by Carre Otis
He positioned the record on the turntable, gently dropped the needle into place on the third track. I waited, eyes shut, counting down for the crackle that always preceded the music by an instant.
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
My father motioned for me, holding his arms up and out as an invitation for me to come closer to him, to place my feet atop his and begin our waltz around the living room, which for the moment was our very own magical dance floor.
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly.
My eyes locked onto his, trying to impress upon him the deep love and need I had for these very moments. How I tried to hold their gaze. How they were like the flavors of my favorite dessert. It was far better even than Mom’s chocolate mousse. I would have given anything to be suspended forever in that moment. For time to stand still. As he lifted his feet and mine, we waltzed back and forth, in sync with each other and the music. He held me firmly in the safe arms of a father, and I let my eyes close and my head fall back in absolute trust. Remember this, I thought. Burn this memory forever in your heart.
When I looked up again, I saw tears in my father’s eyes. And I knew he felt it, too. We each had an innate understanding of how much this dance meant. This one moment seemed to have more than made up for all the disappointments, all the betrayals, and all the broken promises. I held on to this experience tightly, in the hope that I could call on the memory of it later. I wanted to be able to recall the true nature of this precious man who just by taking a few steps with me had lifted me up and showed his love for me so dearly.
Even after he sent me sprawling to the floor, I would remember this moment. And I would remember it again later, when another man I loved so much did the same.
I slept that night with my hand to my cheek and my wounded heart pressed to my ratty old stuffed rabbit. Someday I will get out, I promised myself. Please, God, let it be soon.
Although MCDS had been around for twenty-five years, it turns out that I was the first student ever to be expelled from it. Rumors about what I’d done spread rapidly. My mother swears that the real reason for my expulsion was the school’s inability to cope with my severe dyslexia, but that’s not what the story was on the street. Everyone in Marin seemed to have heard about it. I saw the looks and heard the whispers. Privately, I thought there was only one way I could survive—and that was to give up. I decided that I was damaged goods, untouchable and unsalvageable. I saw it as a plain and simple truth, like a fact you find in a math book. I no longer fretted over it. Once in a while, a sharp pang of sadness would seize me, but for the most part I was filled with a steely resignation, just as I’d been whenever a teacher would place a test in front of me. No answer of mine ever fit in the endless columns of check boxes. I already knew that I would fail, so with some disconnected sense of duty I made it look as if I’d tried, randomly filling in those dots and creating patterns that zigzagged in all directions. Still, a faint hope lingered that by some stroke of luck I might just get a few right. But I rarely passed.
My parents laid down the law with me. After the MCDS debacle, I would be going to Kent Middle School, the county’s largest public junior high. My life was to be focused solely on education, not on socializing. Everyone I knew from MCDS was off-limits, and my phone privileges were suspended indefinitely as well. Not that I had many friends from there that I wanted to keep. Secretly I was happy to be moving on, glad to make a clean break from everyone and everything. It was then, too, that my parents sent me to see my first therapist, Dr. Nathalie O’Bourne. Twice a week for an hour, her office was the one refuge I had from the world and my growing depression. But despite even Dr. O’s help, I was withdrawing quickly, distancing myself from my family, friends, and life itself. I felt like a snail that had just had salt poured all over it. I wanted the pain to stop, and if receding into my shell did the trick, then so be it.
I may not have been the only girl to feel neglected or to struggle with dyslexia or the aftermath of sexual assault, but I was the only one I knew of. At Kent I did enough to get by. At home, like so many middle children, I found it easy to disappear. Alcohol was one comfort. Increasingly, boys were another. Until I moved beyond boys.
I had just turned fourteen when I met Elliott. He was working a birthday party at which I was a guest. His family owned a novelty gift store called Balloon Dreams, and he drove the company van. I still remember the image of balloons painted on the side and the cheery slogan promising a personalized delivery. Lots of girls had the hots for him: He was wiry, with dark, curly hair, a dead ringer for INXS’s Michael Hutchence, a resemblance he made every effort to exploit. He was also thirty years old.
