Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture

by Chelsea Cain

  His friends were equally amazed. I remember hanging out at the house he shared with his brothers one Wednesday night. The usual crowd was drifting around, waiting for free lines. Coke dealers always have lots of friends. Dean’s brother Trey, the dealer, arranged four neat lines on the Miller High Life mirror and shoved them across the table to where I sprawled on the couch. ‘Hey everybody! Watch this! Watch her not do it!’ The four lines sat between us, untouched, until some impatient soul reached down with a rolled bill and got high on a school night.

  Our relationship ended acrimoniously. For Christmas I bought Dean a watch he’d been eyeing for months. He promptly ‘lost’ it. Whether he truly did, sold it for drugs or broke it in anger after a fight with me I cannot say. He ruefully promised to replace it ‘as soon as he had the money.’ I watched him put four or five watches up his nose before realizing cocaine meant more to him than the thirty-seven dollars I’d painfully saved from my meager school job. We broke up in an ugly, sobbing scene on New Year’s Eve, and I have not seen him since.

  The breakup devastated me. I missed him so much it felt physical. I imagined him finding a skinny, narrow-hipped Catholic girl-at size twelve, I was too voluptuous for his tastes-and marrying her. Having quiet, nearsighted babies and buying his starter home on Detroit ’s east side, far from the reviled Jews and Blacks. I still think about him and wonder if he’s tamped down our relationship into something meaningless, or if he looks at his wife in the night and wonders what he missed.

  A few other people wandered in and out of my family’s lives, lan, Michael’s son, was an occasional visitor, always bringing drugs, a bag of new records and an enviably sexy girlfriend. He went in for tall, collected redheads or blondes who left me quailing, so positive in my stoned stupor that I would say something stupid, I’d lapse into paranoid silence.

  There were others: William, who discussed the scientific versus the aesthetic structure of the world with me on a long walk one day when I was seven; a guy lan often crashed with named Blaster; and Cecilia, who’d been gang-raped at a party while tripping on LSD. Talented, bright, charismatic, they’d arrive unexpectedly from Lan-sing or Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, illuminating the house for a few hours with laughter and talk, then disappearing just as quickly, returning in six days or four months or never again. These people were either incapable of or uninterested in ongoing friendships. It seemed to me that the more people ‘understood things,’ the less capable they were of functioning in the world, barely getting by on parental dole or dealing. William’s brilliance turned the corner to insanity; last I heard he lived in the streets. Blaster moved from place to place, dealing. Cecilia married a straight, dull fellow and had babies, lan did nothing, dropping out of college and living off Michael, collecting a string of pretty girls who eventually tired of his laziness and dumped him. My combination of good student, outstanding co-op worker of the year, and drug-user with my folks on weekends, while odd, wasn’t impossible. Why didn’t other people do it?

  During my teens, I remember surveying our lives, relative to the world around us. The straight route led to financial freedom, affording me the creature comforts I wanted: books, records and nice clothing. The counterculture neglected the material things, shunning those values as ‘square,’ offering instead people who shared some of my core values about politics and drugs, people who didn’t freak out over my parents. A foot in both worlds struck me as practical and not a particularly difficult way to live. I often hid my glee in high school, the model student in the front row as the counselors raved at us about the dangers of drugs.

  I spent countless hours trying to figure out people like lan, who did absolutely nothing, or Cecilia, who crossed into the straight life with nary a backward glance. Ultimately I gave up, becoming wary and distant from the parade through our home. Attachment to these people, however appealing, only meant hurt when they vanished. And, invariably, they did.

  Friendless and unspeakably lonely, I despaired of finding people who shared my world view. My peers were a bunch of smart, rich kids following the party line, wearing Levi’s with the waist size blacked out, meeting their future spouses at B’nai B’rith youth group meetings, readying their applications to the University of Michigan. Their predictable behavior patterns enraged me. I had no desire to be like them. I wanted them to be like me.

  When I was seventeen, my family decided to move to Los Angeles, where my father could find lucrative employment in the burgeoning defense industry. I was thrilled to leave, thinking of California ’s then-affordable state colleges and of all the hip, like-thinking people I’d befriend or date. Only my mother cried when we left Caroline behind.

  My father found a job at a big defense company doing government contract work. He loathed it and everything it represented, but we had medical insurance, were able to replace the rusted-out station wagon and could even afford to go see Tom Petty at the Universal Amphitheater. A local kid sold us something we’d never heard of, ‘skunk,’ pot so powerful it left my sister giggling helplessly in the bathtub.

  The move gave us an enormous culture shock. People spoke unrecognizable valley-girl English. Strip malls lined every non-residential street, each anchored by a nail salon. People were enthralled by their fingernails and their weight. The weather was the same every day: hot, dry and unbearably bright. Our first Christmas in LA. utterly unnerved me. I had taken a terrible job with an insurance company while waiting to establish residency for college. The city had overdecorated, as if compensating for the eighty-five degree heat. I remember emerging from the office building at noon. Christmas Eve, hitting that blast of dry Santa Ana heat and wanting to kill myself.

