Resilience

by Jessie Close

  When I answered the door, they both gasped. I was in such miserable condition—mentally and physically—that they decided I needed to leave with them immediately. Mom said she was taking me to Wyoming. After spending nearly sixteen years in Africa, my parents had bought a ranch in western Wyoming. Sublette County was the least populated county in the least populated state in the union. They had chosen a remote area where, as my dad later put it, the two of them could “get off the world for a while.”

  I didn’t argue. I needed to be rescued. It was the only way I could free myself from Brad. Glenn began packing clothes while my mom went to tell Brad that I was leaving.

  “Jessie is leaving you. She’s coming home with me,” Mom announced.

  He was angry and began arguing. My mother held her ground. She had lived, often alone, in a paracommando camp surrounded by violent soldiers. My twenty-one-year-old husband didn’t intimidate her.

  In words that seemed to be spit from his mouth, Brad replied, “You Close women are all cunts!”

  “Bradley,” my mom said, “don’t you ever, ever talk to me that way again.”

  Brad ducked past her to the place where Glenn and I were standing. “Don’t you dare go,” he warned me.

  I wondered if he would become violent by grabbing me or striking Glenn or even my mother. I saw the fury in his eyes. It was a look of pure contempt.

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  Brad had to have the final say.

  “Go ahead,” he said with a smirk. “The only reason I married you is because of your money.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It’s about a two-hour drive from Jackson Hole to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Big Piney, Wyoming, aptly nicknamed the Icebox of the Nation. Winter winds have been known to whip endlessly across the high desert plateau, causing temperatures to dip to some of the coldest found in the Lower 48 and creating a moonscape of white when the ground gets blanketed by snow.

  My dad’s desire to “get off the world for a while” came after he’d become disillusioned with his friend President Mobutu. Starting in 1971, the president began forcing his country to return to its native roots. All Western-style clothing was banned, and the president demanded that his people rid themselves of their European, “colonial” names. He changed his own name from Joseph-Désiré Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga. My parents had been living comfortably in Africa in Mimosa, a compound built exclusively for medical personnel. The community, built next to the river, boasted thirty houses for thirty doctors. My father had helped transform the city hospital into a two-thousand-bed medical center, and he still loved seeing patients. However, the president had begun collecting wives, and to pay for their expensive tastes he’d started looting the national treasury. Torture, corruption, nepotism, and extravagance would soon become the hallmarks of his dictatorship. It had been a good time for my parents to leave.

  Ever since they were young, Mom and Dad had dreamed of retiring to Wyoming. Shortly after they returned to the United States, they flew to Jackson Hole and hooked up with a real-estate agent. When they saw the ranch in Big Piney, they fell in love with it.

  The main lodge and outbuildings were located on 640 acres, nine thousand feet above sea level, tucked in between mountains with names such as Old Baldy, Bare Mountain, and Triple Peak. For them, it was perfect. The fact that in winter the ranch was not habitable didn’t bother them. The Mickelson family sold the ranch to Mom and Dad and also offered them their “honeymoon cabin” on their ranch to use during the winters while they built on ten acres near them. This gave my parents a mountain getaway and a “city” home located on the outskirts of Big Piney.

  I arrived at their mountain lodge in 1974, after Glenn and Mom rescued me from Brad and took me away from my beloved radio station and Los Angeles. Dad met us at the Jackson Hole airport in an old yellow pickup truck. I couldn’t stop staring at the mountains. I had never seen anything like them. I chose to ride in the back of the truck so I could better take in my new surroundings as Dad drove along the Snake River, weaving between peaks and through valleys. The sun seemed brighter here than in LA. The air was cool to the tongue. I had never seen such seemingly untouched beauty.

  When our truck finally made it up a rock-covered road into my parents’ new home, a sense of relief washed over me. In this remote spot, I would be safe from Brad and far outside his grasp.

