The Sunset Strip Diaries

by Amy Asbury

  Self-hatred was welling up inside me and coming out in other ways. My bulimia had escalated to such a degree that the glands on my neck were starting to swell up like walnuts. One of my teachers sent me to my school counselor, Mrs. Harrod. She was a tough black woman who had a way with teenagers. I think her secret was just asking them questions and showing interest. Most people are put off by teenagers’ attitudes and moodiness. Not her. She sat there and grilled me. She wanted to know where my parents were. She wanted to know why I couldn’t say the word “NO.” She wanted to know how I got such sexy clothes and why I was behaving the way I was with men. She thought I needed medical attention for my eating disorder and needed psychiatric help for my other problems.

  She immediately called my mother to find out what was going on in my home. Thank God. It was right after that phone call that my mother finally decided to kick out my father. I wondered why it took my school calling for her to take action. I showed signs of serious problems for the three years prior, which had gone ignored. My mother thought my dad could have possibly abused me, as she admitted years later, but she wasn’t sure and she wanted to keep the family together. That meant keeping me in the house with him. And being in the house with my dad was eating me alive.

  My counselor later revealed to me that my mom showed up at the school in tears, asking her what to do. She didn’t know the first thing about kicking out a husband, making it on her own, any of it. I guess she got some advice and got the courage to do something. Either that or she was kind of forced to act because now someone was watching. At any rate, my mother said she had come home one day and saw a drug dealer in the kitchen with my father and that was apparently the last straw. Within weeks of my school calling, my mother told my father she wanted a divorce and he had to leave the house.

  She then pulled my sister and me next to the front door, in front of the Christmas tree. We stood side by side while she blurted out everything in a huge clusterfuck: Our father was a cocaine addict, with a habit that was up to $500 a day, which meant he had stopped paying the bills, including the mortgage. Our house was probably going to go into foreclosure and we would have to move. She had been trying to hide his habit from us, but couldn’t do it anymore. On top of that, he was unfaithful to her. He had had numerous affairs. I felt sadder about the affairs than the drugs. I felt heartbroken. My mom kept telling me she was doing it for my sister and me. I started to feel bad. Then I thought, Wait, aren’t you supposed to protect us? Is it ‘going above and beyond’ to protect your children? If my school hadn’t called, would you have done this?

  My sister and I were floored. We were not angry with her for wanting to divorce him over all of that- we totally got it. But it was still a shock. I could barely process the information. I had so many of my own problems going on that I couldn’t even really think about my dad. I knew he wasn’t the same man I knew as a child. I knew there was a new anger to him and a creepy sexual edge to him that wasn’t there before. I knew I didn’t ever want to be alone with him and did my best to avoid him. Still, I never thought he would be a drug addict and it still surprised me that he would have affairs, even after the way he behaved. It was hard to hear concrete facts about this man who was supposed to be the person I admired, the person who was supposed to protect me from the outside world. It fucked with my perception of reality. Everything seemed to be swirling in my head like a horrible whirlpool.

  My mom was a basket case. She was especially mean to me during that time. She told me that she was going to kick me out along with my dad. She told me to just go with him, wherever he was going. My dad was around for another month or so, as if he didn’t believe he was being kicked out of the house. One day my mother was in her room crying. My sister and I were sitting in the living room, feeling uncomfortable. My father took me aside and told me she was crying because of me. Although I did feel she didn’t like me because I blew the lid wide open on our family problems, I didn’t buy it. My dad was manipulative and hurtful. I wished he would hurry up and leave.

  One night I went out with some guy and I think we went to a drive-in or something, I can’t remember. We were drinking and hooking up and I didn’t get home until very late, probably three in the morning. Before I left, my mother told me if I didn’t come home by my new curfew (I was thinking, you are trying to implement a curfew? I am so far beyond that, I am in deep fucking trouble here!), she would put all of my belongings on the front lawn in garbage bags. I wasn’t sure where she got the idea, but she was starting to mention “tough love” a lot, so maybe she had received some pamphlet on it and this was one of the suggestions.