  My depression deepened into a constant that varied only in intensity. I remember finishing Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins during my sophomore year. It was the final day before the month-long holiday break, and the campus was deserted, smelling (finally) of winter and dry leaves. An empty month lay ahead. Even the book, with its fascinating characters who led full, exciting lives, was finished. I dropped it reluctantly in the library return slot and thought again about suicide.

  At twenty-two I had a nervous breakdown. I was doing well in school, but it wasn’t enough to pull me up from the emptiness of my personal life. I ceased functioning at home, crying constantly and sleeping as much as possible. I became obsessed with my weight and the most efficient way to commit suicide.

  Fortunately, I was still living with my parents. My sister had moved in with a boyfriend. My brother, who was fourteen when we arrived, had made the best adjustment, getting his GED, a good job and a nice car in short order. He was busy playing in bands and going out to Hollywood clubs with his many friends. So my parents, who weren’t meeting scads of people themselves, had plenty of time to babysit me. For the next two years, I lived in a bizarre netherworld, finishing my B. A. and falling apart. For a while I was incapable of going to the supermarket alone. I’d stand there, bewildered: What did we need? Why was I there? If I stayed in my bedroom with the stereo on for more than a half hour, my mother pounded on the door until I came out. She walked dozens of miles with me around our subdivision as I ranted about ending my life.

  I visited a therapist in a tony office on Ventura Boulevard. The color of her suit matched her shoes and fingernails. She told me I was an intellectual snob and needed to go Jewish folk dancing, where I would meet nice boys. ‘Call me,’ she offered while ushering me out, ‘if you feel suicidal over the weekend.’

  ‘You,’ I thought, ‘are the last person I’d call.’

  Eventually the worst of it lifted. I graduated with honors. My brother moved out to pursue his nocturnal music career. I remained in our large house. I paid my parents a little rent and continued to help around the house.

  At twenty-five I met my husband through a personals ad I placed in an alternative newspaper. I was meeting no men, the ad was free, I had nothing to lose. I received hundreds of responses, finally hitting on the line ‘looks and money not important’ to winn
ow out callers boasting of ‘industry’ jobs, yachts and horse ranches. John’s voice message only said: ‘Call me and we’ll savage the right.’

  We met for coffee and nursed cappuccinos for three hours. We met at Venice Beach and strolled the boardwalk, poking into bookstores and head shops. I told my mother, ‘We get along.’

  ‘You’re going to marry him,’ she said.

  It would be disingenuous to close with counterculture girl met counterculture boy, had counterculture wedding (the groom wore shoulder-length hair and a Jerry Garcia tie; the bride didn’t have a manicure) and lived happily ever after. We each continue to act in two worlds. John is an environmental engineer with an inter-national company that drug tests its employees. His gorgeous long hair rests in an envelope in his desk drawer.

  John has a rare chromosomal aberration called Becker Muscular Dystrophy. It is a slow wasting of the leg and hip muscles, sometimes compounded by pulmonary and cardiac complications. Recent medical research has prolonged the lives of those afflicted, but we live with the knowledge that we may not grow old together.

  He was diagnosed at sixteen and promptly decided to live as he wished and fight like hell. His attitude gives mine ballast. Unlike me, John had many friends when we met, some close. I had long before internalized the idea that the only relationships worth pursuing were of the Caroline and Michael variety. I learned from John that an acquaintance based on a few shared interests can be rewarding, and that such relationships don’t represent the surrender of core values. Instead, they are companionship, a shared glass of wine or a hit, a pleasant evening, a party to attend. I learned not to expect an intense communion at every encounter.

  In fact, I stopped looking for it. I now have a few friends. None are remotely like the relationships I witnessed growing up. I am still lonely, though less so, and prone to bouts of depression. I suspect I always shall be. But knowing my happy marriage may not last forces me to attend to the present.

  I am now thirty-one years old and hold to my early pursuit of a foot in each world. To an extent, I feel alienated by each; I’d no sooner vote for Elizabeth Dole than I’d live without running water. This lands me in a gray place, going into the straight world for my paycheck, then veering toward the counterculture for a reaffirma-tion of my values.

  My parents, now in their late fifties, continue their coun-tercultural ways, fond as ever of lava lamps and always the oldest attendees at rock concerts. After an earthquake damaged their home, they moved to the Southwest, to a blindingly bright white house that deflects the desert sun. Surrounding them are young Mormon couples who make their anti-Semitism plain. Membership in the homeowners’ association is mandatory.

  So my parents move quietly, pulling the drapes before switching on the lava lamps, keeping bottles of air freshener on the coffee table in case a neighbor knocks. They have made a few acquaintances, all younger. They do not know where Michael and Caroline are; at times, my mother insists they are dead.

  For all intents and purposes, they are. But a breeze continues to blow through the window that they opened.

  River Light

  Ghosts

  Thirty-one years ago a baby girl slipped into this world. Spoon-fed love and wild ways, she grew to be a rag-tag tangle-haired woods baby. Small child thriving on the seeds of rebellious plants, rebellious ideas. Child encircled in the arms of a culture running counter to concrete streets, camouflaged intent and white bread, white sugar ideas.

