Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture

by Chelsea Cain

  ‘All cuts heal.’ Nina hugged me close. Her flowing gown smelted damp. ‘Nothing can be broken that can’t be fixed, you understand? We are human, strange and wonderful. We are meant to be broken. By pain. By grief. By disappointment. By each other.

  But we are made whole through love and forgiveness. Remember that, and you will never be lonely.’

  She stroked my hair and kissed my cheek. ‘I hope you come visit us again.’ Though I did not say it, I knew I would never again be allowed back into Summer’s home. Nina and I walked, hand in hand, down the sidewalk and across the street. Nina stopped at the front door and waited until my mother answered. No words were exchanged. My mother’s angry stare bored into me. I shuddered in my skin, already feeling her icy words in my body, her violent pleas to be obedient, to honor my father’s demands.

  After I stepped inside, I bolted for my room and closed the door. My mother did not knock, but just stepped inside and said, ‘Tell me what possessed you to go over to that girl’s house when your father told you not to? I was worried sick, don’t you understand? I knocked on every neighbor’s door. No one knew where you were. I called the police. I called your father at work. I thought you had been kidnapped and raped and killed. I thought you were never coming home.’

  Tears crested in my half-moon eyes. I held my breath, determined not to let them fall.

  ‘You know better than to sneak around behind our backs. You are grounded for a month. I’m going to have your grandfather pick you up at school and bring you home. I’m going to call from work and make sure you answer the phone. You’re a disgrace to our family and a poor example to your sisters. Just wait until your father gets home.’

  My mother stormed out of the room and banged pots and pans in the kitchen as she attempted to cook dinner. My head ached.

  My stomach churned. I felt so bad I wanted to die.

  At dinner, no one spoke of my transgressions, though my sisters glanced at me with furtive eyes. My father was not home. He did not return from work until late at night when we were supposed to be asleep.

  The following morning, my father called me into his room. ‘You embarrassed us,’ he said. ‘What will people think of us if they saw you at that slum? What type of parents will they think we are for letting you go over there?’

  I did not know and I did not care, but I was told I should know, I should care. So I did.

  I listened to my parents. I let my grandfather pick me up after school when everyone else rode the bus. I let my mother call me from work to see that I was home, caring for my sisters like I said I would. I let my father lecture to me about good people, honest people, trustworthy people.

  A week before Christmas, Summer and her family moved as mysteriously as they had appeared. By January, another family had moved in, a more conventional one, with a mother and a father and two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom did not want to play with me or my sisters, even after my father said it was okay. ‘They go to our church, be nice to them,’ my father reasoned. But they kept to themselves as much as we did.

  Only once did my father speak of Summer’s departure, and when he did, he dramatized it as if it were a made-for-TV movie. ‘They left in the middle of the night. They had something to hide and did not want to get caught. They didn’t have a moving van. Just a truck. They piled up furniture and left the place a mess. The owners had to paint and re-carpet and replace doors and the stove. They left trash everywhere. And they never paid rent. Not once.’

  I missed Summer. I missed the escape into a world where time did not matter, where tasks could be forgotten, where it was just fine to be. I wanted stories like Nina’s to tell my children someday.

  Years passed. I forgot about Nina and Summer-for a time. When I was nineteen, I moved 110 miles from home and lived with my boyfriend. A year later, I married. Three years later, I had a son. For five years, I did not own a TV. I listened to whatever my husband played on the stereo. I walked barefoot and naked in the house. I have stories to tell. Of my wedding reception: how the best man had broken his toe and was downing vodka to numb the pain and when the time came for his elegant speech, he wavered with his glass and said, ‘Get a life!’ We laughed. Guests and relatives cowered with shame. It is a tale I tell strangers when they want to get to know me.

  I still have problems trusting others and myself. I keep secrets. I exaggerate. Sometimes I lie. When others berate me and demand perfection, I forget to open my heart and offer them forgiveness and love. Many nights, even with my family home, I feel alone.

