Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  At St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital in Roswell, I was surrounded by nuns. I quickly settled into the familiar routine: they had to measure my urine output and take my blood twice a day—it was before they invented those little plastic ports so they had to stick a new needle into my veins every single time. But even with all that poking and pricking, I felt at ease, knowing I was being taken care of.

  By chance, Morgan had to get an operation for a hernia at the same time, and they put us together in one room. I was the expert on hospital life, and anyway, I was his big sister: as long as we were in that room, I was in charge. (We did argue about what to watch on television, though, and this was before remote controls, so to change the channel we needed to call in a nun. Morgan didn’t care—he was six—but I was worried about losing my status as world’s best patient. When he got better, I wasn’t sad to see him go.)

  When I went back to school, I still had to have my urine tested regularly, and I would get pulled out of class to go to the principal’s office so they could make sure I had my snack. I was so bloated from steroids that a classmate asked me if I was Demi’s sister. I didn’t feel special the way I had at the hospital; I felt embarrassed and different. I didn’t want people to see me like this.

  And so I was almost relieved when my parents told us we were moving again. My mother, I would later discover, had found a red pubic hair in my father’s underpants when she was doing the laundry, and after my parents battled it out they came to the inevitable conclusion that there was only one thing to do: move. Farther than usual this time, to the other side of the United States: Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.

  This was a big deal. My parents sat us down and told us in advance, which raised the pitch of the whole thing. And this time we got an actual U-Haul. I remember filling it up with our beds, the green couch, my mother’s ceramic partridges, and that coffee table Morgan had busted his head on. When we’d finished packing, we didn’t think there was enough room for all of us in the cab. My mother was half kidding when she suggested I sit down on the passenger’s-side floorboard, by her feet. I took her up on the offer. It was fun down there: I laid out a blanket and an airplane pillow and made my own little cave. It was a very long drive, made longer by a blizzard that was so bad my dad had to pull over because he couldn’t see the road. I was down by the heater, so it felt cozy and safe in my spot.

  CANONSBURG WAS VERY different culturally from New Mexico or California. We were from a “y’all” family, and everyone in Canonsburg said “y’uns” instead. (My mom’s accent was always strong, wherever we were; Morgan does a great impression of her asking for “a big ole Coke and a b’rito”—i.e., a burrito.) It was particularly hard for my brother, who was more introverted than I was and often got bullied. I was tougher, scrappier. My coping mechanism was to go into every new situation and immediately start operating like a detective: How does it work here? What are people into? Who are my potential allies? What should I be afraid of? Who holds power? And of course, the big one: How can I fit in? I would try to crack the code, figure out what I had to do, and master it. These skills would become essential later on.

  We settled into a development of townhouses in a hilly area with a pond that froze over in wintertime, which meant we could go ice-skating. Morgan learned to ride a bike. I was eleven years old and loved gymnastics. I was also just on the verge of puberty. I was desperate for breasts: every night, I lay in my bed and actually prayed for them.

  I wasn’t a child anymore, but my mom insisted that we still needed a babysitter; she didn’t trust me to look after Morgan by myself. The girl she hired was the older sister of one of my classmates—let’s call her Corey—who happened to be much more developed and mature than I was. I sulked when Corey’s sister came to babysit, not wanting anything to do with her. The next morning, Corey added to the indignity by announcing to the entire school bus, “I guess Demi still needs a babysitter.”

  I can still feel the hot flush of humiliation surging through my body. I was furious that my mother had put me in this position—had set me up like that. I remember feeling so exposed I thought I might die.

  I wasn’t going to let this define my stint at Canonsburg Elementary. I didn’t need a babysitter. What I needed was a boyfriend.

  I chose the cutest boy in the class: a blue-eyed, shaggy-haired blond named Ryder. And in a very short time, I was doing my victory lap, parading around the school holding his hand. Which actually felt really nice—for a moment.

  WHILE I WAS dealing with the normal preteen girl stuff, my parents were coming undone. I’ll never know what the catalyst was for their descent in Canonsburg, but things started to fall apart that spring.

