Untied

by Meredith Baxter

  I was so lonely. I made three friends--my roommate and the two girls who lived in the room next door and we did have fun together. We got drunk on alcohol smuggled into the dorm in poorly rinsed shampoo containers; I threw up Coke and liquid Prell into my wastebasket. I often tried to call home. I rarely found anyone; there was so little contact; I felt so abandoned. I'd take long showers with the lights off, lying on the floor of the shower for an hour, the hot water pounding down on me, my suitemates pounding on the doors. I learned to sight-read the music a little and I loved the singing and think I improved some; I went to concerts; I added my voice to the others in the woods' rehearsal cabins. In the winter, I went on long, long walks by myself, loving the silence of the snow. I attended my classes. I went through the motions but didn't overapply myself.

  In April, I went home for the two-week spring break. Whitney and Jack were very interested in Interlochen's academic program: Jack was particularly impressed when I told him we were comparing More's Utopia to Plato's Republic ... a fact I might have made up. No one wanted to know how I was adjusting to living away from home. Inside, I was screaming to tell them, but I was afraid of sounding needy and incapable. I wanted them to ask me, "Who are your friends?" "What pieces are you singing?"--it would have made a difference.

  When I returned to school, everyone seemed so excited to see one another, giddy to resume life in this creative Eden. But I felt like I was greeted by thudding silence. I just didn't feel like anyone here, or at home, for that matter, cared. Everything was tempered by the colossal weight of loneliness I carried.

  One night when I was attending one of the mandatory concerts, I had a panic attack and started hyperventilating. My heart was pounding like crazy and I was desperate not to cry. I didn't know what was happening to me. I asked to go back to my room. Despite the rules--students weren't allowed to be in the dorm unsupervised for some reason--they granted me permission. When I got there, I was frantic and sobbing. I don't know why but I started trying the doors of other rooms, went into any of them that weren't locked, and began to gather pills. I took Midol, aspirin, sleeping pills, asthma medication, cold tablets. Anything. I didn't care what I took. I wasn't thinking. I didn't have a plan. I just took everything I could find. Then I went back to my room and wrote a farewell note: "I leave my clothes to Tory ... Brian, you can have my records ..." I swallowed all of the pills with a Coke, lay down on my bottom bunk, and waited to die.

  Looking back now, I don't think I really wanted my life to end. I really wanted attention. I just felt so unseen, so alone, and in so much pain and despair, I couldn't bear it.

  I vaguely remember being half-carried down the stairs to the school infirmary. After a night of spectacular vomiting, I awoke to the warm, friendly face of Mrs. Wysong hovering over me. (Besides being the elderly woman my mother had rented our Traverse City house from two summers ago, she was also our dorm mother.)

  "Oh, honey," she said so gently to me. "If you promise not to do this again, we won't call your mother."

  What? I thought, There's a way Whitney could know about this? But if you don't tell her, she won't know.

  "Mrs. Wysong?" I said. "I don't promise."

  A faculty member must have called my parents, told them what had happened, told them I was expelled. I was told to pack my things, that I'd be leaving the next day and I was not invited to return. I felt so sad, so full of regret that I couldn't make it work there, and knew at the same time I couldn't have done it differently. I wasn't looking forward to my long flight home. I had no idea what ignominy awaited me when I got home. What punishment would Jack contrive?

  The next morning I was told to bring down my suitcases, that my mother had arrived. My mother had arrived? My mother had come to see me, take me home? My mother wouldn't come out of her room to see me. I couldn't conceive that she'd come all the way across the country. And she came alone. She didn't just send Jack.

  It was a silent flight home, Whitney sitting, staring out the window most of the trip. It was so hard to grasp that she had come or what that meant. I was so glad to be with her; I kept waiting for her to say something. I wanted to know why she had thought it important to come. Was she worried about me? Was she wondering why? I couldn't ask. I didn't feel I had permission to ask. Back again in the Hollywood Hills, it appeared that no one--not my father, my mother, or Jack--felt comfortable addressing the incident with me. So my brother Dick was summoned home from his day job at the newspaper and assigned the task of getting me to explain to him why I was so sad. I don't know what Dick asked me or how I answered. All I remember is later, sitting with him and my parents in their bedroom (which was strange since we were so rarely allowed in). "Don't send her to a psychiatrist," Dick said to them. "Just talk to her."