  My parents’ new home was an old dude ranch. The lodge was made of thick logs cut from the nearby timber. Next to the lodge, four cabins were placed one after the other, strung together by a boardwalk, with one other cabin behind them. The lodge contained a large kitchen, pantry, and walk-in freezer, a dining room, and a massive living room. The lodge’s porch was enormous, and off the porch, on a lawn, was an outdoor barbecue grill, picnic tables with benches, and a hammock. I was assigned to one of the cabins, each of which had two bedrooms and two baths.

  As soon as I got settled in, the phone rang. It was Brad. My hand began shaking as I held the phone up to my ear. He was whining and explained that he wanted to talk to me one last time before he killed himself.

  I was scared, and after I hung up, I went into the living room and began pounding my head against the wall, screaming and screaming. Everyone came running. I was pulled away from the wall and forced to lie down on a couch. I was hysterical. Dad gave strict orders to anyone visiting us to hang up on Brad if he called again. He did, but Dad got the phone this time. Brad declared to my father that he was coming to Wyoming to get me. My father replied: “If you take one step into Wyoming, I’ll have the FBI and local police arrest you.”

  Exactly what Brad would be arrested for was never clearly stated, but my father sounded so convincing that Brad backed down. Meanwhile, I was touched that my father cared enough about me to threaten Brad. For the first time in a long while, I felt protected.

  Years later I would discover that Brad had no intention of killing himself. He’d called me from a cheap hotel room, where he was with a woman. With me gone, our radio station had no funds. Brad would have to shut it down and find a paying job. That’s why he had sounded so desperate.

  I had no intention of staying with my parents forever, but I needed time to lick my wounds and recover both mentally and physically. The discussion about what I should do next wasn’t long in coming. No sooner had I unpacked than I began feeling the same old anxiety that I’d always felt around my parents. “What are we going to do about Jessie now?”

  At first I planned to return to California, maybe to San Francisco, where I could use my contacts to get a job in the music business. My parents didn’t like that idea because they feared I would fall back in with the same drug-using crowd. Dad suggested I find work as a secretary. Mom wanted me to return to school to earn my high school diploma. I realized how little they knew about what I had been doing with our cable radio station—CABL 108. Brad and I had been underground celebrities: we were known at the Troubadour and were sought out by magazines and counterculture types who wanted to launch their own stations. Coming from LA, I was a bit of a radio snob and thought the stations in Wyoming were awful.

  I felt like an alien in Wyoming in other ways. On August 8, 1974, I sat glued to the seat in our van, refusing to leave the radio while my parents were having a picnic. The banks of the creek near them were dotted with cow pies, and that was all I could smell and I hated it. I was waiting to hear President Richard Nixon announce his resignation. I was thrilled that he was being forced out, and I knew my friends in LA would be celebrating, but it didn’t appear that anyone in Big Piney even cared that he had been such a crook.

  I soon realized that not much had changed between my parents and me—especially between me and my father. Conversations were awkward, except when both of us had a few drinks to lubricate our tongues. The booze helped me relax, and I enjoyed listening to him talk about his adventures in Africa. One night, I asked him why he and Mom had let me marry Brad when they knew beforehand that I had taken a drug o
verdose.

  “Jess,” my father said, “you are very convincing when you want to be. We believed you wanted to get married.”

  Was I really that convincing? I wondered. Or was that an excuse?

  I filed for divorce from Brad. Still hoping for a free ride, he demanded alimony from me, but a judge—thankfully—denied it. I turned twenty-one years old on the verge of being a divorced woman. My parents gave me an etching of a mouse as my birthday present, and, in an immature and ungrateful way, I didn’t hide my disappointment. To please me, they decided to give me an old Volkswagen bus they had at the lodge.

  It was time for me to move on, so we decided that I would drive my van to Tucson, Arizona, where Grandmother Moore was by then spending all her time. I packed my VW bus and headed south with Ziggy Stardust the cat and Poo the dog, still a flower child at heart, driving her hippiemobile.

