The next morning, as my mother drove me to school, chatting about “Oh, isn’t this exciting,” “Isn’t everything pretty here,” “It’s going to be great!” I felt only growing dread: Everybody would be rich. Later, I found out that many students were from military families, far from wealthy, and that there were a lot of middle-class kids as well. But that first day, I knew in my heart that my mother was about to drop me into a scene right out of Heathers.
I’d carefully chosen an ensemble I was certain would win me new friends and influence new people: a mint green sweater under mint green overall shorts, and black high-top Reeboks with yellow laces. My hair was long and dark, the top half pulled back leaving just my bangs, which hung down to my chin. I spent a good ten minutes each morning leaning upside down with a curling iron, shaping my bangs so that they would resemble a wave (in fact, they more closely resembled the Nike “swoosh”). Upside down, I teased it at the roots, coated it with Aqua Net, and blew it dry with a hot hair dryer. When I stood back up, so did my hair. Hard as a rock, too—it wouldn’t have moved if I’d run straight ahead at warp speed. The look was a dead giveaway: poor Mexican kid from a crap neighborhood which, more or less, is what I was.
The school was a short walk from the beach, and the main building was two stories high. I’d never been to a two-story school. Mom took me to the guidance counselor’s office, wished me luck, then took Johnny to his school. The counselor, a soft-spoken woman who seemed not much older than my mother, walked me to my first class, already in session when I arrived. After an introduction—you know the script, right? “Boys and girls, may I have your attention? This is Mary Forsberg, who’s just moved to Coronado. I’m sure you’ll all give her a warm welcome, answer any questions she may have, and help her be a part of our community! Right? Okay? Have a nice day!”—I was assigned a “buddy” to show me around school and get me from class to class.
As I walked to my desk, I heard the giggles and the tittering; I guess, had I been them, I might’ve laughed, too. This was a room full of kids with a laid-back California beach vibe—Esprit khakis, sun-faded Izod polo shirts—and I looked like a circus clown.
During the break before my next class, a few girls came up and introduced themselves. One girl gave me a hug. Oh, that’s nice, I thought—at which point she yanked the back of my sweater, revealing the tag inside the neck: fake Guess that my mother bought in Tijuana. Even my Reeboks were fake, also from Mexico. All the girls were laughing. Red-faced and nauseated, I couldn’t decide whether to deal out a beat-down or sprint for home. My faux-bok’ed feet wouldn’t cooperate with either option. My helpful new “buddy” then escorted me to my next class, where I sat barely able to concentrate, making eye contact only with the chalkboard. Up until then, lunch was always my favorite part of the school day. At every previous school, I lined up with everyone else in the free-lunch line. Your family has to make next to nothing to qualify for free lunch, and nearly everybody I knew made the cut. No one was ashamed; we were all in the same boat. But here? The free-lunch line was out of the question. I will starve before I go stand in that line, I thought, and that’s what I did. It may have been the first time in my life that I turned down food. The rest of the day, my stomach growled in stereo in every silent classroom. One more reason to laugh at the new girl. When the bell rang at the end of the day, I flew home to inform my mother that she had ruined my life and that I would not be returning to school the following day or, for that matter, ever again.
Even now, my mother still believes that PMS is responsible for all of our fighting when I was a teen; whatever the cause (nature, nurture, screwed-up biochemistry, or genetics), I really think it was that first day of school in Coronado that kicked off the chaos that soon followed. Later that night, once I’d calmed down a little, she gave me the earnest “Mary, you’re not a quitter, we are not quitters” speech, and then promised to buy me something from the Gap (if we could find something on sale). This was of no comfort. I spent that entire first night wide awake and stressing—how could I revamp myself in less than twelve hours?
The next morning, I let my hair dry into natural waves, then put on jeans, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops. I packed a lunch so I wouldn’t have to stand in the free-lunch line, and before I walked out the door, I threw up. I threw up nearly every morning for almost a month.
