In that one night, I felt as if I’d taken a huge step toward the big life I craved, and I made an active choice to continue pursuing anything that might expand my mind—new people, experiences, drugs, and music. Anything unknown was good, and the illicit was exciting. So much of my time at home seemed like a game of chicken, with me pushing for freedom and Mom and Craig wondering when to push back.
I became remarkably brazen. I smoked cigarettes out the window of my bedroom at night, blowing the smoke through the screen. I came home from hanging out with friends who were old enough to drive, stoned out of my mind, and made the most amazing toasted peanut- butter-and-jelly bagels, which I devoured with tall glasses of milk. In search of an absence from worry and pain, I would take whatever substance I was given and do as much of it as there was to do. Music was like a drug to me, too; it soothed my feelings and evened them out—play it loud enough, and sometimes my thoughts were suppressed. Booze. Cigarettes. Pot. I was still worried about making a good impression, making people happy, and so I didn’t get fucked up at school, or do anything that would get me in serious trouble. But now that I knew how to vacate my body, I mimicked it, even when I was sober. I disappeared up inside of myself, where it didn’t exactly feel safe, but it wasn’t as scary as everywhere else.
Halfway through my freshman year, I sat on the new stairs in the addition to the house and eavesdropped on Mom and Craig in the living room, talking about whether or not I needed therapy. Surprisingly, Craig thought it would be good for me. This gave me pause because I had a new grudging respect for him, helped by an interaction we’d had the summer before I entered eighth grade. A friend and I had started our own business, a bakery, and worked long hours five days a week all summer. In the end, we’d generated a combined profit of three hundred dollars, which her stepmother accepted in payment for the money we owed for our startup costs. I’d been hoping to buy a Walkman, but I hadn’t earned a cent from the project.
I was sitting at the table one evening at the end of summer when Craig got home from work. As he walked into the kitchen to put down his lunch cooler by the sink, he paused near me.
“I think you earned this,” he said.
He handed me the Walkman I had been coveting. In fact, it might have been a little nicer than the Walkman I’d wanted. I sat up from my perpetual slouch.
“Thanks,” I said to his back as he walked into the kitchen.
I was profoundly moved, and not just by the gift itself. He was paying attention.
In the discussion downstairs, Mom was in favor of me figuring out whatever was troubling me on my own. In part because I was generally against any interference from Craig—even though I was softening toward him—I sided with her. More than that, I didn’t want therapy. I wanted to suffer. I wanted the hurt I felt to be visible. Hence the black clothes, the black eyeliner, the perpetual sulk. It didn’t help that my brother, now almost four, was everything I’d never been or had—a nice, mellow kid enjoying a stable two-parent childhood—and with such a big age gap between us, it was almost like we lived two separate lives. I had no ability to see I might be something of a dark cloud over his childhood, enjoying as I did the myopia of intense teenage experience.
As my freshman year drew to a close, we began to hear back from the private schools to which I’d applied. Once again, my happiness was directly dependent on what came in the day’s mail. I got rejected from all of the schools but Hebron, a small institution in Maine. Even though it was no elite prep school, it was still expensive.
The wild card was Betty. She had not been up to visit since our lunch with my dad and Eva, but she sent me weekly letters and continued to be extremely generous with money for clothes and school expenses. She had long talked about an IRA she’d opened in my name at a bank in Portland, with the idea that the money—around four thousand dollars—would be mine for college. Now I had to talk her into letting me use it for private high school. But the IRA would not mature by fall, and she wouldn’t pay the penalty for cashing it in early.
I was convinced there was a factor I had yet to think of, and while daunted, I was still determined, which I expressed to my dad in a postcard in June: “My whole plan for school next year is still up in the air. A new factor limited my options in a major way, but I’ll tell you all about that later.” In a bright, newsy tone, I informed him I’d gotten an A+ on my Jack Kerouac paper, adding, “Out of the four books I read, I think my favorite was Dr. Sax.” Mentioning the Gothic-looking female on the postcard: “You always send me really neat cards and when I saw this I thought of you, so I decided to send it. I got your last letter a while ago. It’s nice that we’ve been more in touch this year.”
He wrote back a little less than two weeks later, a three-page letter that smelled of his incense and essential oils. It was exactly the kind of glimpse into his daily life and inner workings I had longed for: “My workbook’s like a journal I guess that I record my dreams in, do affirmations daily (right now I’m doing a thing called the forgiveness diet that lasts 7 weeks, 70 affirmations a day, x 7 days x 7 weeks . . .) and any other thoughts I feel important enough to write down, or I feel unlazy enough to put in my workbook, I also carry a small notebook around on my travels in case anything important comes up. Long sentence, huh? I really don’t know how to write a letter (proper form) as my formal education only went to the 9th grade + I never paid too much attention, my regret now.” His response to the news of my postcard included this: “I can safely say I probably could of gotten a good mark on a paper on Kerouac because at one time I loved his writing so . . . It’s just that lately, I’m seeing tv, movies, videos, as images that hypnotize people into buying figuratively/and literally ideas + consumer goods of a very limited scope. It just supports my theory of how tough the 90s are going to be unfortunately.”