  I’d spent most of my early teen years with Grandmother Moore, so I felt welcome there, enough to enroll in Pima Community College, even though I’d not finished high school. I liked my classes and was determined to do well, but old habits are hard to change, especially when you’re twenty-one, recently divorced, and out on your own. Shortly after I arrived I abandoned my grandmother’s guesthouse and moved into a tiny house on East Glenn Street. This house was built for a midget. The sinks and showerhead were very low, and I’m not tall but I had to bend my knees to take a shower. Still, I liked it. I was on my own for the first time in my life.

  At a popular watering hole called the Cushing Street Bar, I found a new gang to hang with. The bar had opened a year earlier in a historic building that had two-foot-thick adobe walls, an antique cut-glass chandelier hanging over its bar, and an art nouveau statue of Cleopatra as its trademark. My new crowd not only drank heavily but also smoked weed and got high. I’d already tried cocaine in LA, and now it was sweeping across the nation.

  I loved the energy that snorting coke gave me. Sleep was irrelevant. I would stay up until 4:00 a.m. or later and spend my time writing, listening to music, and drawing. I felt liberated in Tucson and soon was racing from one man to the next, going on so many dates that I’d get them confused. One man called me, and, thinking it was someone else, I began to complain about what a dull and boring date I’d been on the night before.

  “This is the dull and boring man,” he snapped and hung up.

  I was so mortified that I slipped into a depression and didn’t leave my bed all day. I did, however, get gussied up for another night out—again—even though I was shouting to myself to stay home.

  My tiny brick house was connected by a carport to another house that was the mirror image of mine. Two college-age boys lived in it, and one night I stripped naked, put on a blue silk kimono, and went next door to borrow a cup of sugar. I knew these boys had been ogling me, and I wanted to torture them. I let the opening of my kimono slip a bit, but not so they could see everything, and talked to them for a while. I was proud of my legs, and the kimono was very short; by the time I left they were practically panting.

  I’d discovered that sex gave me power, and I enjoyed both sex and power. As soon as I got a man to fall in love with me, however, I lost interest and dumped him. I had no idea why I was doing this. I wondered if my promiscuousness was aimed at my father and feelings of male rejection. Was I punishing these men because of him?

  One of my favorite lovers was a man who was a bum. He actually lived on the streets. After a night of lovemaking at my house, I awoke to discover that he’d stolen my truck. Another lover was an African American. When my landlord saw us together, he threatened to throw me out because I was “cohabitating” with a black man. That only made me more determined to do whatever I wanted. One night I brought a businessman home with me from a bar. We had sex, and after he was dressed he pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet and put it on my bureau. I was outraged and handed it back to him. But when he left I thought, Gee, that could be an easy way to make money!

  There were times when I would wake up in the morning and think, Okay, Jessie, this has to stop. You are not going out tonight. But when darkness came, I would start applying makeup and picking out an outfit. It was as if I were having an out-of-body experience, because I could actually see myself putting on lipstick in front of my bathroom mirror—as if I were floating above the scene, totally helpless to prevent the train wreck below. I seemed powerless to stop this woman I was watching from going out, from sleeping with men, from doing drugs.

  At one point, I was dating a coke dealer whose best friend was another coke dealer, and he was dating a girl, Leslie, who was the close friend of a Tucson doctor. This doctor had the hots for both of us and came over to Leslie’s house one night promising to shoot us up with a drug that, he claimed, was even better than cocaine. In return he wanted a threesome. Leslie and I plopped down on her couch while he opened his medicine bag.

  “I’m going to inject you with morphine,” he announced. “It’s going to make you feel as if you’d gone to heaven.”

  I panicked because Brad had given me morphine in Africa and it had nearly killed me, but the doctor was convincing and I decided this was different because he was a medical professional. I closed my eyes when the needle hit my skin, and within seconds I could feel the morphine racing through my blood, causing me to relax. Leslie was soon high, too, and we began to kiss. When the doctor tried to join us we told him no. We went into Leslie’s bedroom together, leaving him frustrated and alone. We thought his agony was funny.