  I was too chicken to tell the guy to get me home on time. I was scared I would look childish or unsophisticated or whatever, so I waited for him to take me home when he felt like it, which happened to be three in the morning. I entered my room wearing only my tight black dress with white skulls all over it. When I flicked on the light, I saw that my room was completely bare. Everything off the walls, all the furniture out, no clothes, no belongings, no nothing. Just a bare mattress remained. My beloved stuffed animals, my favorite stacks of books, and framed pictures of old movie stars- they were all gone. I panicked. They were my only comfort. I was really into “things” as a way to comfort myself, which was never healthy, but that is the way I was.

  I started screaming at my mother that I needed my birth control pills and she tried to remind me that I broke the rule. I was thinking, What the hell are these flimsy rules? These are so ridiculous and they are coming way too late. The damage is already done. These rules will not protect me, I have already suffered and have been abused and wronged and stripped of my dignity and my soul and my innocence. I need guidance, I need help, I am very lost and I am in trouble. I am sinking, I am drowning, I am up to my neck in quicksand. You are offering me what should be a rope but instead is thread that will snap if I try to use it. I am wayyyy past where you think I am; I am in deep, deep trouble. A fucking curfew? But truth be told, it was good that she was trying to discipline me. I needed that. The reason it didn’t work is because of the inconsistency. I had done what I wanted for years and then suddenly there were rules that night.

  My mom went outside in her nightgown and glasses, and came back with a few trash bags so that we could find my pills. When I opened one of the bags, I became enraged. My trinkets that were ceramic or glass were broken into pieces because they had been shoved in with shoes, books, and anything that was in sight. It was as if my existence was just thrown away, as if I didn’t matter. It was as if I was dead and my things were not going to be opened again. I fished out my birth control pills and popped one, in tears. At least I wouldn’t be pregnant during all of this misery. I wanted to change out of my clothes and into pajamas, but I didn‘t know where to find pajamas. I sat around crying in my bare room for a few hours. I then became so livid over my belongings being broken that I lost it. I went to the kitchen, puffy-eyed, and examined the knives. I thought, Oh my gosh…I can’t control myself. I am going to kill my own mother.

  It hurts to write that, but it is what I felt. I was going to take a knife and stab her; that is how mad I was. I found myself crying again because I was scaring myself. I couldn’t control my anger and I couldn’t control my hand. I picked up the knife and stared at it. Then I put it back down. I went into my mom’s room- I didn’t know why I was going in. I don’t know what I wanted or how it could have helped me. I looked at her sleeping on my dad’s old side of the bed. There was no one on her side. His side was closest to the bedroom door and the bathroom. I saw the old headboard in the dark, with its big mirror and the stained glass cupboards on either side. She loved stained glass. There was a tissue box above her head and an alarm clock and other necessities that would grow as she got older into a jumble of earplugs, pills, lotions, and pens.

  I looked at the lump sleeping in the bed. The lump that single-handedly shattered any comfort I had left in the world. I became full of rage, enough to make me snarl, snarl like a fucki
ng panther. A feeling shot through my body- it was a feeling of pure wrath. I punched her as hard as I could, in the general vicinity of her face. She jumped up out of her dead sleep and I remember seeing the whites of her eyes in the dark. She looked like a scared animal. I actually felt remorse at that moment and wished I hadn’t done it. But at the exact same time I wanted to kill her. I beat her with my fist as hard as I could and she tried to hold up the blanket, as if that would be a shield to stop me. She was screaming my name, begging me to stop.

  All of the screaming woke my younger sister, Becky. She quietly went outside, where the rest of the garbage bags were hidden. She took out the things she knew I liked most and lined them all up in my room. My white stuffed cat, Nicky; my big fat Warner Brothers book, my pictures of Rita Hayworth. She pulled out some other things she knew I loved and quietly put them out in the midst of my hysteria and screaming. I always loved my sister for that. She knew what to do. It did calm me down.

