Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  Needless to say, whenever I started to get a sense of a place, to decipher how I might fit in through sports or the social scene or what classes I might be good at, it was time to pick up and leave. Usually without much warning, or any kind of logical plan.

  I DON’T KNOW which of my dad’s illicit activities provoked this particular fight—whether it was another infidelity, or if he just got too nasty when he was drunk—but one afternoon when I was doing my homework to the background music of my parents fighting at the top of their lungs, I heard my mother scream, “I’ve had it with your shit!” She came storming into my room and told Morgan and me to grab our stuff and get in the car, we were going back to Roswell.

  This was nothing out of the ordinary, of course: we were pretty efficient at packing by this point, and we were used to hitting the road for hours on end while my mother chain-smoked out the window. But going back to Roswell was a departure from the exhausting routine of starting over from scratch. Insofar as we understood the concept, Roswell was home. It was where we came from, where we had family and history and an understanding of the culture and the community. And then there was Grandma Marie, whom I’d called “Mother” as a little girl, and who was, in many ways, the only adult I really trusted. Staying with her was grounding, soothing. When we got to her house, it was a relief just to be in her midst.

  Even with half a dozen states between them, my parents managed to keep their drama explosive. The screaming phone calls began almost as soon as we arrived—my father’s voice was so loud through the receiver it felt like he was there in the room. My mother would stalk around the house sobbing histrionically, while I tried to stay out of her way. Morgan escaped into his projects: taking apart and putting back together the vacuum cleaner motor, disassembling the alarm clock to see how it worked. When my aunts came around, I realized they were shooting knowing glances at each other during my mother’s outbursts and drinking binges. For the first time I felt embarrassed by her. And I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way.

  Ginny wanted me to take her side and tell everyone how horrible my dad had been to her, but I couldn’t. Aside from the gambling, I felt they were equally to blame for the chaos in our lives. Now that I was old enough, I could see how childish she was compared to her sisters—how rarely she took responsibility for herself, and how her default mode was to blame everyone else: my dad, my grandmother, whoever. Little by little, I started to wall myself off from her. With my grandmother around, I didn’t need to overlook my mother’s craziness just to survive.

  So, on the inevitable afternoon when Ginny said we were going back to my dad, I didn’t get up and start packing as I always had in the past. Dad had gotten a new job in Washington State, north of Seattle, Ginny told me and my grandmother, and the plan was to return to him in Pennsylvania and then move to the other side of the country together as a family.

  I looked at my grandmother. I looked at my mom. And then I said, “I’m not going.” Ginny didn’t give me a good enough reason for returning to the man she’d been spending all of her waking hours maligning to her family or fighting with on the phone. I was sick of things not adding up. Whatever it was they were doing, I didn’t want to be a part of it. My mother tried to persuade me, but she saw that I was immovable. She took Morgan and went back to Charleroi without me.

  That summer, I did gymnastics at the Y, where I made my first best friend, Stacy Welch. My grandmother enrolled me in the better public school in Roswell in the fall—we weren’t zoned for it, but Grandma Marie finagled it by dropping me off every morning at Stacy’s house, and then Stacy and I would walk to the bus or Mrs. Welch would drive us to school. I made the cheerleading squad. Suddenly, I was living like a normal person, like everybody else. It felt great.

  Once Ginny made it to Washington with my brother, I started getting the push: “You should come up here; it’s beautiful, you’d love it!” And there was a part of me that felt you should be with your parents—a dutiful pull. But why? I was doing fine.

  My grandmother took care of me with a consistency I’d never before experienced. She made sure that I finished my homework, brushed my teeth, got to bed on time. She let me paint my room bright yellow because I loved Tweety Bird so much. She was attentive to everything in my life, including the friends I was making at school. If I went to the movies, she would pick me up, or, if she was working, she’d arrange to have someone else get me. Never once was I left standing on a street corner, wondering if anyone would show up. The daily disasters of life with my parents were nonexistent. In essence, I got the version of my grandmother that my mother had always yearned for.

  After my granddaddy died, my grandmother went through a prolonged mourning period. For almost two years, every day when she got home from her job in the office of a legal title company, she lay on the couch in the living room without turning on the lights. Then she met a lovely guy named Harold and found love again. They had their regular schedule, and I became part of their routines: Tuesday and Saturday nights they went dancing, so I either had a sleepover at a friend’s house or someone came and slept over with me. Wednesday was Grandma Marie’s standing appointment at the beauty parlor, and when she finished getting her hair done after work, we would go out to dinner, just the two of us, at one of the usual spots: the Mexican restaurant, Furr’s cafeteria, or the Chinese place. The Roswell rotation.

  It was a halcyon period of safety, a time when I saw what a parent could be—should be—and an example I would look to when I became a mother. And yet, I started to get restless. By that point, I was conditioned to not stay in one place for too long. I didn’t have any experience in following through; I had no barometer for the hardships—or the rewards—of commitment. I’ve often wondered what my life would be like if I’d remained in Roswell. I would have had to work on developing and maintaining friendships, which had always been disposable. I would have had to set goals for myself, which I’d never done, because we weren’t in one place long enough to see them through.