He went on to say he was better, as was his back, in part because he’d given up driving a cab, which meant he was “pretty low on money + must do something pretty soon.” He was still hoping for an insurance settlement. If he didn’t get one, he was preparing to sue. His plan, once he got the money, was to visit me in Maine, Eva and Asmara in Germany, Betty in New York City, and maybe his “friend” Sarah in Washington before moving to LA for a year of primal therapy. “I’ve realized from reading a book called Imprints—the Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience by Arthur Janov—author of Primal Scream, that I’ve had lifelong problems that I’ve never dealt with successfully with all the things I’ve done, and that Primal sounds like it gets to the bottom/beginning of things . . . I’m afraid about making such a major change but really feel I don’t have much choice esp. if I want to be happy . . . Give my love to everyone. Take care of yourself. And let me know what’s up with you when you feel like it.”
I didn’t really know what primal therapy was, but I liked the idea of going out to LA for a year in pursuit of a specific project, at the end of which it might be possible to be fulfilled. On the other hand, I was incredibly jealous that he had such complete freedom of movement, and that he would use it to go so far away from me.
Mom had to tell me there was no way we could afford Hebron, which meant at least one more year in hell. I was powerless, miserable. My dad wasn’t helping. As it turned out, the insurance company had refused to settle, which meant a court case, and he had to start strengthening his back in order to try to get back to work in the meantime. His book of the moment was the Meditation Practice Manual by Yogi Shanti Desai, which perhaps influenced his advice: “I’m sorry again about your not going to Hebron. I can understand your disappointment, I only wish Betty did. You said your trying to be happy about going to Lincoln, you can’t try to be happy, you either are or your not.” Not useful to my fourteen-year-old self.
Every time I felt that we’d made real progress toward getting close, he set me straight soon enough. After our flurry of letters that spring, he didn’t call me for the rest of the summer and didn’t write again until late August, when he apologized for not having called bec
ause he couldn’t afford the long distance. It was difficult to be mad at him. In response to my suggestion that he go work at a bookstore, he said it would be too hard on his back, but maybe if he ever got a lot of money he could open a bookstore and I could run it, an idea I of course loved, as I did the fact that he took everything I said so seriously, something that’s hard to find as a teenager.
Going into my sophomore year that fall, my prospects were grim. My dad sent me a postcard in late September, acknowledging the obvious: “How’s Lincoln? Or should I ask?” And reporting that he’d had a relapse with his back but was recovering more quickly than usual. “I had been doing a lot of walking (everyday) + stretching before it happened + am getting back to that quickly so I’m optomestic—but still a bad speller.” And ending with a surprise: “I love you.” And the less personal closing: “John.”
Even though I got out quite a bit for a fourteen-year-old kid living in rural Maine, it still wasn’t enough, never enough. And so I sought ways to make the world come to me. My drama club friend, Rob, had gotten me into the fanzine Maximum Rocknroll. I studied it more closely than my schoolbooks, coveting the records that could be ordered from labels like Dischord, watching the mailbox for weeks as diligently as I’d waited for cards from my dad or acceptance letters from prep schools. It was like sending out a message in a bottle and having one come back; the records were able to find me, even as far off the grid as I felt.
My friend told me that if I put an ad in MRR looking for pen pals, I would get deluged with replies. So I took the plunge, placing a small ad that simply said I was a female seeking like-minded friends and mentioning my favorite bands: Jane’s Addiction, Fugazi, the Cure. I began receiving letters—from California, from Ireland, from prison, and one from Connecticut that stood out among the rest. Oliver wasn’t what I’d been looking for at all—he didn’t live in an anarchist squat, or give homemade tattoos, or play in a punk band. But. As much as I adored and hungered for the company of wild punks and bohemians, the truth was I didn’t do any of those things, either. Basically I just wanted to live in the city and read books and have cool friends.
Oliver was like an ambassador from the world I hoped to enter, and soon. He was twenty-one and in college. He liked music. He was clever and amusing and just dark enough. By his second letter, he was offering up serious musings about life, slightly crass but affectionate flirtations, and casual drug references, which I found highly enticing.
I wrote Oliver back right away, adding him to my diligent correspondence with a half dozen pen pals around the world. It was a necessary distraction, since I hated high school as much as ever. I had not heard from my dad since September, which meant it was difficult to even fantasize about going down to Boston for a visit. Having just enjoyed our bustle of correspondence the past school year, I felt his absence even more.
Even amid the mail’s wondrous bounty every week—the tape of my Irish pen pal, Petey, reading me a bedtime story in his lovely brogue, the Canadian zine containing one of my poems—I began looking out for the simple lines of a white business envelope with the address scrawled in all caps. It was like Oliver didn’t have to try so hard. And he opened a window into a life that seemed quite a bit like one of the possible paths down which I might go—he didn’t really study anything in particular, which I got, since I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. But he did study. And he read books. And listened to music. And he wrote passionately and intelligently on these subjects. He had friends from school, and roommates he lived with in a big house off campus. They drank beers and talked late into the night. Sometimes he went to parties. It all sounded fun to me, like everything I wanted to get out and do, but even more than that, it sounded manageable. I was incredibly relieved to think I could hang in Oliver’s world, my future world.