  I’m still looking for that freedom. Sometimes I see it when I grow out my hair, wear clothes that are no longer in style, disregard consequences. I see Summer in the man I married, a man who is proud of his body, relishes his talents, doesn’t weigh the opinions of others more than his own, a man who has seen my body change from a back injury, a pregnancy, an abortion, and who loves me more each day for the woman I was, the woman I am, the woman I will someday become. I hear Nina’s voice in the stories I tell: delivering an unapproved valedictory speech at my high school graduation, leaving my boyfriend to date his best friend, having sex at a construction site high above the city lights, writing love letters to a writer whose work I fell in love with long before I fell in love with him, taking my three-month-old son with me to work, nursing him during my ten-minute breaks, nourishing him with my milk, my presence, my poetry, my love.

  Each day is full of discovery. I give myself permission to be whoever I am, a spirit of fire and water, a daughter of the moon, a brave soul, a hunter, a wife, a mother, a writer, a woman.

  Elizabeth Shé

  Free Love Ain’t

  We wore robes everywhere, and flowers in our hair. We made sand castles on Venice Beach. We painted our house bright orange and yellow and red and named it Rainbow Flower. Our bathroom featured a mural of giant mushrooms and fairies with glow-in-the-dark stars and a crescent moon. We skinny-dipped on Oregon beaches. We drank alcohol, smoked pot. My brother surfed before he could walk. And Jimi Hendrix played with agonizing consistency in our house, driving me to a seven-year-old’s distraction. I still can’t listen to ‘Foxy Lady’ without cringing. And the smell of marijuana makes me ill.

  My mother was raised Catholic. When my parents divorced (I was six), she ran hell-bent for leather in the opposite direction. Suddenly realizing that being a good girl nets you nothing, she tried the other extreme: sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. My good little Catholic mom drank and fucked like a sailor. For her birthday, we made her a macrame bell system over her bed that she rang with her toe when she orgasmed.

  Sexual innuendos came fast and furious in our house. The randier a joke, the funnier it was. No matter that neither my baby brother (six years younger) nor I knew what the hell we were laughing at. For my tenth birthday, my mom organized a striptease for me and my friends, with bawdy music from The Stingand racy nightgowns. I learned to masturbate with my Chatty Cathy. Sex is fun.

  Sex is a game. Sex is sport.

  The free love movement was a wonderful theory. My parents and their friends were reacting to war, to violence, to governmental betrayal. They wanted a better world, and thought free love was a way to achieve it. Make Love Not War. All You Need Is Love.

  Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines free love as ‘sexual relations without any commitments by either partner.’ But let’s break it down.

  Free. Definition number fifteen states: ‘open to all comers.’ Oh, yeah, baby. That was definitely how my parents’ circle of friends was operating in the sixties and seventies. The good dictionary goes on to say, ‘Free stresses the complete absence of external rule’-yep-‘and the full right to make all of one’s own decisions.’ Kids too?

  Love. Definition number seven: ‘copulation.’ That’s it-no need to read further.

  Free love meant sex, and lots of it. Free love meant you did it anywhere and everywhere to prove you were hip, unencumbered by society’s rules. Countering her strict religious upbringing,
my mother was born again, as a twentieth-century fox. She slept with a fifteen-year-old, a twenty-year-old, a musician or three, a forty-year-old accountant. I heard her sexual ecstasies from my bedroom. The bells over her bed rang frequently.

  I was a wild child of a newly minted wild child.

  Hippies were outside of society, better than society. I still remember a family friend saying I was too good to like a certain black-humored movie. My mother chirped right up. ‘She’s not good. She’s bad.’ Good is bad and bad is good. No wonder I’m in therapy.

  I have an immediate negative response to people who smoke pot and wear bell-bottoms. Unfortunately for me, my college campus is full of people who nostalgically look at the sixties as the pinnacle of our century. But they weren’t there. They weren’t even born. They didn’t see the day after the wild orgy, when my four-year-old brother wandered into the kitchen for a snack, and had to dodge the flying wine bottle my mother was throwing at her drummer boyfriend. Yeah, we were free. Free to fuck our siblings, or drink screwdrivers until we puked.