  One evening, as my dad was sitting in the kitchen making his way through his usual six-pack of Coors and listening to James Taylor, he decided to clean his gun. I remember the way he looked that night: when he drank, his lazy eye went even more askew, and everything about him seemed glazed over. He didn’t notice there was a bullet in the chamber. When it went off, he blew a hole in the wall and the bullet grazed his forehead. There was blood everywhere. After the mess was cleaned up, my mother laughed it off, though inside I’m sure she was terrified. When I think about someone getting hammered and taking out a loaded gun in a house with kids running around, it’s just beyond me.

  Another night that spring, I woke up to the sound of distressed voices and commotion. I stumbled into my parents’ room, where I found my mother thrashing and crying as my father struggled to hold her down. By the bed I saw a bottle of yellow pills. “Help me!” he screamed when he noticed me in their doorway. I walked toward them in a trance, not knowing—but on another level understanding completely—what I was witnessing: my mother trying to kill herself.

  The next thing I remember is using my fingers, the small fingers of a child, to dig the pills my mother had tried to swallow out of her mouth while my father held it open and told me what to do. Something very deep inside me shifted then, and it never shifted back. My childhood was over. Any sense that I could count on either of my parents evaporated. In that moment, with my fingers in the mouth of my suicidal mother, who was flailing like a wild animal, and the sound of my father screaming directions at me, I moved from being someone who they at least tried to take care of to someone they expected to assist them in cleaning up their messes.

  Chapter 2

  It was the early seventies, and my mom did what people were starting to do: she went to a therapist. She was going to get help and get better. She was going to find herself! There was the ambient energy of the women’s movement floating around the culture at that time, and we had a feminist neighbor my mother became friendly with who probably introduced Ginny to some of the ideas and catchphrases of women’s liberation. But in her fragile state my mom was impressionable: after she saw The Exorcist, she went through a Charismatic Christianity phase. She would take me to services at a Catholic church where they played George Harrison songs and danced around in dashikis.

  She was trying to figure out who she was. Sometimes I would “overhear” her talking with our neighbor at the kitchen table about how she was struggling. (I was such a snoop, my parents would joke that I “didn’t want to miss a fart.” But looking back, I see that what I was doing was patrolling for chaos. My mother had just tried to kill herself: I had to stay on high alert.) She would complain about the ways my dad didn’t appreciate her and the deprivations of her childhood. They had been so poor that one Christmas she got her own doll wrapped up as a present, just wearing new clothes. To her, that doll symbolized the scarcity of her upbringing—the lack of money, nurturing, and attention she grew up craving. I heard that story many times.

  I could feel the dynamics shift just a little in our house: for years, my mom had put up with my dad’s cheating and had been completely dependent on him financially and emotionally. It’s sad to say, but when she tried to kill herself, it had the effect of reclaiming a little power: she had shown my dad she might be capable of leaving him. Unf
ortunately, she had shown her children she was capable of leaving us, too.

  My mother was repeating her own family history. Her first experience of male love was from the same kind of flirtatious, charismatic troublemaker as my dad. My maternal grandfather, Bill King, didn’t think much of my dad when my mother first started going out with him in high school, but the two men had a lot in common. Granddaddy was a charming womanizer and rule bender who played stand-up bass in a country band. He was very tough: one time when he had a toothache and they didn’t have the money for a dentist, he went up to the bathroom with a razor blade and cut the tooth out himself. Eventually, Granddaddy had a wild death to match his wild life: he was out drinking one night when he drove his beloved blue El Camino into—and under—a moving truck. He was decapitated.

  I was ten when he died. I remember him as a silver fox, handsome and rugged, his strong hands stained by motor oil. He owned a little gas station where my cousins and I loved to play, but when my mom was young, he was out of work for a long time after he broke his back on the job, working construction with a road crew. My grandmother had to support them and the three daughters they had at the time—my mom and her older sisters, Billie and Carolyn. This was distinctly not the life my grandma Marie had hoped for. She had her heart set on going to college. Growing up on the border of Texas and New Mexico in a strict Pentecostal home, she was the first member of her family to graduate high school. But Marie ended up a young wife and mother working full time to make ends meet. She was stretched thin.

