mental institution as a result. My sister and I went to Christopher and David’s and sat out in the backyard with them. It was painful to see them hanging their heads. All four of us felt broken and weak. It shattered me. They were our dear friends and such a huge part of the happiness in my childhood. I thought, once again, This can’t really be happening.
Carol came back a few months later. She was back to normal as long as she stayed on her medication. But she was never friends with my mother again.
My grandfather’s death, my mother’s depression, and the loss of my closest childhood friends hit me hard. I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings. I closed myself in my room alone with Ratt, L.A. Guns and Mötley Crüe records blasting. Their songs were almost exclusively about drugs/strip clubs (Motley), or about girls and sex (Ratt and L.A. Guns). The subject matter was the total nightmare of most parents. I listened to the music and stared at the guys on the album covers, or looked at their pictures in magazines, for hours at a time. I fantasized about Stephen Pearcy, Robbin Crosby and Warren DeMartini of Ratt and Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe. They all had long hair and tattoos, wore eyeliner, and rocked leather pants. The thought of screwing any of them scared the shit out of me. I was certain the Ratt guys would probably give me some crazy, horrible VD and Nikki Sixx would surely sacrifice me to the devil after doing lines off my corpse.