  But not free to say no.

  The free love movement, in practice, set me up for a lifetime of sexual, emotional and physical abuse. I learned that sex is a should. If someone wanted to sleep with me, I let him. It didn’t matter-never mattered-if I didn’t want to. Free only went one way. And love meant sex.

  If you ask me, free love ain’t either. It’s not love, and it’s not free. I’ve been paying the price for thirty years.

  When I was in the third grade, my babysitter ran away from home to live with us, staying more than a year. Several teenage boys started hanging around, and some girls, adding to the hormonal stew. We called them The Teenagers. Suddenly I had older siblings, and I loved it. I was free to act like a kid, not the responsible elder taking care of my mother. And my mom got to be even more of a wild child-experimental, free and easy. No worries.

  One day my babysitter’s friend Ceoff said we should bond. He sliced my hand, then his, and smeared our blood together. I was nine. He was on acid. My new blood brother leered at me when his girlfriend left the room.

  My mother’s brother also leered at me, as did a few of my father’s friends. There was nowhere, after I developed breasts, that I was safe.

  My dad felt free to comment on strangers’ bodies-even those of twelve-year-olds. And I wonder why I’ve always hated mine?

  What I learned as a child of the sixties-fuck everything that moves and let it fuck you-has definitely shaped my adulthood. Want to screw on the beach? Want to fuck under the desk at work? in the alley? on the side of the road? in the car driving eighty miles an hour?

  Sure.

  My function on earth, said society, said the hippies, said my mother, was to be fuckable. Extremely fuckable. Did I want sex? Who cares? Open your legs and let me in or I’ll call you a square, mainstream, conservative. God forbid.

  My brother and I saw our mother say yes to everyone, so we learned to say yes to everyone, even strangers. When I was fourteen, I was molested by a talent agent. When my brother was twelve, he was molested by his best friend’s father.

  Sex. Not simple, not easy, not free. And not love.

  My mom routinely took us to the Fox Theatre to watch movies. We popped our own popcorn and smuggled in thermoses of Callo wine (unless we were boycotting). Once she dragged us to Performance and something I only remember as Bye-Bye Blackbird. Both rated R, both semi-pornographic. Nuns sodomized and killed. Mick Jagger fucking a starlet.

  My brother cried for a month with nightmares, and twenty years later, I still vividly remember those violent images. Some things are too graphic for kids to see, but we saw them, and later tried them, or at least consented to them.

  It may be why, years later, I beg a boyfriend to whip me. And, more recently, why I throw up when a new friend wants to shop in a sex store.

  No boundaries, no guidance, no protection. Nothing was sacred.

  And yet, as a kid, everyone envied me my mother. She let me do anything I wanted. I could roam the streets after midnight on a school night, or fuck a classmate on an open field after a football game. All she wanted was the details, which she promptly passed on to her friends, along with the size of my brother’s dick.

  My hippie mother even suggested people for me to sleep with, didn’t understand when I wouldn’t, especially if it was someone she wanted. She saw nothing wrong with the local mechanic taking pictures of me naked. After all, he took some of her.

  Neither parent provided protection. I think my mom naively believed that all you do need is love, that love will heal all wounds, that there is no such thing as inherent evil. She couldn’t imagine such evil, so couldn’t guard against it. After a while, in self-defense, I lied to my friends about curfews (that I had one) and restrictions (that I had some). I wanted limits before I got eaten up. But by then it was too late.

  I slept with my best male friend (to Pink Floyd, of course). I slept with my best friend’s boyfriend. All this would’ve been fine and dandy except I felt like shit. One of my friends laughingly called me a slut, but I knew she meant it. Another girlfriend wrote me a nasty letter after I slept with a guy I hadn’t known she liked.

  As I got older, I did my best to have a protective boyfriend around, someone to fall back on, so I had a ‘legitimate’ excuse to turn people down. As if what I wanted didn’t count. Sorry, can’t menage a trois. My boyfriend, you know.