  A few days later, they sent me to a psychiatrist. After the one session, he told my parents, "She's a perfectly normal sixteen-year-old girl."

  He even got my age wrong.

  No one ever mentioned my suicide attempt again.

  Chapter 3

  With Robert in Ferndell Park. We are eighteen and twenty years old, respectively.

  Kicked out of Interlochen, living back at home and being perfectly normal, I finished out the last two months of my senior year at Hollywood High, failing to distinguish myself in anything. I didn't have many friends there anymore; Tory and John had graduated the year before. I was restless, listless, lonely, irritable, and discontented. I wore my Interlochen uniform to school, navy corduroy knickers with navy long socks and a white shirt. Trust me, no one else dressed like that at Hollywood High. I spent much of my after-school time alone in my bedroom reading Keats and Shelley, writing bleak, artless, rhymeless poetry. When I wasn't writing I was at Wallach's Music City at Sunset and Vine, sitting in a sound booth, listening to the Vivaldi Gloria and singing along in Latin loudly, hoping someone might wander by and wonder, "Who is that fantastic singer?" I felt rudderless and untethered. I slid back into play production and tried to make a place for myself.

  It was the spring of 1965, and for the past several months the deployment of U.S. troops to Southeast Asia had continued to escalate. The Vietnam War was on everybody's minds; boys in my class were getting drafted left and right. At the time, being drafted meant the infantry, and being shipped off to Vietnam, which instantly conjured up nightmarish visions of sloshing around a faraway rice paddy while being shot at by armed villager insurgents. So, my brother Dick enlisted in the air force and crossed his fingers that his journalism experience would help him land a safe post on a base newspaper. It did. After basic training, he got a job in the information office at the Suffolk County Air Force base in Long Island.

  With Dick gone and Brian out on his own, I was now at home alone with Whitney and Jack, where a different sort of trouble was brewing. As Hazel entered season five, the writers had feisty Hazel and the Baxters' young son, Harold, now living with Mr. B's younger brother and sister, and in an even an odder plot twist, sending corporate lawyer Mr. B and his Missy B off-camera--way off-camera--to Saudi Arabia.

  Poor Whitney had been fired from a series she despised--one of the more ironic forms of showbiz indignity. Even more humiliating--for all her attempts to be seen as young and vibrant--they'd been replaced by a younger cast, ostensibly to appeal to a more youthful viewing audience.

  Right around this time I was at home alone one evening when the doorbell rang. There stood our former tenant, Harvey, the focus of so many of my teenaged romantic fantasies, looking good and as tousled and rumpled as ever. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years. He was looking for his agent, Jack. But there was just me.

  Now, at eighteen, I was no longer the same little girl who mooned after Harvey when he lived with us, but he still made my heart leap. His business with Jack must not have been so pressing because he said to me, "C'mon. Wanna go for a ride?"

  "Okay," I said, unable to even consider another answer, as if I'd just been sitting there wondering when someone would come roaring up to find me. I hopped
on the back of his motorcycle and wrapped my arms around his waist. I don't think I'd been on a motorcycle before. The wind made my eyes tear as we sped off along the Hollywood Freeway and rode to his apartment about ten miles away in Highland Park.

  Where we had sex.

  I shouldn't have been surprised but I was. I mean, what else should I have expected? Conversation? I wasn't wanting sex but I suppose I'd wanted something ... something romantic or sweet, hopefully gentle. But it wasn't. When I'd lost my virginity the year before, I'd felt detached, unemotional, almost indifferent, but I wasn't humiliated. It wasn't too dissimilar with Barry. I wasn't hurt; he was kind and I appreciated his tenderness. But this felt like cold, aggressive, mean sex. It was so confusing. I couldn't figure out what I'd done that it had turned out so badly.