When Elliott left the party to return to his van, I followed and stopped him with a question: “Got a cigarette?”
He turned, cocked his head to one side. Squinted at me and asked, “How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” I lied. But as the blood rushed to my cheeks, exposing my lie, I decided to come clean. “Fourteen, really.” I shrugged, letting my shoulders fall dramatically. And waited.
Elliott just looked at me. His gaze made my heart lurch and my skin grow warmer. No other girl my age I knew of would have followed Elliott like that. But I was bolder. By now I knew the allure I had. I might not have been confident in other areas of my life, but my desirability was rising on a very short list of the things I could trust. “Getting Elliott” was now my project. I knew that our age difference made us off-limits to each other. In my parents’ eyes, my having a relationship with a male of any age was unacceptable. While that made the challenge more appealing, it was still terrifying.
As we stared at each other, I slowly fingered the unicorn medallion that hung around my neck on a thin silver chain, twirling it, then lifting it to my lips. I knew that the ball remained in my court. So I pressed: “What about that cigarette?”
I could see he was intrigued. More than intrigued, he was fascinated. But also appalled and unnerved. I had him believing that I knew what I wanted—and that what I wanted was dangerous. Taboo. Forbidden. Pulling a pack of Marlboro Reds from his back pocket, he expertly shook one to the surface and held it out for me. Without fumbling, I took the cigarette, placing it between my teeth, all the while continuing to hold his gaze. I thought of Debra Winger in Urban Cowboy and waited for my man to light me up.
“I don’t get something,” Elliott said, having lit my cigarette. “Here you are at this party full of kids. But you’re obviously not like them, are you?”
I smiled, silently urging him on.
“So you see me, and when you should be enjoying birthday cake and Pin the Tail on the Donkey, you follow me out here. Couldn’t just be for a cigarette, huh?”
I had him. I grinned, leaning back on the hood of the van, turning my gaze skyward, letting the rays of sun splash across me, conscious of how I hoped I looked. I knew I still had to play another move. The only way I could see Elliott would be if I got his number; it would be a disaster if he called my house and one of my parents answered. I raised my head, meeting his eyes, and in a steady voice asked him for it. He tossed his cigarette away and scribbled it on the inside cover of a matchbook, pressing it into my ready little palm. As coy as could be, I waved at him, then walked back into the house, knowing that his eyes were on my ass the entire time.
Under my parents’ strict curfew, there was only one time I could see Elliott: in the middle of the night. We developed a routine. I would sneak out of the house after everyone was asleep and meet him, returning home before dawn without fail. I needed Elliott and the freedom and excitement he represented, more than I needed sleep. And night after night, week after week, I got away with it.
I had carefully planned rituals to ensure my safe escape from the house. I always waited until after midnight, when the :00 on my digital clock radio flipped to :01 and P.M. changed to A.M. I’d climb out of my bunk, still wearing the street clothes I’d worn to bed. Most nights the outfit was the same: tight jeans and a sweatshi
rt with Mickey Mouse on the front. The jeans were my stab at looking sexy, the sweatshirt my threadbare attachment to childhood. Even at fourteen I could sense the conflict between these two aspects of myself—the confident sexuality I was trying to display and the innocent girlishness that was still very much a part of who I was.
I would arrange my pillows into the shape of a slumbering body and pull the covers up over them. I’d tiptoe to the window, straining to hear if anything was amiss. I’d open it just wide enough to squeeze my slender body through, and then I’d drop a few feet to the ground, leaving the window slightly ajar for my return. At this point I’d always pause and listen once more to be sure that the thud of my landing hadn’t roused my parents or my sister. It never did.