  Who I am is informed by, but not defined by, the fact that I am a ‘hippie kid.’ I stand in too many camps for only two feet, and the camps are not always at peace. I am an avid feminist and an anti-censorship, pro-sex ‘pervert.’ I believe in decadence, but cannot become passionate about money. I am a dyke who wants children, a woods baby living in the heart of the city, a pacifist who has taken self-defense.

  We were the golden children, angels of the woods.

  My stepmother (long since left my dad) worries that I do not prepare for my retirement, while my father (still the hippie radical dropout) worries that I do not prepare for the fall. My mother, burned by ‘free love,’ worries that I’ll be stung by the polyamory that I embrace, and my stepfather keeps his own counsel.

  The child whose first word was ‘hot,’ but whose second was…possibly not fit for the company of grandparents. A child who understood the concepts but who, stretching at the applications, still asked, ‘Is this one of those times I don’t say ‘fuck’?’ The child who ate with four forks, three knives, some spoons, but mainly her hands. Who now reads entire books on manners (the last one titled, appropriately enough, Please Don’t Eat the Doily). The one who now prides herself in knowing how to formally introduce.

  I come from two ‘failed marriages.’ But with each separation and subsequent addition, those who cherish me grew in number. And my love for my original parents did not diminish. I had ample for all-and so do not believe in the scarcity theory of love. I do not believe affection is finite, because that has never been my experience.

  The child who would climb into anyone’s lap, even if only just introduced, because a friend is a friend regardless of how long the acquaintance.

  Nothing lasts forever. Each friendship, each relationship, must change, flow through its cycles, transform endlessly into new gifts, new treasures. If we resist this movement, the relationship shatters, like ice in the moving tide. But if we are open to re-creation, then we become stronger with each new turn.

  Child brought up on Gandhi. Who presumed good intent, and love as the common denominator. Child taught to move gently through this good life-that each action, no matter how small, affects the whole.

  I can no more write of the deadening pain of loss than I can of the breathless confusion of new love. Love’s ecstasy is like being stoned on almost too many mushrooms: Those who’ve never tried it have no comparison; those who have still do not share a common experience. Each trip takes you down a different path. And to paint a picture of true loss is to create something that is indecipherable to the uninitiated and unbearable to those who have felt its paralysis deaden the senses.

  The child who, for all her strengths, all her freedoms, is nevertheless but a child. Still must be fed, must be cared for, must be raised, by others. Cannot choose to remain behind as life’s sudden changes take those who love her elsewhere.

  When I was ten years old I lost my home. I left the wilderness completely and began to live full time in the city. Twenty-one years later I still define my life history in terms of before and after. How does a child mourn this loss? My home was not broken, it was abandoned in a process that started at age four when my parents separated, and my brother and I began to live half-time with my mother in the city. It was completed six years later, when my father, left abruptly by my stepmother, could no longer care for my brother and me adequately one month out of every two.

  The Mid who at age eleven is shocked to discover that people, that a friend, can look one in the eye and lie. Who sits on the steps of the first real school she has ever attended, and weeps at her disillusionment, at the seeming uncertainty of everything, at the changing laws of the universe.

  Home is where my family is. When my mom comes in to wish me goodnight and ends up curled next to me, talking over the latest in our lives-I am home. When my father and I work shoulder to shoulder preparing the fire pit circle for guests-I am home. When my stepmom opens the door of her new house to me, one that I have never before visited-I am home. When my brother’s children climb into my lap-I am home. When I lie in my bed, my lover’s head on my chest, our skin damp from lovemaking-I am home.

  And yet there is a child who can never go home. A little girl who knew a home that worked its way into each cell, that grew to become the strength of her bones, a part of her skin-integral to the workings of her lungs, her heart. A home that smells of rain and of sunshine on salty rocks. A home that sounds like silence, but which is as silent as a tidepool is empty. A home that tastes like the first salmonberries of sprin
g, fresh-picked huckleberries, dried saskatoon berries too late in the season. A home that feels like the earth under bare feet, the cool woods air on naked skin, the salal scraping your thighs as you push your way through it. A child who, yearning to go back, must learn to turn and face forward.

  I dream of holding my own children to my breast. Of leaning back into the arms of my partners, my lovers, and feeling their lives entwined with mine as far into the future as I can see. So often the memory of loss, the pain of past loves’ endings, clouds my vision and I turn from my dreams, frightened by the innocence, the intensity, of my hope.

  But I will stand, one day, at my own hearth. A hearth encircled by the people of my present, of my future. A hearth not haunted by ghosts.

  Rivka K. Solomon

  Thanksgiving ‘71

  1971 was the year my sandwiches went from Wonderbread to whole wheat with wheatberries. From velvet dissolving in my mouth to gritty cardboard that needed to be chewed forever.

  In ‘71, no one in my elementary school was eating PB & J on brown bread. Between bites I hid my sandwich under the lunchroom table.

  In ‘71, my family moved in with strangers-people who grew pot on the windowsills, shared hot oil massages in the living room and danced around the kitchen to reggae while boiling lentils.

  In ‘71 we shunned supermarkets. We bought groceries from the Unitarian Church weekly food co-op-even all-natural turkey and organic brown rice stuffing.