  The fifteen-year-old my mother bedded became my lover fifteen years later. My mother abused him, he later abused me. Instigated by good ol’ free love.

  I guess I’m lucky to be alive. I have no STDs, I’m HIV-negative. But free love exacted a terrible price on my family. These days I trust no one either over or under thirty. I have no real friends, no support, no closeness. Neither my brother nor I can keep a meaningful relationship going for very long before it self-destructs. We’ve both been in jail for domestic violence, and we both continue to flail in the maze of our desecrated sexuality.

  Free love freely fostered self-hatred, which manifested itself in eating disorders and suicidal tendencies. I became so disconnected from my body that my gynecologist would find objects (tampons, condoms) left in my vagina for days. I didn’t feel them rotting inside me.

  I was primed to be the sexiest, the wildest, the least hung up. Liberal. A hippie’s kid. Untainted by rules and regulations. Unconstrained. Free.

  These days I have so many hang-ups, I’m surprised I can walk down the street without tripping. And actually, there were years when I couldn’t walk down the street; I couldn’t even leave my house. Nowhere was safe except, paradoxically, my bed. Depression and sex, with bed as part of the disease and the cure.

  If you saw me now you’d have no inkling that I used to dance to the blues in such a way that the musicians all had hard-ons, that my favorite movie, after The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was 9 ‘/2 Weeks.

  Today I rarely wear revealing clothes outside of the house. I don’t like dirty jokes or double entendres, and I hate Valentine’s Day, with its corresponding message, ‘Everybody copulate!’ Some would call me frigid.

  I read self-help books that say sex is healthy, sexual urges are normal, I’m not a slut. But that vaguely echoes what my mother taught me. Sex is good. Sex is fun. Sex is sport.

  Nowadays I have only fantasies, because I am too damn tired to deal with people. After so many years of sexual abuse, and being the sexiest slut on the block, ironically, I can’t have sex.

  For a period of time, I cried every time I came, and exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I gained weight, wore baggy clothes, shaved my head.

  I call myself bisexual, but in truth, I’m asexual. Celibate. Scared even to flirt. Because flirting leads to sex-inevitably, mandatorily, to sex. So I don’t even start. Everyone I know is safely partnered up.

  Deep down inside I am conservative. I don’t like multiple lovers, I only want to sleep with one person. I pretended to separate sex from love, but I was only fooling (an
d abusing) myself. Sex was love for me-a substitute love-not sport, not just fun. Love my body, love me. Simple, easy. Not.

  I have a hard time imagining someone really loving me unless I fuck her into the ground. As if sexual prowess ensures love or even monogamy. The well-trained concubine.

  Now I am scared of anything sexual, afraid I can’t control myself, that I’ll eke back into my yay-saying ways. I’m afraid to do anything other than write and fantasize.

  But I’m lonely. Lonely for love, for companionship, for touch. My body betrays me by craving caresses, coveting kisses, melting under hugs. I am a sensual being. All the ugly, baggy clothes in the world won’t stop my body from responding to smells, sounds, touches, tastes. My sex drive rears its ugly head frequently. Repression only works for so long. Eruption is imminent.

  Eventually I’ll have to reconcile this with the sex abuse. Every month (probably hormonal) I get horny, masturbate, then feel extraordinarily degraded and ashamed. Bad.

  Not good.

  I’ve taken to writing violent pornography which offends my feminist sensibilities, but for some reason (Bye-Bye Blackbird?) keeps coming up. I read porn too, and it shames me.

  Ten thousand dollars in therapy bills later, the love I gained through sex, or free love, is nonexistent.

  The cost of ‘free’ love? Self-esteem. Happiness.

  A few things have changed. The Beatles are still gods, but my mother has had plastic surgery. And I am slowly healing from my parents’ fling with free love. I guess the pendulum had to swing to the other extreme for me to achieve balance. I’m learning that not everything is black or white. I can grab the grays and define them. I just hope I recognize the happy medium when it hits.

  When I come out of my promiscuity backlash, my own little frigid movement, I hope to feel safe and powerful and sexual. Something I can almost imagine. But not quite.