I was an only child, and my mom made no secret about the fact that my father never wanted kids in the first place. I have always known that she got pregnant on purpose, and he tolerated the one. He was never bad to me, but he just didn’t have that dad instinct. He barely acknowledged my existence, and I adored him.
So naturally, when I was four and needed to start school, there was no question about my father’s lifestyle changing. It just wouldn’t. My mom and I moved into the house in Baton Rouge, and he took a job in Alaska. For a while, he sent me stuffed animals from that region. My favorite was a little husky. Dad would take pictures from his job site, great big eight-by-tens of this desolate flat land and the arctic foxes he trained to come near him by feeding them fried chicken. “I almost have them eating out of my hand,” he told me on the phone.
He wouldn’t answer when I asked when he was coming home or when I could visit.
The house on Mcclelland Court was small, with a front yard that was two equal rectangles of blacktop driveway and patchy grass. The street was a part of a horseshoe-shaped development where every house had the same look and layout. We lived in a three-bedroom ranch-style house they had no business calling a three-bedroom. I had a waterbed tucked in a vinyl-covered frame, so I at least thought that was cool. The houses next door were just a few feet away from each other, and if you want to buy one of them today, the estimated going price is twenty-four thousand dollars.
My mom took me to a dance class because I wanted to be a ballerina. My dance teacher was Miss Vicki, and her crotchety old mother, Miss Donna, owned the studio. The recital that year had a Disney theme, and I can still see my costume: baby blue and fully sequined with a little ruffle on my butt. And white tights, white tap shoes, and a white sequined hat. What’s funny is that I now have the same hat in black for when I play a magician when I do my feature dancing gigs in clubs on the road. Every time I put on the magician hat, I think back to that recital.
Backstage, it was full-on Toddlers & Tiaras, with all the Baton Rouge moms teasing out their daughters’ hair. Everyone was smoking, and my mom was trying to secure my hat to my hair by bobby-pinning it directly to my skull. With all the hair spray and polyester, I was a pint-size fire hazard for sure.
“Ow,” I screamed over and over as she pinned the hat on. “That hurts!”
Miss Donna hobbled over and shook a finger at me as she exhaled smoke. “You have to suffer to be beautiful,” she rasped. “Beauty is pain.”
Then she hobbled on, and I was speechless. But no truer words have ever been spoken. Little did I know the future would involve plucking and waxing. High heels, corsets, and underwires.
It was around then that I had my first boyfriend. Jason Beau Morgan lived next door to my mother’s mother, who I called Mawmaw Red. We were dating because I said so, telling him in my grandmother’s front yard, “You’re my boyfriend.” He had blue eyes and curly hair the color of light sand. I actually cut out a picture of his face and put it in a locket that I still have. We lost touch after elementary school, and in middle school I heard he died of a brain aneurysm. Jason was the first boy I ever held hands with.
I was especially close to Mawmaw Red and loved visiting her, not just for the chance to play tag with Jason. She would give me café au lait—with extra milk and sugar in a tall, skinny brown plastic cup—and had blocks that she hid from her other grandkids. They were just for me to play with. “You are special, Stephanie,” she would tell me in her Louisiana drawl.
Mawmaw Red had emphysema. When I went to her house in the last several months of her life, she wore an oxygen mask, and the big green tank went around the house with her until she just stayed in one room. I remember the smell of the oxygen, how it triggered memories of when we lived in Idaho and my asthma was so bad I had to be hospitalized in a crib with a bubble canopy. I pretended I was a fish in a bowl, until I got bored and decided to escape.
The August after my dad started work in Alaska, Mawmaw Red deteriorated, and my mom took me to the hospital to say good-bye. She couldn’t talk and was so close to death. I remember thinking she looked like the death scene in E.T. “You must be dead,” Elliott says to E.T. “’Cause I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything anymore. You’ve gone someplace else now.”