  My mother’s interpretation of my grandma’s unavailability was that she, Ginny, was unlovable. She was a skinny, sickly child, and she never got over feeling neglected—never enough money, never enough love, an afterthought. It never occurred to her that my grandmother simply didn’t have the bandwidth to nurture her the way she might have wanted. Ginny wasn’t able to put herself in my grandmother’s shoes and imagine what it was like for her as a young woman, living with a cheating husband for whom she’d given up her dreams, having to support a family without the benefit of training or education—and taking care of three little kids on top of that.

  My grandma Marie was by far the most dependable grown-up in my life. She was raised on a broomcorn farm in Elida, New Mexico, in the 1930s, and possessed a practical farmer’s do-what-needs-to-be-done competence. She was solid, consistent, and trustworthy. But for all her good qualities, she had taught my mother—who in turn taught me—some strange coping mechanisms. Whenever Granddaddy was unfaithful, he would convince Grandma Marie that it was the women who were the problem. He persuaded her after one affair that they had to move to get away from his pursuer, so they picked up and left for Richmond, California, where my mother was born. When Ginny was about twelve, after they’d moved back to Roswell, she came home early from school one day and walked in on her father in bed with his brother’s wife. His reaction was to scream at my mom—blame his daughter for the situation. He had been my mother’s safe harbor; she worshipped him. Their relationship was never the same after that.

  ONE HOT SUMMER afternoon in Canonsburg, Ginny told me giddily that I should hurry and get packed; we were going to a hotel. It didn’t make any sense, but I got caught up in my mother’s enthusiasm as she hustled Morgan and me into her Pinto and took us to a nearby hotel with lots of blond wood, where everything was brightly lit and sparkling clean. My excitement fizzled into confusion and anxiety when she told us that we would be staying there because she was leaving Dad for her shrink, Roger. They were in love, she explained; Roger was paying for the room, and we would be moving with him to California, where he was going to build a glass house for us to live in. She even showed us the plans.

  It was a solid sales pitch. She presented her new plan as perfectly reasonable and already settled, with no acknowledgment that her kids might experience some pain or fear or confusion about their parents splitting up. Partly, this was because she was too caught up in her fantasy to consider our feelings, but I also wonder if, at some level, she knew this was nowhere near the end of her relationship with my dad.

  Roger was a tall, sandy-haired guy with blue eyes and wire-rimmed glasses who had grown up in Northern California. Clearly, he was not a therapist who subscribed to a professional code of ethics. It’s heartbreaking when you consider that my mother went to him trying to find help: she saw him as the answer to all her problems, a sober, educated man who could put her on a different path. Instead, she found one more guy to complicate her life. He prescribed her uppers and downers, and I doubt she was following the recommended dosage. The pills, along with the alcohol she drank to wash them down, made her more unpredictable than ever.

  My parents started going through the motions of splitting up. My mother moved in with Roger, and we alternated between staying with her at the hotel and with my dad at the apartment. A few weeks later, he told us we were going on a road trip. Off we went to Ohio, to visit my aunt and uncle in Toledo. Only he didn’t tell my mom. From her perspective, we had all just vanished. (I can only imagine the powerlessness and raw panic she must have felt.) Dad told our relatives that she had abandoned us for Roger without a word, that he had no idea how to reach her, and they believed him. Morgan and I were so accustomed to things not adding up that I don’t know if we even bothered to question the situation, or wonder why Ginny wasn’t calling and checking in on us. In any case, we were distracted: my aunt and uncle took us with their kids on a road trip to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. For me the main attraction was Minnie Pearl, who had, always, a price tag dangling from her hat.