  Afterward, Harvey took me home. As he dropped me off in front of my house, his parting words were, "Tell Jack Fields that I just fucked him." Then he roared off. I stood there, dumbly, in the street.

  What? This was about Jack? I'm just a stand-in for Jack?

  I never told anyone except Tory.

  Even I knew I was floundering. Once I graduated high school, I halfheartedly started taking classes at Los Angeles City College. I was quasi-interested in my literature class but, in truth, I was so done with school. I got a job, my first job, $30 a week as an usher at the new Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. My responsibilities were mindless: ripping tickets in half, shining a flashlight so moviegoers wouldn't stumble in the dark, and, of course, there was the concession stand. As far as I could see, this movie theater was new and innovative only in their huge wide screen and how they produced popcorn--they didn't. Unlike other theaters, where the smell of corn popping lured you to the concession counter even before you rushed to save your seat, the Dome folks had the popcorn trucked in in huge plastic bags, prepopped! We had a popcorn room. Another hapless usher and I would stand in the small room and upend massive bags of popcorn onto the bare concrete floor so were standing in it. We'd unfold the rectangular boxes, scoop them full of the popcorn around our shoes, fold the tabs, stack the full boxes, and transport said boxes to the concession stand, where they'd sit under a heat lamp until purchased. Mmm. Would you like a Coke with that?

  I started spending time with a guy named Rick whom I knew from the Hollywood High theater department. Rick and everyone else seemed to think he was the king of the drama class. He had the arrogance and posturing of a seasoned performer, although he couldn't have been more than year or so older than I. He was short, had floppy, dark blond hair, and might have been handsome except for the air of dissipation that made him seem older than he was. Rick lived in a typical sixties-era teenager's idea of a perfectly acceptable apartment: a long, narrow, one-car garage, minus the car, with a stained mattress at one end, a hot plate for making coffee, and candles stuck in wine bottles everywhere to supply flickering, spooky mood lighting for the endless pot and Red Mountain wine gatherings. One afternoon Brian and a guy named Bob Bush showed up at Rick's place. Bob had also been part of the Hollywood High theater crowd, but he was two years older than I so our paths had never crossed.

  Back in high school, Bob was a bit of a hybrid--part popular kid, part tough guy, part drama geek. He had slicked-back hair and wore tight black jeans, tight white T-shirts, and pointy-toed black boots. If Rick looked a little bit like James Cagney, I'd describe the young Bob Bush as a sturdier, more sultry, five-foot-ten Tom Cruise. He had dark hair and distinguishing eyebrows that he'd arch to punctuate a sentence. Bob lived in a commune of sorts, a group house that everyone called the Snake Pit, where kids from Hollywood High would go and do drugs. When Brian cut school, he'd go hang out at the Snake Pit and he always told me he didn't want me going up there, which of course only increased its allure.

  The way Bob tells the story is that Rick had two girlfriends--me and a girl named Donna. One day after we'd all been hanging out together, Bob said to him, "Hey, man. You can't have both of these chicks. You've got to make a decision. I want one of them," and somehow he got me. This was the free love era, so I guess that's how guys found their mates. I didn't seem to have had any say in the matter but must not have minded. I think I was glad to be chosen by someone. It helped that Brian liked Bob; it gave him the seal of approval. Bob was very easygoing and made me laugh with his sharp wit and funny observations. It helped that he also understood the trials of coming from a dysfunctional family.

  Born and raised in Hollywood, Bob's father was like a shady character out of a Damon Runyon short story, only the not-funny, real-life version. He was a professional gambler who ran floating games around Los Angeles. He was also an alcoholic, the kind who'd have a few drinks and get verbally and physically abusive. When Bob was sixteen, he and his mother couldn't take it anymore and found their own apartment farther east, near Los Angeles City College. I remember Bob telling me about the day when his father showed up at their new place, unannounced, and Bob let him know just how unwelcome he was by picking him up and throwing him down the stairs.

  Bob never asked me out on a date. This was the '60s. Nobody dated. Plus neither of us had any money. We just walked. Everywhere. We'd literally walk for hours. What I liked most of all was walking in residential neighborhoods where I could look in windows. I couldn't get enough of watching families together. I especially liked seeing mothers and fathers with children, seeing them sit and laugh together, especially touching each other ... it was just enthralling.