I spent the night at my father’s parents’ house next door, and the next day I was at home when my mom came into her room, where I was playing. I was standing by the bed and she sank down to her knees to take me by both arms.
“I have to tell you something,” she said. “Mawmaw Red died.” She was sobbing, so upset, but I wasn’t sad. I was relieved. Mawmaw’s just gone someplace else now, I thought. My mom remained distraught in the days leading up to the funeral.
Dad came home to attend, and he decided that was a good time to tell her he was leaving her. He’d met someone else. I knew her name was Susan because, well, my mother was screaming about “that whore Susan.” They sent me next door to my grandparents, but I still heard all the screaming and the sounds of plates smashing against walls as my mother went ballistic. Worse, he had brought Susan with him from Alaska, and while he was in town, my mom spotted them and tried to beat the shit out of her.
My mom was so caught up in her understandable grief that she didn’t seem to remember I existed. She was just different, listless and uninterested in doing anything with me. The next thing I knew, the Suburban was backed into the driveway with the hatch up. My dad loaded it up, just like he did all the times we’d moved as a family, only it was just his stuff. I was aware he was leaving, and as my mom screamed at him for the whole neighborhood to hear, I played quietly in the patch of front yard.
When he went in to get one last thing, my mother chased him inside to continue yelling at him. This was my chance. I climbed in the Suburban and hid myself behind some boxes. Nobody noticed I was missing, and it has never occurred to me until I’m right here writing this that he didn’t look for me to say good-bye. He just got in the Suburban, slammed the door, and drove off into his new life.
He got a couple of miles down the road when I decided the coast was clear and I could surprise him.
“Hi!” I said. I thought he would be happy. We were escaping together. Instead, he looked sad and pulled over.
“Baby, you can’t stay,” he said. “I gotta take you home.”
“I don’t wanna go home,” I said. As he did a U-turn, I began to wail, hitting boxes and crying. I just knew home wasn’t safe anymore. I have always had a good sense of things, and everything in me told me that I needed to run.
He had to pull me out of the car, and my mom screamed at both of us. She had to hold me in her grip and drag me into the house to keep me from running after the car. He married Susan, and he started his new life without me.
I didn’t see my father again for almost three years.
*
My mother instantly became a different person, as if my father’s leaving had triggered an Off switch. She drank Coca-Colas all day, lighting each new cigarette off the one she was just finishing, then stubbing it out in an ashtray or whatever was close. She didn’t care what she looked like, and her hair became gray and got curly, seemingly overnight. Thirty years old and she had to go to work for the first time in her life. She got a waitressing job at a restaurant called Café Lagrange, and then a second job working at Tigator trucking company across the bridge in Port Allen, Louisiana. When the restaurant closed down, she took on more work at Tigator. They had a fleet of blaze-orange eighteen-wheelers, all with a logo of a two-headed animal that was part tiger, part alligator.
She had been a great mom, but now she paid less and less attention to me. Part of it was that she now had to work these minimum-wage jobs, but mostly I think my father just broke her heart. She quickly devolved, and a lot of people wondered if she was doing drugs or drinking. I wish she had been, because her actions would make more sense. I’ve seen my mom drunk maybe five times. On wine coolers at barbecues, places where it’s perfectly appropriat
e to relax and do that.
My dad left and my mom never cleaned the house or even did dishes again. It was so gross, but it became just how I grew up. I am not a clean freak and I am not OCD. I can do so much damage cluttering up a hotel room in two days, you cannot imagine. But there is a difference between being messy—dumping my suitcase on the floor to find the one thing I cannot find—and being dirty. This was fucking dirty.
At least I could go next door to my grandparents’ house for a little normalcy, but that ended when my grandmother passed away when I was six. My grandfather sold the house as quick as he could and moved to Mississippi. A couple moved in with a little boy named Travis. He was six months younger than me, and we became best friends.