It was not so much where I was going, or even who I was going to see, that gave me such a rush. What I loved most about these escapes was the game, the art, the science, and yes, the experience of just setting myself free. To make it all that much more exciting, I’d pretend I was a princess narrowly slipping through the clutches of evil captors, risking death if I were to be caught. The thrill was tremendous. Once I was in the clear, I’d be off and running.
Elliott and I always met at the same place: a 76 station on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, less than a mile down the hill from my house. I didn’t dare let him drive any closer for fear that a neighbor might see us. The gas station was the nearest safe place. And at the end of our nights together, it was at the 76 that Elliott would leave me to climb back up the hill and into my house alone.
One unforgettable night I reached Elliott’s car just before twelve-thirty. When I stood at the door of the old Toyota Supra (he wasn’t forced to drive the family delivery van all the time!), I found him fast asleep with the driver’s seat fully reclined. The engine was running, the stereo was pumping. The car shook from the pulsating bass that rumbled through his prized speakers. And the backseat was filled with helium balloons, as it so often was. The balloons seemed to cradle Elliott’s head and torso as he lay there, oblivious to my insistent rap on the window. I figured out what had happened pretty quickly. Elliott usually passed the hours waiting for me by getting drunk and high; by the time I made it to him most nights, he was already loaded. But this time he was passed out cold. A half-smoked joint in a roach clip sat in the ashtray.
I pounded on the window with a closed fist. No response. I pushed up and down on the hood of the Supra, trying to rock the car more than the bass already was. Still nothing. I was at a loss. I knew from experience that the cops would drive by every so often; I needed the shelter of being inside the car, and soon. And it wasn’t only the cops I sought shelter from—the late hour brought with it all kinds of fears.
Headlights blinded me momentarily as a huge gasoline delivery truck slowly pulled into the station. It wasn’t unusual for them to come by at this time of night, but I felt afraid, exposed, still very much left out in the cold even though my boyfriend was only inches from me. I watched the truck’s cab as the engine shut down, seeing only the red ember of a cigarette inside. I turned back to Elliott’s window, hitting it as hard as I could, bruising my knuckles in the process. Still nothing.
The driver of the truck climbed out of the cab and began walking slowly toward me. He was tall and lean, wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a T-shirt that read COCA-INE written in Coca-Cola script. He was older than Elliott, and I sensed by his approach that he wasn’t going to leave me alone.
“Whatcha doing there, young lady?” He slurred his words as if he’d been drinking.
“Just waiting for my boyfriend,” I replied. As soon as I said that, I realized how stupid it sounded.
Cowboy looked past me, into the driver’s seat. “Yeah. Seems your boy’s out like a light. Stone-cold stoned.” His expression changed from feigned concern to an unmistakable leer. He moved closer. I backed away, praying for Elliott to wake up.
Just then my prayers were answered. I heard the door to the Supra open and a sudden burst of music pour forth from within the car. I only half turned to face my boyfriend, not wanting to take my eyes off the trucker.
“What’s up, girl?” Elliott asked, making eye contact with me, trying to assess the situation as quickly as he could. “What’s going on here?”
I moved to get behind him, and instinctively Elliott stepped forward as if to shield me from harm’s way. There was something impressive about his fearlessness, something that made me want to curl up in his lap and wrap my arms around his strong neck. He was everything my father wasn’t: assertive, defiant, brave, protective. But I could see Elliott’s temper rising by the second. I already knew his reputation for violence, and though I’d not yet been one of his targets, I’d seen him throw some wicked punches that had knocked even sizable men out cold.
Cowboy trucker stood his ground. “Your girl was trying to get into that car of yours. Just making sure she was all right. Strange to be out at this hour, such a young lady and all. And strange she couldn’t wake you either.”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your fucking business,” Elliott snarled, the words coming out slowly and rising with emphasis as he at first walked toward the trucker and then broke into a run, almost charging him.
In a split second, I saw a flurry of movement as the trucker reached behind his back and whipped something shiny from his waistband, something that stopped Elliott dead in his tracks. Cowboy pointed a .357 Magnum right at Elliott’s forehead, cocking the gun.