  None of that happened. I had learned to crave extremes: it was like I needed the juice of it. I lasted six months in Roswell. Then I went back to my parents.

  Chapter 3

  I was with my family in Washington for just two months before they decided we were moving, this time to Southern California—and in a hurry. Maybe it was because of a mistress, maybe they were dodging a bill collector, or maybe the Pacific Northwest chapter of the mafia had figured out where to find my dad. We may simply have been evading Roger the therapist. My mother had stolen his credit card, and we used it to pay for our trip to California.

  Somewhere along the never-ending nineteen-hour drive to Redondo Beach, my dad got badly beaten up; his face was swollen and bruised and he had a black eye. He looked awful: I can picture his battered face behind the wheel. In keeping with the silence that surrounded every unpleasant aspect of my family’s life, there was no explanation or discussion.

  Once we were installed in our new place in Redondo Beach—an apartment in a beachy, stucco, pseudo-hacienda-style complex a mile from the water—my mother told me that when anyone called I should say that both my parents were away and couldn’t be reached. They were eluding the phone company, the electric company, and credit card carriers—all of whom would ask to speak to the variations of my parents’ names they’d been given, like “Virginia King,” my mother’s maiden name, or my dad’s first and middle names, “Danny Gene.” My parents even rented our apartment under the names of my aunt DeAnna and my uncle George, my father’s little brother, who lived nearby in L.A.

  This came to light when George and DeAnna decided to move into our apartment complex and discovered that, thanks to my parents, they were already there. I don’t even remember them being particularly angry about it; they simply assumed my parents’ names for the purposes of their own lease. Having my aunt and uncle so close by was a huge comfort. As my mom and dad spiraled further out of control, George and DeAnna filled in the gaps time after time: they gave
us rides when we needed them, fed us, listened to us when we had problems. They took me to my first concert: Aerosmith, in 1975. (They wanted to sit up in the stands; my friend and I were desperate to get onto the grass down where the action was. During “Sweet Emotion,” I remember, a stranger casually passed me a bottle of rum; I went to lift it to my mouth, but DeAnna snatched it away.)

  Southern California in the mid-seventies was different from anywhere we’d been before. I was in seventh grade—at my third school that year—and all the cool kids wore Dittos jeans and smoked cigarettes and pot. I became close with a girl named Adrien, who had long blond hair: the quintessential California girl in a tube top. She was my mentor in misbehaving, introducing me to hard liquor and Marlboro Reds.

  I got busted smoking at school and was sent to the principal’s office. My punishment was suspension. I was horrified. I’d never been in trouble before; up until then fitting in had never required acting out. My mom came to pick me up, and we were quiet on the way home. Then she removed a cigarette from her pack, waved it in my direction, and said, “Go ahead.” Instead, I took out one of my own. She reached over and lit it, and we never talked about it again.

  That marked the beginning of a new stage in our relationship. I was only thirteen, but when I asked Ginny if I could go with friends to a club in the Valley, she said, “Sure—take the car. If you get stopped by the police just say you’re driving it without your parents’ permission.” I had learned how to drive back in Roswell, but I didn’t know the Valley. I didn’t know the freeway. I had no experience driving at night. Somehow, I made it to the club, with two other kids—who are lucky to be alive—as my passengers. From then on, I was regularly assigned to run family errands in that car. “Just remember: we don’t know you’re driving it,” Ginny told me. It was convenient for my parents, and it was one more way of seeing what they could get away with.

  My parents didn’t set boundaries for me because they couldn’t even set them for themselves. They were drinking more than ever and taking Percodan, Valium, and Quaaludes that my father somehow obtained prescriptions for and filled at different drugstores using all my parents’ various aliases. He had the look to go with the partying: bell-bottoms and long sideburns. He even got a perm.

  As for my mother, she often got aggressive when she mixed drugs and alcohol, and my parents got kicked out of restaurants and bars as a matter of course. My mom would start a fight with other patrons or lose her temper with my dad and start breaking dishes. Once, when she didn’t like the way the check was delivered, she took off her high-heeled shoe and used it as a weapon against the waitress.

  Somehow, in the middle of all their partying, my mom found a good job as a bookkeeper for a magazine distribution company owned by a man named Frank Diskin. DeAnna started working for him, too, and suddenly my family had more money—especially my mother. Frank gave her luxurious bonuses: a mink coat and, eventually, the ultimate status symbol for a New Mexico girl of that era, a Cadillac Seville in pale yellow. We ended up moving into the nicest house we’d ever occupied in Marina del Rey, with Frank Diskin paying our rent.

  Why was this guy willing to spend so much on his bookkeeper? DeAnna remembers that whenever my mother was alone with Frank in his office, the door was always locked.

  EVER SINCE THE episode in Canonsburg when my mother had tried to kill herself, I’d been subconsciously waiting for another disaster—another truly devastating situation that didn’t make sense, that I couldn’t control, and that would upend my already unstable life. It arrived without warning when I came home from school one day to find that my brother, my father, and almost every trace of them had vanished. “Where’s Morgan?” I asked my mother. “Where’s Dad?” It was not unprecedented for my dad to go missing, but my brother? She shrugged. “Your father and I are getting a divorce,” she said. “And he’d only consent if I gave him Morgan.”

