Excavation: A Memoir

by Wendy C. Ortiz

  FALL

  1988

  The smoke in my bedroom wasn’t dissipating even with the windows open. I was a little nauseated in the cloudy room. I had the dour taste of Pall Mall nonfilters in my mouth, a pack I chose for the novelty of it. My ashtray was almost overflowing with Camel, Kools, and Marlboro filters. All my friends smoked in my room. The walls were taking on a tannish tint. I knew my mother would make me paint when I moved out, whenever that might be.

  I felt a thirst that started in my chest, radiating out to my throat, only I didn’t want to go get a diet Coke from the fridge, because it was after ten and my mom still wasn’t home, and I had left all the lights off in the living room when I got home from school.

  I wore the same cut-off jeans I’d worn for days after school. The errant strings hung off the tattered edges and tickled my knees and the insides of my legs. I smoothed a hand over one leg that was freshly smooth, a little sensitive from the brisk rub of a razor. I poked at the little scabs on my knees that looked like tiny dark islands on my skin.

  My white peasant blouse, as light and airy as it was, scratched my raw, pink shoulders. I got sunburnt a couple days before, and parts of my skin had already transformed from pink to a deep brown, but my shoulders still felt tender and hot. My sandals, which laced up onto my calves, felt a little too tight and were rubbing me the wrong way.

  I was achy, annoyed. I stood up and pushed the window sideways in its groove until it was up against the small, square piece of metal that served as a lock. It didn’t occur to me to run away. The room was an oasis, a still point. Dust wafted toward me and fell like a heavy fog of glitter into the air.

  I hope I get my period soon, I thought.

  FALL & WINTER

  1988

  I was moving in the circles of hippie-come-latelies, punks, skinheads for racial unity, and drug addicts. I felt comfortable and chameleon-like among each group, as though each encompassed parts of me that I was still formulating, negotiating.

  I was six months from a driver’s license. My sights were set on a Volkswagen bus, a thought my parents abhorred, but didn’t argue with. I was in negotiations to set free some of the money in the bank account that was not really mine until I turned eighteen. Good grades, decent behavior and refraining from losing my temper all served this purpose. Showing my grandmother good report cards issued from Catholic school, reassuring her that I prayed every time I got into a car and before I went to sleep, that I read my Bible—these worked in my favor. I regularly picked up Auto Trader magazine as each new issue hit the stands. I daydreamed of the iconic vehicle that would ensure my status as a hippie girl: the blue bus. I dreamed of the perfect VW that I could adorn with batik fabric on the seats, translucent rainbow stickers I collected from Grateful Dead and reggae shows. I just needed one with an automatic transmission.

  I was set on the color blue as a means to achieve a mythical stature I aspired to. The blue bus, is calling us, Jim Morrison crooned through my stereo speakers, and I chimed in, trying to echo the crazy, hollow voice, Driver, where you takin’ us?

  A few days before Christmas, Jeff dropped by my house. My mother was safely at work for the next four hours. I was on Christmas vacation, had spent the night before snorting four lines of coke with my new friend, James, who was twenty-one and an alcoholic, and who I was having a hard time finding some redeeming qualities in, besides the fact that he could score me free drugs. I’d met James at the head shop on Van Nuys Boulevard, whose reputation was twenty years old by the time my underaged self wandered nonchalantly onto the premises. James had long, feathered hair and a big, white Buick, both of which bewitched me to some degree, and we easily became friends.

  I was at home, my body feeling a little edgy from the night before, and here came Jeff—a surprise visit, totally abnormal, considering his low-grade paranoia—and I was not prepared in any special way. I wore my green, blue and white speckled tie-dye shirt and torn jeans. On my feet were mint green slippers that belonged to my mom, a tiny pink satin rosebud adorning the top of each slipper. In a little while, James was supposed to pick me up, and I was hoping for sooner rather than later, because my mom wanted me home when she pulled in from her day at work.