Grandpa sold just in time. My mom and the neighborhood were in a race to see which could go downhill faster. The population of the neighborhood changed just as the crack epidemic hit Baton Rouge. What was once a stable, working-class neighborhood became a real-time loop of Cops. Even the yards gave up. The trees and lawns all died, and cars started getting parked in the yard.
Rats moved in, and their poop was all over the house. They loved the third bedroom, which became a literal junk room. They could have it. The real problem was roaches. They were everywhere in the house and no place was safe. I had a waterbed and I don’t think my mother washed those sheets once after Dad left. The roaches hid in it, waiting for me. I have scars on my legs from where they would bite me.
We had this toothbrush holder, a plastic teddy bear that had holes in his hands and feet to hold two kids’ brushes. When it was new, you could pull a string and the bear’s arms and legs moved as he blinked at you. But my toothbrush had outgrown it, and the teddy bear sat empty on the wall for the roaches to turn into another nest. I’d look in the holes and the roaches would just be in there, their antennae waving at me like, “Fuck you.” It bothered me because I could remember when it was new and clean, when we had Dad around and I had a real mom.
There were many days I came home from school to no electricity. We were always getting shut off for nonpayment. I’d be home alone after school, the house getting darker as the sun got closer to setting. I wasn’t scared, but I was bored and hungry. I’d go out and ride my bike, which wasn’t really safe in the neighborhood, or go hang out at a friend’s house. I had a lot of friends from school and the neighborhood, though in those days I never once had anyone over. “I’ll come to your house,” I’d say. “You guys have better snacks.” Travis next door was always fun to play with. He taught me how to ride a bike, and we took turns with his. Who else was going to teach me?
Travis was great, but he wasn’t a crush or anything like that. Back then I had eyes for Tanya Roberts in 1984’s Sheena. I saw the movie on TV—a sort of female version of Tarzan—and I’ve never forgotten the thrill I felt watching her. She was perfection, a blonde with phenomenal boobs in a torn-up makeshift bikini. Tanya played an orphan raised by an African tribe, who can communicate with animals. What drew me in was that Sheena is as strong as she is pretty. She gets the bad guy by shooting him in the heart with an arrow, then saves the boyfriend and then sends him home to America so she can ride off on a zebra.
The hot girl who saves the day. Who wouldn’t fall for her?
*
My dad remarried and I guess Susan, who I had still never met, suggested that maybe he should see his daughter. In the three years since I had tried to run away with him, they had moved to Philadelphia. I was six, and my dad wanted me to fly up by myself. There were a lot of screaming phone calls. My mom felt strongly that if he wanted to see me, he should come get me, and this is one of the rare cases where I was on her side. I was not an outgoing kid, so if I was lost or something happened, I would have just decided to live in the airport rather than ask an adult for help.
Susan flew down to Baton Rouge, but on reflection I think my father might have told my mom that he was coming and sent her instead. The last time my mom saw Susan she was dragging her around by the hair, and now she had to hand her daughter over to the woman who ran off with her husband. She referred to Susan as my Wicked Stepmother, and I think it pissed her off even more that Susan was so polite at the airport. We flew to Philadelphia, and I didn’t talk very much until she brought me to my dad. I was so excited to see him.
He was exactly how he was before, a little distant and not at all hands-on. He was nice enough, but I don’t think he had any idea what to make of me. Their town house wasn’t a mansion, but to me it was. It was clean and didn’t reek of smoke.
“The first thing we’re gonna do is wash all these clothes,” Susan said, recoiling from the stale smell of smoke as she unpacked my bag. She bought me a ton of new clothes and seemed way more excited about seeing me than my dad did. I actually spent very little time with him that week, except for when he took me to see the Liberty Bell. This was back when you could still touch it, and he held me up to reach my hand to the crack in the bell. I remember it so vividly, me in my pink jacket and pigtails, touching history.