I was so mad at my mother. It took me a long time to understand why she had brought us to this place. Every day our conversation was the same: “How could you do this to me? Can’t we please move back?” Her response was consistent: “Don’t be ridiculous.” Every night I called friends in Lemon Grove to see whose parents might let me come back and live with them. No one volunteered.
One thing that became immediately clear was how far behind I was in class. Until Coronado, I thought you went to school because you had to; you passed, you got out, you got a job. College was something other people did, to become doctors or lawyers or teachers, professions I was pretty sure were out of my reach. Learning for its own sake never entered anyone’s conversation. I didn’t like being behind. I didn’t like not having the answers. I didn’t like that I was surrounded by kids who had actual plans for their lives. I have to make a plan, I thought.
It took a couple of weeks to work up the nerve to speak in class. Eventually, sarcasm and a sense of humor helped me make some friends. Long story somewhat shorter, I guess I worked it out. Nevertheless, I fiercely hid my family’s financial situation, and worked like a dog in class and at night to make up for being so far behind. Soon, I was able to go to school without vomiting.
In time, a couple of generous girlfriends let me borrow their clothes, which boosted my comfort level at school. But the mall on weekends still sucked. My friends shopped at Nordstrom, the Gap, Contempo, and Nine West; I hung back and watched. One day, a friend’s father handed her a hundred-dollar bill just before he dropped us off. I had to clench my jaw to keep it from dropping open; I had never even seen a bill that large before, let alone had one to spend on myself. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had to suck it up and learn to be content with enough pocket change for Hot Dog on a Stick. “I forgot my wallet” or “I’m saving for something really expensive” worked most of the time; other times, I made up excuses to just not go.
When I started modeling a few years later, I worked for Nordstrom, the Gap, and Contempo, which went a long way to help erase the hurt and resentment those mall trips had created. For a long time, my picture was on Contempo’s glossy shopping bags. Revenge is sweet. And childish. But even now, I can’t pretend it didn’t matter.
I was thirteen, my parents were definitely finished, and on weekends, my mother went out with her girlfriends. She even started dating. I was dumbfounded by this. She’d always been the stable one, the reliable one—my Knots Landing buddy on Thursday nights, my rock-out-with-the-hairbrush singing partner. Now that was over.
I didn’t want my parents to get back together. I knew enough to understand why my dad lived on the other side of the bridge. But now my mom was gone, too. This was the only time in my entire life (and for that matter, in hers) that she ever left the house at night. She’d never dated before she got pregnant and married my dad, she’d never gone out with girlfriends. She was thirty-one and yet, she said, it was as though we were both thirteen going on fourteen. She was trying to find her way, and I was certain I’d lost mine.
I couldn’t fall asleep at night, woke up angry almost every morning, and could not haul myself out of bed. Mom was defensive, trying to be independent while managing a family with little financial help from my father. The fighting between us accelerated to something ugly. She wanted me to babysit. She wanted me to clear the table. She wanted me to dry the dishes or keep an eye on my baby sister while she ran to the store. There was always a daycare baby in my room, taking a nap.
“This is bullshit,” I said.
“Don’t take that bullshit tone with me,” she said.
“Fuck this, I’m moving in with Dad,” I
said.
She called my bluff. “Look, Little Miss 1975. I could’ve been a nurse now, if not for you. You think it’ll be better living at your dad’s? Be my guest.”
Dad was living in a small, ugly apartment on the same street where he and my mother had lived when I was born, and the only thing in the fridge was potato bread and orange Shasta. “All these years we spent getting away from that place,” my mother said, “and he goes back to it.”
When I got to Dad’s, there wasn’t a houseful of daycare kids, but nevertheless my routine was complicated. In order to stay enrolled in the same Coronado school, I had to wake up at 5:00 A.M., walk a mile to the trolley station, go to downtown San Diego, then take the bus over the bridge to the island. So I moved back to my mom’s. Johnny and I did this moving-back-and-forth thing periodically, playing our parents against each other, using one to manipulate the other. I’d feel the words coming to my mouth, hear myself say them, and all the while, I’d stand outside it somehow, witnessing, unable to stop the scene. Then it would somehow blow over. An hour or day would go by, and the surface appeared calm again. But the ugly moment never felt fully gone.