  Jeff came to my door in a scratchy flannel shirt, blue sweatpants and a blue baseball cap. His hair looked longer and he had a thick beard, like he’d been without a shave for a couple of weeks. I realized it had been awhile since I’d seen him.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” he asked me as I opened the door. He was chewing tobacco. I nodded with a secret smile.

  I was so glad he was there.

  Then I remembered the potential awkwardness of James, his constant insecurity and uncertainty. I remembered that he might arrive any minute.

  I heard Jeff turning on the sink and I closed and locked the front door. By the time he was done in the bathroom, I was in my bedroom, placing Led Zeppelin III on the stereo. He found me carefully putting needle to vinyl.

  “Yeah, so your Christmas present’s in the car. I’ll go get it in a second, but do you wanna get high first?”

  “Yeah!” I replied, when really I was thinking Fuck, yeah! He produced a strange little pipe in a cute case and some herb that looked as electric green as my tie-dye shirt. We returned to the living room, where he loaded the pipe and handed it over to me. I took a long drag and handed it back. He took a hit that far surpassed mine in inhalation and amount of smoke expelled. I took one more hit and I was done, just flying. We were chatty, both of us, and I was stepping on his toes in my green slippers, giggling, aware of how stupid I must look. After a bit, he deserted me, unlocking the front door and stepping outside to retrieve my gift. I looked out at him through the screen door and noticed that he arrived in his roommate’s truck. He returned, bearing packages.

  Wrapped in the comic pages of the L.A. Times, I found two new car floor mats emblazoned VOLKSWAGEN. The second package contained a blue and white license plate stamped with the VW insignia.

  I dropped both onto the couch and commenced to laughing, covering my face, and he joined me in laughter, saying over and over, “You like it? Isn’t it great? Is it perfect, or what?” The smell of rubber was on my fingers, which were black with newspaper ink. I finally thanked him, wanting to hug or kiss him, and we sat there smiling, my stomach muscles aching from the all the laughter and screeching.

  “So,” he said, and I felt a shift in tone, “let’s go over all the different ways people express ‘Merry Christmas’ to one another. First, there’s this.” He stood up, pulled me to my feet, and hugged me. It felt strange and I laughed again, because there was warmth and closeness that I didn’t know what to do with.

  Next he shook my hand. “Merry Christmas,” he said formally.

  Before I could react, he put his hands on my breasts and squeezed. “Merry X-mas,” he said in a sinister tone. I laughed and swatted at him.

  “Merry Christmas,” he repeated, and leaned over finally to give me a small peck on the lips. My inhibitions were gone, I was high and forgetful and I moved to him, attempting for a longer kiss, the kind I fantasized about.

  “I fooled you there,” he whispered, and moved closer to me, enveloping me in a long, passionate kiss that I associated with movies, where the focus went blurry and soft. I felt myself smiling as he licked my earlobes, my neck, my face. We stood there in the living room, in front of the wall of mirrors, making out, and I heard him telling me between kisses to never doubt our friendship, ever. I pressed against him, not saying a word, feeling the roughness of his flannel, the soft brush of his beard on my face.

  “I understand why men are always after you,” he began, rubbing my ass with one of his hands. I was lost in this arousal, unknowing of where he was going with this talk, what men he was even referring to.

  “I mean, one: you’re mentally stimulating,” he said, followed by a nip on my neck. “Two: because you�
��re physically attractive.” I reddened and looked down at the green slippers on my feet, and he touched my face, sucked on my earlobe.

  “And, three,” he rocked me in his arms, looked me in the eye, “you’re just physically overwhelming and you fuck like you’re ageless.” I pulled back and laughed in confusion, loving the sound of this. Ageless.

  “Anyone can put you in the tenth grade and you’d function, but I know you, your mind is actually screaming thirty! Thirty!” His hazel eyes gleamed, and I focused on the gap in his teeth, the fur on his cheeks, his soft, vulnerable chin, his glasses that I wanted to slip off his face.