“Step the fuck back, boy. You don’t want to come any closer.”
I could see the wheels turn in Elliott’s head. I prayed frantically, silently, Just step back, Elliott, step back. But I could see that he was lost to his rage and his toxic pride. Drawing himself up tall, he stared straight at the trucker and spit.
“Go for it, motherfucker.”
It was my first time seeing a man I loved facing death. It wouldn’t be the last either. Quicker than I knew I could move, and without any hesitation, I ran in between Elliott and the gun, turning to face him.
“Elliott, step back. Just do it.” At that moment I could hear my voice, strong and sure, a voice I hadn’t exercised with Chad or my family or anyone else, for that matter. Inches from a gun pointed at the back of my head, I had found it. And with it I felt how wildly out of control my whole situation had become. I was fourteen years old. It was nearly one in the morning on a school night, and I was standing between my boyfriend and a deadly weapon. It was crazy. And more than that, it was downright terrifying. So near death, I was alive.
I spoke again. “Elliott, step back. Get in the car. Let’s just go.” I turned to the cowboy, face-to-face with the gun, my eyes now pleading with his. I had always known how to rescue, fix, or manipulate people and circumstances. But this expertise was definitely being put to the test.
I heard Elliott exhale behind me, trying to right himself, weighing the options. “Fuck it,” he said, and with that I could feel my insides sag in relief. I kept my eyes trained on the cowboy until I heard the driver’s-side door of the Toyota open and close. I gave the trucker the most thankful smile I could manage and backed quickly toward the Supra, sliding into my seat and slamming the door once inside. Elliott revved the engine and peeled out of the lot.
As we hit the boulevard, he rolled down his window and screamed, “Motherfucker!” I moaned in fear, turning to look behind me. The trucker stood framed in the orange glow of the mammoth 76 globe. As we tore off down Sir Francis Drake, Cowboy raised his gun and fired a single bullet straight into the sky. That should have been my warning shot. It was not.
My last night out with Elliott came a few months later, the night before my eighth-grade graduation. I followed the same routine that had worked for me so often before. After the episode with the trucker, I had decided that I needed to get to Elliott earlier in the evening so he had less of a chance to drink and smoke himself into a stupor. Instead of meeting him at midnight, I began sneaking out nearly an hour before that. My new magic time became 11
:07 P.M. These numbers proved reliably lucky every time.
Some of my fellow eighth-graders at Kent were holding a pregraduation party at Muir Beach that night. I knew better than to ask my parents for permission to go. Elliott had promised to take me, and I suspected that it would be raging until well past midnight. I found him at the 76 station as always; he wanted to keep meeting there, even if it meant risking another confrontation with the trucker. Thankfully, we never saw that cowboy again.
As soon as I climbed into the Supra, Elliott handed me a beer. We chugged the better part of a six-pack as we drove over the windy roads to the beach. When we got there, I was relieved to see a bonfire; the party wasn’t over yet. I was already very tipsy, and as soon as we stopped, I climbed onto the roof of the car, yelling and signaling to my friends. I began to do a little provocative dance, swiveling my hips, the beer easily in my grasp as I raised my arms over my head. Suddenly I was in a very real spotlight. Flashing red lights followed a second later. The unmistakable sound of a police car loudspeaker crackled.
“Get off the car, ma’am. Now.”
I thought about making a run for it but realized the futility in that idea almost instantly. I was caught. I could barely climb off the Toyota’s roof at that point. Elliott staggered out of the car, and before I knew what was happening, he charged the cops, two of whom drew their guns and ordered him to the ground. Fortunately, he obeyed and was quickly handcuffed.
There was more than one police car, and in no time at all another cop was at my side. He asked me for identification. I had none.
“How old are you?”
“Old enough,” I said smartly. He wasn’t impressed.