I wandered around wrapped in a thick black cloud, my own personal bad-weather system in sunny SoCal. For hours, I rode my blue beach-cruiser bike all over the island or walked barefoot through the sand on the beach. Often I pretended to run away, rehearsing for the day I’d do it for real. I’d go to my school friends’ houses, try on their clothes, making believe that I lived there, until Mom tracked me down and ordered me to come home.
Time and again I found myself at the Hotel del Coronado, which sits on the beach, a ten-minute bike ride from our house. The Del is a magical old sprawling place, with painted white wood and red turrets. It’s haunted, somehow, and elegant. Many movies have been filmed there—Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot is probably the most famous. I’d walk right in and stroll around the lobby. Nobody ever paid much attention to me. I wondered what it would be like to be a guest in such a place, to actually sleep in those rooms and eat in a dining room with glasses and silver and flowers on the table.
Sometimes laughter came from the restaurants or from the patio, where people sat by candlelight with the last traces of the sun going down behind them, and it made me want to cry. I’d go out to the pool, stretch out on a lounge chair, stare at the sky, and shake—it was cold at night, always. I wrapped my arms around myself and stayed there until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t want to walk out of the fantasy; I didn’t want to go home.
TWO
walk fast
In those first weeks at Coronado Middle School, I was determined not to be that solitary geeky girl alone at the lunch table. I made friends. But I never made a best friend. Always the new girl, the third wheel, to girls who had known one another forever and already had best friends. When opportunities arose to become close with a girlfriend, I didn’t know quite what to do. It was like I was wearing something great that didn’t have pockets, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands. These days, I’ll buy almost anything as long as it’s black and has pockets. I still like the comfort of giving my hands a safe home.
The first time I put my lips around the icy green glass of a beer bottle, I was thirteen years old, in a girlfriend’s house where the grown-ups were rarely around and the big brothers always made sure the fridge held plenty of beer. The bubbles went up my nose, the taste went right to my gut. By the time I’d finished the second bottle, I knew I’d found my best friend. No more third wheel. The way this felt was all mine, and I was in charge of it. My instant affinity for booze explained the purple cough syrup, although it took me a long time to make that connection. I’m drunk, I thought—and simultaneously realized that if my mom found out, there would be hell to pay. I delayed going home until I figured she was safely asleep, then started walking. This was Coronado at the time when a girl could walk through the streets at night without an ounce of concern. And sometime during that short walk home, the Oh-my-God-how-can-I-make-this-happen-again? drumbeat began. The noise that filled the space between my ears that night has never gone away. For some brains, once that demon moves in, it never fully moves out.
Carefully opening then closing the front door, I silently crept into my house, into my room, and into my bed. The slow movements of my water bed (cut me some slack here—it was the eighties!) lulled me almost to sleep until I realized I needed to go to the bathroom. Tiptoeing down the hall again (and triumphantly past my mother’s room), I sat on the toilet for what seemed like a very long time. I’d had a lot of beer. When at last I opened the door—quietly, carefully—there she stood, her arms folded. I wondered how long she’d been standing there. She looked me straight in the face and said, “Jesus, Mary, how much did you drink?” I was busted, wobbly drunk, starting to slide into the morning after, and Mom decided it would be a great idea to take pictures of me so that later she could show me what an ass I had made of myself. They were not pretty, and neither was I.
My real punishment began the next morning, when Mom woke me up early. “I’m going to make you the foulest breakfast you’ve ever had,” she said, “and you’re going to sit in front of me and eat it.” Fried eggs, swimming in bacon grease. Black coffee that could have peeled paint. And a bowl of soggy Lucky Charms, little pastel marshmallowy things floating in milk. “Eat it,” she commanded. She knew I would hate it or vomit. She was right on the first count, nauseatingly close on the second. If it was meant to serve as a deterrent, it didn’t.