  Leslie and I spoke every day after that, and I began to wonder, again, whether I was bisexual. Then an odd thing happened. Leslie got jealous. She didn’t want me sleeping with men. We had a nasty argument, and during it I suddenly flashed back to Brad. It didn’t matter if I was in love with a man or a woman—either could become possessive and controlling. Having lived through one abusive relationship, I wasn’t going to let Leslie take control of my life. I ended our relationship. On the drive home from her place, a jackrabbit bolted in front of my car and I hit it, leaving its smashed body on the road. I suddenly felt tremendously guilty and actually wished I were dead. I was having major mood swings, although I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it. I was going from being giddy and sexy to feeling depressed and suicidal. I assumed it was the drugs and booze.

  The coke dealer I was dating asked for a favor. He and several others in our crowd had bought a “brick” of cocaine—about a pound—from a dealer in Mexico. My boyfriend had found a buyer, but they needed a mule to transport the brick. It sounded exciting and easy. I’d never sold drugs, but I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  I soon found myself driving across Tucson with a brick of cocaine on the seat next to me. The exchange was going down at a friend’s house. I arrived early and hid the coke under a cowboy hat that I spotted near the front door. My boyfriend and his pals arrived, and a few minutes later some strangers pulled up.

  “You got the money?” my boyfriend asked.

  One of the two buyers opened a briefcase, and I could see that it contained stacks of hundred-dollar bills. This is just like the movies, I thought.

  “Where’s the cocaine?” a buyer asked.

  “She’s got it,” my boyfriend replied. I was the only woman in the room with five men.

  Suddenly, the two strangers drew pistols and yelled, “FBI! Everyone down on the floor! Now!”

  All of us fell on our bellies.

  Oh, my God! I thought. I’m going to go to prison and will have to send a telegram to Mom and Dad telling them what I’ve done. My entire body began shaking, and I began to cry. One of the gunmen noticed how frightened I was and apparently felt sorry for me.

  “It’s okay,” he said, “We aren’t really FBI agents. We’re just ripping you off. Now, where’s the cocaine?”

  My boyfriend, who was lying next to me, whispered, “Don’t tell them!”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’ll handle this,” he whispered.

  He was a Vietnam v
et, and I realized that he was planning to leap from the floor and attack the two armed men. He was going to get us killed.

  Before he could, I screamed: “It’s under the white cowboy hat by the door!”

  My boyfriend shot me a furious look as the gunmen snatched the cocaine.

  “Let’s take the blonde with us,” one of them said.

  I let out an ear-piercing scream followed by another. I couldn’t stop screaming.

  “Okay, okay, never mind!” a gunman yelled. “Just shut up.”

  Both of them bolted from the house with their briefcase of cash and our coke. My boyfriend and his buddies grabbed their guns and ran after them. I ran from the house, too, but in the opposite direction.

  When I got to my house, I packed an overnight bag and drove to my grandmother’s house. It was time for me to get out of Tucson.

  I had relatives on the Close family side who lived in Washington, DC, and when I called they offered to take me. As soon as I could, I left Tucson and didn’t look back.

  What had happened in Tucson—the endless string of men, the drugs, the dope selling? Why was I acting so wild?

  Sometimes, only when you look back in life can you understand your past actions. This is true for me. I was still more than thirty years away from being correctly diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having bipolar disorder. Only decades later would I learn that severe mental illness had been a driving force in my life since my teens, often causing havoc, although I was completely unaware of its influence.

  Although no one really knows exactly what causes our brains to go haywire, the National Institute of Mental Health, our government’s leading research institution for the investigation of mental disorders, has declared that serious mental illnesses such as mine are biologically based and passed along genetically. Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder, which means it can cause you to go from feeling elated to feeling worthless within minutes. Another common serious mental illness, schizophrenia, is a thought disorder that can cause you to hear voices or see things that are not there. It is not uncommon for both conditions to surface in women in their late teens and early twenties, a time when girls are often experimenting with sex, drinking, and drugs.