Around the holidays, things started to feel lighter. I was optimistic about my private school prospects—there was a school in Pennsylvania that had expressed interest in my application. Now, faced with the possibility of having my dreams come true and actually leaving Mom and the particular way we did things on the land, I was freaking out a little bit. But every day that I was forced to drag myself onto the school bus and endure the mundane torture of high school only reinforced my certainty I couldn’t stay. And so, I dared myself toward the one thing that terrified me most, reassuring myself that I’d figure it out once I got there.
I was still corresponding a few times a week, almost constantly, with Oliver. A few months in, our letters became affectionate. He told me I seemed mature for my age (complete teenage-girl bait) and wished he could say good night in person. He called me in mid-January. I liked his runaway cackle, which made me feel like a genius when I set it off. I liked that he knew about cool bands like Operation Ivy and had been to way more shows than I had. I liked that he was opinionated and strong-willed and not afraid to disagree with me.
A week before my fifteenth birthday, he sent me a note wishing me a “Bappy Pirthday,” and saying he enjoyed talking to me very much. It was rendered in a pig-Latin-type language; deciphering it only added to the intrigue. He also mentioned that he’d pled guilty to possession with intent to deliver psilocybin, stemming from an incident in which he’d received hallucinogenic mushrooms in the mail. I took this in stride, the daughter of the father who often referenced his 120 acid trips.
Amazingly, I got into the private school of my choice in Pennsylvania. Mom spent several weeks looking through the papers. I was in an agony of anticipation, my whole life hanging in the balance. My dad had still mostly disappeared from the picture, but I sent him a note with an update. I received a newsy postcard from him in mid-February. “Pleasantly surprised to get your card. Glad to hear about George School + that you’re happy. And thanks for the warning that they might contact me. Did you get the CD’s I was concerned I didn’t pack them well enough. Let me know please. Love, Dad.”
Another card from him on March 1 began, “Just wondered if you got my card, figured this would be a good way to find out.” I had not answered his card in the ensuing two weeks. He wanted an answer immediately and had included a postcard with a box for “yes” and a box for “no,” so I could check one and send it back to him. I took the rest of the card’s content at face value. “I am doing well, I started physical therapy 3x a week for 3 weeks today. I have been doing psycho-therapy twice a week for a couple months. I feel better. How are you? And school doing? Have you decided where your going yet? My court case is finally coming up this month, 4 years since the fact. I have my fingers crossed. Hope to see you soon. Love to Sue + the family. John.”
I checked the box for “yes” and sent the card back, happy he was suddenly keen to be in touch with me. I eagerly awaited his next letter. And waited, and waited.
Meanwhile, my relationship with Oliver grew more intense. As his letters inched toward romance, they also included musings on whether other people wished they could start over, and how he hoped I never felt as crumbly as he did. Even when he confessed to having made a “lame-ass” suicide attempt, it only drew me toward him. I often felt pretty crumbly myself, and I valued that he trusted me enough to confide in me. This was exactly the kind of big emotion I reveled in—the kind of help I would have offered my father if I’d been old enough to understand his struggles—not the trite bullshit of high school. It felt as if I were experiencing the grown-up life I was so hungry for, like Oliver’s interest in me was a sign that I did have value, even if most of my classmates couldn’t see it. Plus, Oliver could still be silly and tender and obliquely flirtatious in a way I liked and could just barely handle, saying it was too bad I lived so far away—or he’d probably ask me out, although I might hate him if I met him or not like the way he looked—and encouraging me to find something, anything, of value. Walking the halls with his voice in my head, I was linked by his stories to this bigger, smarter, more grown-up reality. Once there, no one would call me a dyke, or stab me with hateful looks, or distrust me because I read boo
ks for fun or liked music that sounded like noise to them. Once there, I would be the perfect, fantasy version of myself. Maybe I would even be happy. At least I’d be living.
chapter five
THE BREAK
Mom had no choice but to tell me that we couldn’t afford the private school’s tuition. I ran upstairs, slammed the door, threw myself down on my bed, and sobbed. I was exhausted and heartbroken after two years of applications and soaring hopes and dashed dreams and dragging myself through long days at a place that hated me as much as I hated it.
A smattering of college brochures had trickled in, but I hadn’t paid attention, as I was so fixated on my prep school dreams. Mom happened to see one that looked promising: a brochure for an early college in the Berkshires called Simon’s Rock. I read it. If I got accepted, I would be allowed to drop out of high school after my sophomore year and begin taking college courses the next fall. Mom told me that she’d always planned to help me attend college, and while we couldn’t afford private high school with its more limited financial aid, if I got accepted to Simon’s Rock with a scholarship, she would find a way for me to go. I had never wanted anything so much in my entire life, and I don’t think I will ever want anything that much again.
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