  I was stunned. I don’t know what was worst: losing my brother, losing my dad, or finding out that my father couldn’t bear to be parted from Morgan but was fine with abandoning me.

  “You and I are moving to West Hollywood,” Ginny informed me. “I’ve found an apartment on Kings Road.” Frank Diskin was out of the picture. As my mother and DeAnna told it, the IRS had been after my father for back taxes for years, and when they caught up with him, he gave them dirt on Diskin in exchange for his own freedom. Basically, he offered the government the same deal he’d offered so many others: double or nothing.

  There was only one problem. Losing Diskin meant losing our relative prosperity. Both my mother and DeAnna were out of jobs, and my family wouldn’t be able to stay in the house in the Marina. My mother was furious, and I guess for her it was the final straw that convinced her she’d be better off without my dad. Evidently, my father had hit a breaking point, too: before he left, he’d cut Ginny’s beautiful mink coat into pieces.

  I was still reeling when she took me to see our new neighborhood. She was on a manic high, pointing out all the bars and movie theaters, the shops and restaurants. The complex where we were going to live was massive, but the actual apartment was tiny: one bedroom, which we would share; a kitchenette; and a little balcony overlooking the pool. It was like everything in my life was shrinking: my home, my family.

  NOW THAT IT was just the two of us, my dynamic with Ginny shifted. It was more like we were sisters than mother and daughter. I was already used to living without rules or limits, but now we even started to look more like peers. I was developing into a teenager; and Ginny basically dressed like one, in miniskirts and low-cut tops. She dolled herself up every time she went out the apartment door. She had deliberately chosen a building where there were other single people and divorcées, and she made friends with one of our neighbors, Landi, who would go with her to the bars.

  From our balcony, I used to see this beautiful girl hanging out at the pool, swimming and lying in the sun, growing ever more golden. She was the most radiant creature I’d ever seen, a German actress a few years older than I was, named Nastassja Kinski. I became her friend and acolyte.

  The director Roman Polanski had brought Nastassja and her mother to America so that Nastassja could improve her English and her accent at Lee Strasberg’s acting studio. Polanski wanted Nastassja to star in Tess, a romantic tragedy he was going to make based on the Thomas Hardy novel, and he was willing to put off the film until she was ready. That’s how much faith he had in her, which certainly made sense to me. As far as I could tell, she was perfect.

  She was self-possessed and in her body like nobody I’d ever seen before. She owned her sexuality completely, without self-consciousness or discomfort, with complete confidence and ease. In my whole life, I haven’t met many who have that in the way that she did. Nastassja was only seventeen, but she had already been in four films. Her star was on the rise in Hollywood, and she regularly received scripts from directors who wanted to work with her. That’s where I came in. Nastassja could speak English well, but she couldn’t really read it, so she asked me to read the screenplays out loud to her so she could decide which ones she wanted to pursue.

  She would stare at me with her enormous green eyes, listening intently, and by the time I finished reading her a script, she’d know exactly what she thought; she had total clarity in her opinions. I was as dazzled by her confidence and her sense of direction as I was by her beauty and sensuality. And I saw the breathtaking effect that combination had on other people: like me, they were overcome by her sense of comfort, freedom, and power—though I doubt I identified it as power at the time, as the concept was unimaginable to me. I didn’t know what it was that she had, but I wanted it for myself.

  Nastassja’s mom may have been even less reliable than mine. It had fallen to Nastassja, from the age of twelve, to support them both. I wasn’t paying for my mother’s life (yet), but I understood the feeling of being responsible for the person who was supposed to be responsible for you. Emotionally, it felt like it was my job to keep Ginny alive. It was a
sad but powerful thing Nastassja and I had in common. For a time, we were very close.

  I decided to follow Nastassja’s example—I wanted to do what she did, and if that meant acting, then so be it. I learned by watching, observing, asking myself: How is this person doing this? What do you need to do to make this work—do you need to get an agent? (Not: I want to be an actor, mind you. But: How do I make this happen?) I went with Nastassja to her dance classes, trying to emulate her grace, and one night she took me along to dinner with Polanski. He tracked me down to invite me to dinner a second time months later, and I went with my mom. He was a perfect gentleman on both of those evenings, but he had been convicted of having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. (I saw this dynamic all around me. Thirteen was a little extreme, but in my world, believe it or not, relationships with underage girls was the norm.) He expected probation following his plea bargain, but the judge saw it differently. Faced with imprisonment, Polanski fled the United States just a few days after that second dinner. He ended up making Tess in France; the film received three Oscars, and Nastassja won a Golden Globe.

  I was disappointed when she moved out of the apartment building. It would be two decades before we saw each other again—unexpectedly, at Elizabeth Taylor’s regular Sunday lunch. When we embraced, it was like a homecoming. We knew each other in a way that no one else could.