  None of this would fly now, of course, in the age of cell phones, Instagram, email, and FaceTime, but it was easy to disappear in the seventies. My dad had made it something of a specialty. When we were in one place long enough for bills to start showing up at the door, he would write “deceased” next to his name on the envelope and take it back to the post office. I remember a microwave he bought from Sears—when microwaves seemed like a miraculous invention—that he made Morgan sign for when the deliveryman brought it to our house. My dad then told Sears he wouldn’t pay for it because a child’s signature wasn’t legally binding. He stiffed stores for all kinds of things with schemes like that; he was a creative guy. If either one of my parents had ever applied their intelligence to something constructive, I honestly believe they could have been highly successful. They had the brains, they just didn’t have the tools to pursue a positive path. And so much of their energy was focused on self-sabotage, or on sabotaging each other—I think we treat the people we love the way we believe, in our deepest hearts, that we deserve to be treated ourselves.

  That summer in Toledo, my dad had no idea how to be alone with us. I had always felt connected to him, but he was so withdrawn by this point that it was impossible to feel close. He loved us, sure. But he hadn’t kidnapped us because he was determined to spend quality time with his children or because he was genuinely afraid Ginny would take us to California and he’d never see us again. I think our time in Ohio was just one extended power play in my parents’ never-ending love-hate struggle—and I suppose he won that particular round. Because somehow, by the end of the summer, he’d convinced my mom to forgive him for kidnapping her children, and we headed back to Pennsylvania so they could give it another shot.

  Everything was going to be different. We were—of course—going to move, to a bigger house in another town in Pennsylvania called Charleroi, thirty miles outside of Pittsburgh. It was a step up on every level. A spacious, modern house painted avocado green, with high ceilings and shiny new appliances that my mother loved. The plumbing needed work, but Dad was good at that: he blew cigarette smoke through the pipes and had Morgan sit up in the bathroom and yell down to tell him which was the hot tap and which was the cold based on where the smoke came out.

  Of all the places we lived, I think that house most closely matched my mom’s fantasy of what life should look like. Unlike her mother, Ginny’s aspirations early on were conventional: she wanted to
be a beautiful wife and mother who was adored by her husband and had a nice home. And she had made nice homes for us, everywhere we went. She had a knack for decorating; she managed to whip each house we lived in into shape almost as soon as we got there: sewing curtains, arranging the furniture and knickknacks she got from a company called Home Interiors, and generally making things look lived in, as if we’d been there for years. But at the Green House, as my brother and I called it, she outdid herself. That house was the embodiment of her domestic ambitions. I was even allowed to get a puppy. Unfortunately, it went to the bathroom in front of my dad’s closet and he gave me a “spanking” for that with his belt. (I didn’t cry, though. I never, ever cried, no matter what.) The puppy went back.

  Of course, nothing was really different in Charleroi. The same stuff was just happening in a different house. Danny was gambling and drinking to excess. He was an excellent pool player, and, when he was lucky, he would convince some unsuspecting fool to bet against him, saying that he could win with one eye covered. Then Danny would cover up the lazy eye he could barely see out of anyway, and proceed to rake in the other guy’s money.

  It didn’t always go his way. He lost huge amounts of money playing poker and would come home raging, drunk, and broke. At one point my father turned to a mafia loan shark to cover his gambling losses, and he was indebted to the mob for years afterward. He had already been working with them to sway local elections for mafia-favored candidates and other low-level, unsavory stuff like that. However indirect my dad’s involvement, it was still dangerous. He got into a shoot-out outside of a bar in Charleroi once. Another time, my mom went with a female friend to a pub in town and was spotted by a mobster who called my dad: he told my dad that mob women weren’t supposed to be out unaccompanied like that; it didn’t look right.

  I, meanwhile, started seventh grade, which in Charleroi was part of the giant, terrifying high school. As always, I was the new girl. It’s possible that all the adapting I had to do primed me to become an actress: it was my job to portray whatever character I thought would be most popular in every new school, in every new town. I identified the in crowd and studied them for clues: Did the cool girls wear bell-bottoms or hot pants? What were their accents like? What did I need to do to be accepted? Was it best to try to stand out or blend in? It would be decades before it occurred to me that I could just be whoever I truly am, not the person I guessed other people wanted to see.