  Bob started bagging groceries at the Ralphs supermarket on Sunset Boulevard. If we pieced our two tiny paychecks together, we could just barely manage to make the rent on a cheap apartment. So, in 1966 we found a small place for $70 a month on a narrow, dead-end lane, at 10000 Honey Drive, #10, just off little Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I moved out of my mother's Whitley Terrace house and moved in with Bob.

  In the mid-sixties, rustic, woodsy Laurel Canyon was where everyone--musicians, artists, everyone--lived. Some even called it the "birthplace of the hippie generation." Our neighbors included Sonny and Cher, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, members of The Mamas & The Papas. Jim Morrison lived behind the Laurel Canyon Country Store. Frank Zappa and his family's house was just off of Mulholland Drive. Jimi Hendrix stayed at a log cabin down the hill from our apartment. We were in the happening place! But while they might have lived real close and breathed in the same canyon air, we never saw any of those folks.

  Whitney and Jack weren't happy about my being with Bob. For some reason, they thought we should be married. (Like that had worked out so well for young Whitney!) Living together in those days was just not done, and they liked things done their way. Once Jack showed up at our apartment and suggested Bob move out or he'd break both of his legs. But when threats of bodily harm didn't do the trick, more extensive measures were taken. Somehow Jack got my father, Tom, to pull some strings with the air force, and big brother Dick was again brought home from his post on Long Island, arriving like the cavalry to save his errant sister. Jack and Whitney had me in temporary custody and wanted me to get married, goddammit! Dick strolled into our family summit meeting in full uniform and announced, "Why get married? Why don't they just keep living together and see how it goes?" Then he left to get on with his forty-eight-hour fun pass away from the military--and Bob and I continued to live together unchallenged for another six months.

  The fact that everyone said that the complex we lived in had originally been a whorehouse--and that our unit used to be occupied by the madam--made our new home very enticing. Our corner unit was just a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. But it was a big circular-shaped corner unit, with windows that looked down on the street so the madam could spot police cars. I used them for the same purpose. Every one of our neighbors was a character: the guy downstairs was a magician and always seemed to burst in when we'd just smoked a couple of joints, then he'd entertain us by doing tricks with flash paper and blow our minds.

  Bob knew a guy named Larry, who was our drug dealer. We were very low-le
vel druggies and only got weed from him and Dexamyl by the bagful. Ah, Dexamyl ... it was essentially a dreamy combination of dextroamphetamine (speed) cut with amobarbital (a downer) in a time-release spansule. I loved staying awake for days, not eating, thinking I was brilliant, feeling the surge of the amphetamine as I talked about changing the world with Free Love, No Nukes, Legalize Marijuana--all the bumper sticker slogans. I lived for Larry arriving with the big plastic bag that didn't last long enough. I had a gradual realization that I was downing a lot of them every day although at no time did I ever feel dependent. I counted taking twenty-six one day and had a mini-moment of clarity, wondering, What are you doing? Clarity didn't last long. I shrugged it off. "Who cares?"

  At some point, I got a job as a cashier at the Ontra Cafeteria on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. Another mindless job but perfect for someone who was stoned a fair amount of the time. Customers would serve themselves, then slide their trays along the counter to my register, I'd add up the dishes, then hit a small bell--ping!--that would summon a runner to carry their tray to the table for them. Many a time I knocked the bell into their applesauce.

  In our apartment, we glued red, yellow, and green tissue paper on the windowpanes to make it look like stained glass, listened to music nonstop on Bob's amazing stereo system, and dried kilos and kilos of marijuana in the oven. We heard that you could get high smoking bananas or "mellow yellow"--it had something to do with extracting a supposedly psychoactive substance called bananadine, so I followed what I thought were all the steps: scraping the whitish, pasty residue from the banana peel, spreading the paste out on a cookie sheet, and baking it until it turned into a fine black powder. Then I scraped up some powder, rolled it up in a joint, smoked it, and waited.