  I felt inclined to reward him for all of this, the gifts, the pot, the beautiful words. He was breathing heavily into my ear and my clothes were coming off. Soon, Led Zeppelin was over, the needle picked up from the vinyl, and we paused for a moment, breathing in the silence.

  Rad, I thought, as he lifted off me and I pulled my panties back to their normal position, I’m still high!

  “Thanks again,” I said, “for the presents.”

  “Oh, my pleasure,” he said with a chuckle and a wink, letting a finger trace along the collar of my shirt. “Oh, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy. I can’t wait until you’re eighteen, when we can go anywhere together,” he said. “We can go to the coast. Anywhere.” He snapped his fingers. “And no one can do a thing ‘cause you’ll be legal.”

  I sighed, smiling. Don’t, don’t go, I thought.

  “Please don’t ever doubt our friendship again,” Jeff said, and I shook my head, shaking off doubts, sadness, anger and jealousy that had been building like plaque over several months of arguments when we saw one another, phone calls that felt stunted and full of what was unsaid.

  He left. In a flash I was over him leaving. James was picking me up soon. And I had to be back by four, when my mom got home.

  I headed to the shower, singing.

  1989

  1989

  1989 was the year I went on the Pill.

  The granddaughter of this revolution, I purchased mine by donation at the local Planned Parenthood. I was blessed with insurance due to my mother’s job, but I didn’t want her finding out about my new drug of choice from some mislaid insurance paperwork. I rode the bus to the clinic, filled out the appropriate forms, survived my first gynecology exam and walked away with the pink, plastic shells that contained what would become a daily routine that would keep me free of fear and pregnancy.

  Jeff and I celebrated the lack of need for condoms without saying so. He walked around the apartment in only his jeans and made me coffee. We sat at the kitchen bar, drinking mugs of the rich goodness, sharing a bongload, talking, laughing. If this is how life will be with us in the future, I’ll take its comfort, laughter, and closeness, I later wrote in my journal, examining the feeling from every angle as we talked and looked into each other’s eyes.

  One afternoon, I was walking through the sunset-lit aisles of cars in the parking lot of The Forum in Inglewood, waiting for the Grateful Dead to go onstage. I bought six hits of acid and twenty dollars’ worth of Ecstasy. I followed my friends as we searched for a big, red bus that purportedly held countless canisters of nitrous oxide. When we found it, we sat on the cement, yelping and shrieking in between inhalations of laughing gas. My hair was tied haphazardly in a rubber band, and wisps of it tickled my cheeks. The evening felt equally full with abandon and promise.

  I heard a man whining nearby, pining away for just one dose of LSD, just one. I followed the sound and came to a skinny dude sitting on an open tailgate of a pick-up truck.

  I wanted him to experience the beauty, the potential that was me, that was this day, and I wanted my fingers to be gold. I decided to be the fairy, the princess, the one who would save him.

  I gave him the tiny piece of paper that I wished would be the best trip of his life.

  “Stick out your tongue,” I said, and he obeyed; I placed the square paper on his tongue and walked away, floating, an imaginary trail of golden, sexual, generous power emanating from my body as I receded down the crowded aisles.

  ✵

  I wasn’t the only one changing.

  I tried to see the sunny side of my mother’s new wardrobe, her laughing demeanor, and saucy asides that let me know she was a woman, with needs and desires like anyone else.

  There was the fact that she went out at night and left me alone until ten or eleven, when I had to leave all the lights on, because she herself had scared me into doing so. Still, I enjoyed the empty house, the belief that this was what it would be like to live on my own someday.

  Her choice of radio station was the one I had abandoned in favor of classic rock stations. This was not a total loss to me: I could often hear Depeche Mode echoing darkly from the living room and listen along with an air of nostalgia for the songs I had listened to three long years before.