  Unfortunately, I never retrieved a large portion of my belongings. My mother swears to this day that she really only meant to teach me a lesson so she moved everything out and off to the side of the house. Goodwill thought it was part of a donation and took it all. I was kind of confused as to how Goodwill could make house calls so late at night, because I left at like seven p.m. to go out, but hey, what do I know. Regardless of that, regardless of anything my mother ever did or didn’t do, I was deeply, deeply wrong for striking her. I don’t care if she beat me to a pulp or abused me herself. Striking a parent is an abominable act and I am still gravely ashamed. I am telling the truth in this book, so that is why I mention it here. It affected what was left of my future relationship with her.

  My sister says:

  “I feel like I understood this all back then, especially the curfew part. It’s just really, really sad you went through feeling that way and had no comfort. None. And the bags on the lawn- I remember being stunned. I don’t remember when she put it all there, like, I don’t remember being there watching her bringing it out - but I remember trying to bring it back in and she stopped me. I remember feeling SO badly. That was a horrible time.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Mental Ward

  In January of 1989, my mother wrote me a letter that pissed me off, but also kind of relieved me. It said that we were moving away from our neighborhood because she knew I was in trouble with a bad crowd. What really happened was that our house was in foreclosure because my dad hadn’t paid the mortgage in months. Luckily, my mom ended up being able to sell the thing at the last minute. Anyway, she didn’t mention that. She stuck to her story that we were moving because of me, and hell, I did need to get out of that neighborhood and away from my new crowd. She said that Jeff Hunter came to her and told her I was in trouble with some older guys. I was pissed at him for butting in. He was only an afterthought to me at that time, even though he was my world six months prior. I think I told him my happenings in passing, but I didn’t want to deal with his angry girlfriend if we were caught speaking to one another. I was mad at him for telling her about me, because she still yelled “Whore!” at me any time she saw me at school, no matter where we were or how many people were around. It hurt more once I wasn’t a virgin, because I did feel like a whore and she was basically rubbing it in.

  It felt like I was living on one little AAA battery instead of the usual four D batteries. When in my room, I screamed at the top of my lungs and laid my ear against my stereo speakers that were on full blast. I had dreams of demons and devils and evil things. I drifted in and out of hallucinations. Then I stopped grooming. I stopped the skimpy clothes and started wearing men’s T-shirts. I wouldn’t brush my hair, wear shoes, or even turn my shirts right-side-out. I went to school with inside-out shirts that were backwards, with the tags sticking out in front, under my chin. I lost the will to live, so it didn’t really matter what I looked like. I still possessed enough vanity to wear makeup though. I felt as if my being pretty was the only power I held. But as for the rest of me, I looked homeless.

  The kids at school left me alone, except for the random gangster girls bussed in from South Central L.A. who shouted at me and called me a crazy bare-footed bitch. The Latin cholas left me alone, raising their penciled-in eyebrows and shaking their heads. I was so tired, depressed, and suicidal that I feared none of them at that point. I would have beaten the shit out of or tried to kill any one of them who stepped to me. People stayed away- even Jeff’s hateful girlfriend shut up after a certain point.

  My mom made a plan to move us all into our grandmother’s house. We had nowhere else to go. When everything was packed and being moved, my sister and I had our belongings in these little train cases. Mine was covered in stickers on the inside and it held my favorite cassette tapes, some makeup, rocker jewelry, and little knick knacks that made me happy. It was a little tiny piece of luggage, but it had my life inside. What was left of it, anyway.

  We moved in with my grandmother that February. She still lived in a small house in Canoga Park, which was the house where my mother grew up. I normally loved and felt comforted by the house, but this time, it felt dark and sad. Canoga Park was not a bad neighborhood in the 1950’s and even in the early 1980’s it wasn’t that bad. But by 1989, the homes in that particular neighborhood had a lot of security bars on the windows and the surrounding area had become infested with illegal aliens. The neighborhood wasn’t as safe as the one we had just left.