I don’t know how much I actually drank that first night, but I soon learned that no matter the circumstances, I could always drink most people under the table and keep on going, even if I wasn’t sure quite where. The ultimate goal, whatever it was, seemed always just a little bit out of reach. Maybe having more, just a little bit more, would take me there. Getting a buzz was the perfect excuse not to care about anything anymore.
I know that a hangover is the body’s way of fighting off the toxins, but something else always accompanied the physical aftermath—a letdown, a darkness, a frustration that replaced the high from the night before. It was hard to get out of bed not just because I’d been drunk and was now sick, but because even when I was sober and not hungover, I just did not want to get out of bed.
For an underage girl looking to get into trouble, the key to success is the college-age boy. It wasn’t difficult, in a Southern California beach town, to find one. Flirting without following through became my strategy for getting access to a party and a six-pack. A few weeks later, I was with my girlfriend Sloane at our friend Hardy’s house. Hardy was older than we were and had a few of his friends over. Hanging out with Sloane was always kind of exciting. Her dad was an officer in the navy, and she seemed well-traveled and worldly to me. She knew what to wear, how to put on makeup; at thirteen, she could easily pass for eighteen, and she often did.
Hardy’s parents ran a local restaurant, and there were a lot of kids in his family. They all went to parochial school, which I’d thought was stricter, more straitlaced, than where I went to school. So I was very surprised when somebody brought out a large bong, fired it up, and began to pass it from person to person at the party. It was the first time I’d ever been in the presence of drugs. The bong made its way around the room to the strains of Bob Marley and the Wailers and “Waiting in Vain.” When it got to Sloane, I watched with shock as she took in a lungful of smoke. Then she handed it to me. I almost dropped it; I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. Panicky and embarrassed, I pulled both Sloane and the bong into the bathroom and shut the door behind us. “I don’t know how to do this,” I whispered, “and I don’t want anyone to know that.”
Carefully, she gave me a step-by-step introduction: inhale, close your eyes, hold, exhale slowly. I blinked, my throat burned, my eyes watered. Seconds later, we were outside the bathroom and I was on my own. I inhaled again, and nothing in particular happened. I wondered if maybe I was doing it wrong. I decided that maybe more would b
e better. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Still, not much of anything. I just felt a little sleepy.
Sloane decided it was time to go home. I walked with her to her apartment (a bland, nothing-beige building that suddenly made me wonder if she ever felt like she was living in a Band-Aid) and then I continued on to my house on El Chico Lane, a couple of blocks away. As I was walking, I found myself stepping over water hoses on the sidewalk, snaked out in front of nearly every house I passed. “What’s the matter with these stupid people, leaving hoses out all night?” I muttered. “Don’t they know that anybody walking along could trip and fall and break a leg or something?”
And then I realized that there weren’t any hoses. They were shadows on the sidewalk, made by the overhead telephone wires in the artificial light of the streetlights. I was high. I stopped in my tracks, peering around me, trying to take inventory of every house, every front lawn, the sidewalk ahead of me and behind me. Nope, no hoses. I wondered what else I had gotten wrong, and it made me laugh so hard I had to wipe the tears from my eyes. Must’ve looked pretty silly, I thought, high-stepping over imaginary hoses all the way home.
It turns out that I fall into the category of funny stoner. I’ve never been paranoid or immobile, just wildly entertained and (I was always convinced) entertaining as well. Laughing, and laughing hard, at everything. It was so light and fun, being up there, with the black cloud lifted away. And then I’d get hungry. Not just hungry, but starving. Ravenous. Raid the refrigerator, order Chinese, somebody get in the car and go get me something. Good thing I eventually quit. Otherwise, I’d probably tip the scales at half a ton today and be working at a 7-Eleven to keep up with my insatiable stoner snacking.
Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness Page 3