  She suddenly spoke of friends at work, possible weekend trips, and asked how I’d feel if she joined a busload of her coworkers on a trip to Las Vegas. I kept my excitement in check even as my pulse raced and my mind calculated how many people I would invite, how much money I had to purchase the necessities for the weekend: beer, wine coolers, an eighth of pot, a bit of coke, some acid.

  “You can trust me,” I said a little too quickly. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Really?” she asked. She thought a moment as she stared me down. “You could invite a couple of your friends over, like Veronica, Dawn.” She raised an obscenely red painted fingernail to my chest and pointed. “But no boys, do you hear me?”

  “Not even just Nicholas?” I pleaded. She had met Nicholas, spoken to him on the phone, and had acknowledged that there was little to fear with such a soft-spoken, polite nineteen-year-old.

  “No,” she said, pursing her lips.

  “Alright,” I said with a sigh. “It’ll be fine, don’t worry.” We looked at each other a moment longer.

  When she left my bedroom and I heard her far down the hall, I jumped off my bed and did a little dance. I stifled an excited scream. I picked up the phone and start making calls.

  ✵

  A jug of wine. Me in my cut-off overalls with an Indian print shirt underneath.

  Smoke rising in the low-lit living room as another knock sounded on the front door and someone scrambled to answer it. Cross-legged on the floor, it was Friday night and they were all here, my friends in their loose, flowing hippie garb, Nicholas and his friends in their t-shirts and jeans and black leather jackets. People lounged on the sofa with ashtrays between them, and I started up a new pipe load. We used the low glass table to snort a couple lines of coke. Two men, one in black sixteen-hole Doc Martens and the other in a white puffy blouse had an angry exchange about peace. I ran to my bedroom where Veronica had crashed and asked her to referee, help me kick someone out. Jimi Hendrix asked us if this is love or is it confusion. Nicholas detoured me when I got up for more wine and we moved into my mother’s bedroom. We slipped off our clothes and fucked, our bodies contorting in myriad positions, and from far away I heard the phone ringing. My hurried hands searched for my clothes: there was no phone in the room, and I could only hope that Veronica had answered it. My mother loved and trusted Veronica, almost as much as I did. When I emerged, Veronica was holding the phone out to me, and I answered. My mother asked what took me so long, and I explained I was in the bathroom and Veronica nodded. Fine and good, I said, urging sober reverence into my voice. I covered the mouthpiece so she couldn’t hear the din in the living room.

  Everyone slept over. When they left the next morning, Veronica drove us to Planned Parenthood to pick up my new packet of birth control pills. We returned to my house and hung out all day, smoking pot, cooking eggs, opening packages of cookies and cans of cola. Three more friends joined us in the afternoon. We had set aside this special afternoon to drop acid.

  A photo was snapped of me with two squares of paper o
n my tongue. When I tried to write, it came out in spirals and squiggles and I got stuck in the middle of sentences, stopping to stare at my hand, the delicate veins in which I could see the blood pumping along. Everyone was watching Pink Floyd: The Wall in the living room, my pen was stuck in the confines of two blue lines on this stuff called paper, and Jeff was looming in my frying mind.

  I didn’t think of the early morning hours, when we would have to clean up the spilled beer, cigarette box wrappers, hide the pot, and air out the house even as we were coming down, our stomachs uneasy with strychnine. I didn’t think of the sleep I needed. I didn’t think of my friends, my loyal and generous girlfriends, who helped me make the house spotless just hours before my mother was due home. I didn’t think of anything but recording the happenings in my journal, later, sober, fresh from experiences and revelations.

  ✵

  “Damn it, I didn’t know all those people would be here,” he whispered into the phone at me.

  I had made a stop at his house during my spring break, my mother’s car and learner’s permit in my possession. “If you’re driving around illegal tomorrow, come by my house and get illegal,” he said on the phone the night before. The next day, I’d walked into a living room full of men, composed of coaches from my junior high and elementary school, and a few of Jeff’s current and previous roommates. The male energy in the room was like the possibility of wild, cracking thunder in an electrical storm, and I left quickly.