  I got my mother’s childhood room, and my sister got what was the TV room (and Aunt Billie’s room before that), and my mother shared a room with her mother. When I opened my closet, I saw 1950's nursery wallpaper with lambs and ribbons on it. It was pretty, but my taping pictures of L.A. Guns all over it soon destroyed it. My bedroom floor became quickly covered in clothes and shoes and the bathroom was soon full of wet towels. Within a month or two, the kitchen had roaches that scattered when a light was turned on. We were slobs and my poor grandmother said nothing.

  ***

  One day, I started scratching my private parts and couldn’t stop. I laid in my bed and cried non-stop because it hurt so badly. There was no down time; it felt like someone had my skin in a vice grip and was pinching me as hard as they could for hours and hours. My eyes watered, my teeth clenched. I was taken to a doctor at some point and the mystery was solved: I had a horrible, horrible case of VD. It hurt worse than pretty much anything I have ever been through. They put me on some big horse-pill painkillers and tried getting rid of it, but it became so painful I had to go to the emergency room.

  I was referred to a doctor who I couldn’t stand. One time he was trying to treat me with a Q-tip of acid and he accidentally spilled the entire bottle between my legs, into my butt crack. I screamed in pain. It burned me so terribly that big pieces of my skin were falling off in clumps when I got home. I think the thing I hated most about him though, was the fact that he constantly told me I was pretty, and he always wanted to examine my fifteen-year-old breasts. But instead of having me lie down and put an arm behind my head as he felt in a circular motion (the proper way to do a breast exam), he had me stand against the door as he lifted up my shirt. It was just a man squeezing my breasts and getting off on it. I knew it wasn’t right and wanted to scream but I was defeated and exhausted. Who was there to tell? I actually did tell my mother once, but she thought I was being dramatic and ignored me. I even brought it back up to her a few years later and told her it was still bothering me that he was a practicing doctor. This was another scenario where I wanted her to cock a rifle on a mountaintop and vow to shoot the nuts off anyone who touched her child in a sexual manner. Instead, she told me to write a letter to his higher-ups and then went on with her day.

  A few years later, I wrote a letter to the American Medical Association and never received a response. I even went back into the doctor’s office by myself after I could drive, to try to complain. At that point, they told me he no longer worked there. You would think he got in trouble- but guess what he does n
ow? He has his own practice in Encino. He is an infertility doctor. He probably suggests he screw people’s wives to see if there are any problems.

  Needless to say, I was pretty unhappy with my life and health problems there in 1989. I didn’t know how to deal with my pain and my anger. I started hurting myself: beating myself in the face, hitting myself with things, and sometimes asking other people to hurt me. I know now that self-injury is a coping mechanism, but back then, I just felt so grotesque inside that I felt I deserved abuse. I had a lot of self-hatred. Guys picked me up and tossed me across the room like a lifeless corpse and I hit the ground in pain, but I was somehow relieved. Other times I tried to strangle myself, but I couldn’t do it. I was too chicken to actually kill myself, but I had no desire to continue my life, so I lived as if I were not alive. I lost all hope for myself. I never thought of the future; I didn’t think I would make it that far. I never, ever considered that I would live to be in my thirties. I thought I would die either that year or within the next few years and I didn’t care; it didn’t scare me. I did not fear death for the first time. I even prayed for death sometimes. I cried and I begged God to please, please kill me. I just wanted to die.

  Too many things had happened at once. We left our childhood home very abruptly, my father was a drug addict and was no longer a part of our family; I had been date raped, videotaped, blackmailed, contracted a painful venereal disease, was bulimic, suicidal and failing school. I was in a lot of trouble and couldn’t seem to get it under control by myself. I knew I got myself into each mess. I knew I chose to dress and behave the way I did. I knew I had no one to blame but myself.