I spent the week sleeping on their living room floor, right by a floor-to-ceiling glass window and a door that led to their back patio, which was like a mini yard. The window had huge vertical blinds, and one morning at about 5 A.M. I saw a shadow go across the ceiling. I crawled over and looked through the blinds. I so wish you could have seen this: There were bunnies everywhere. There were about twenty of them, all doing mating dances, leaping into the air and darting under each other like a goddamned bunny ballet. I thought, Am I dreaming?
Dad had to see this. I ran to their bedroom and woke him and Susan, and neither of them was impressed. “Go back to bed,” my dad said.
After that week, they—and I’m sure it was just Susan—set up a schedule of visits. I’d go see them for a couple of weeks in the summer and then either around Christmas or Easter. All my birthday cards and Christmas cards came from her, with her signing his name for him. Every time I went to see them, it was like going to Narnia. Each visit started with washing my clothes. She was kind and set up art projects for us to do, but she was not pushy. She didn’t want to play Mom for the week, and I wasn’t looking for one. I wasn’t searching for anything from my dad, either. I’d stowed away in his car and he’d brought me home. I can take a hint.
No, the trips weren’t about him. This was a short period of time where I slept in a clean bed, there was food, and my asthma wasn’t acting up from my mom’s chain-smoking.
And then I’d go home.
After Dad, my mom dated this parade of horrible guys. It was like if someone mentioned a guy, her first question was “Is he a loser? Yeah? Sold.” None of them came on to me, which I know is what people assume happened to adult actresses to “damage them” as children. No, they were just losers.
When I was about eight, my mom started disappearing for days at a time, probably with one of the guys she was dating. There would be no food, and I just wasn’t sure how long I would have to ration out saltines or whatever was still there. When she was gone, I would watch TV until late. I loved late-night talk shows and the companionship of the last years of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Saturday nights were best, because I could watch Saturday Night Live. Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Kevin Nealon—they became my heroes. The humor just clicked with me, the thrill that I was sitting there alone in Baton Rouge, and in that very second, they were making these jokes live from New York. All of us sharing this moment.
When my mother came home, she never offered an explanation or an apology. I didn’t think she was capable of either. She wasn’t off on a romantic getaway. She probably just went to hang out at a car garage where some guy worked, went home with him, and then he drove her to whatever job she was doing. And then when she needed a ride to her car … rinse and repeat. She also hung out at a bar called the Gold Dust Lounge. I just wasn’t on her radar as a priority, and by the time I was eight she was used to treating me with less care than you would a dog.
There was one man, a big, heavy
dude named Wade, who was so in love with her. Wade was a nice guy with a decent job, so she wasn’t interested. But she did use him. He would come over after work and bring us groceries. Wade always sat in the easy chair by the big picture window. I couldn’t understand why anyone would volunteer to be in the house. He didn’t mind the rat poop and didn’t seem disgusted by the roaches. He would ask me about school, which no one else did.
“It’s good,” I told him, meaning it. I had realized I was smart when I started finishing my work in class before everyone else. My friends complained about quizzes and I worried that I was missing something. At school I was a leader. Not in a Mean Girls kind of way, but when we played games or pretended we were wild horses galloping around, I was always the leader and no one ever questioned it. There was never anyone saying, “I’m gonna be the leader today.” It was just natural that it be me.
It was natural to me, too. I always felt like there was some kind of magic around me. Maybe you could chalk it up to my having an exceptional imagination as a kid, but not all of it. There was a vibration that people picked up on. Like the universe had a plan for me.
*
By the end of fourth grade, I had found my first bad boy. Damien MacMorris was in my class, and his mom, Sharon, was friends with my mom. They lived in a mobile home in a trailer park. He had dark hair and dark eyes, and he was always, always in trouble. He was my boyfriend, though we’d never kissed.
His parents were divorced, and on the last day of school, he was going to live at his dad’s. My mom and I were over at his place, and Sheila and Sharon chain-smoked in the trailer, probably talking about how men suck. I didn’t know if Damien was leaving for the summer or for good, but I had a feeling this was the last time we were going to see each other.
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