by Jewel
We lived in a subdivision, with identical homes lined up neatly and indiscernibly on streets that looped with mazelike precision. All seemed well. Until school started. I learned quickly that my school was properly called something like the King Kamehameha Junior High, but was mostly referred to as the King Zoo. The kids in the seventh and eighth grade school seemed to outnumber the population of my entire hometown. But private school was beyond my reach, and so I tried to steel myself and hoped for the best.
The campus was beautiful—all outdoors, no windows, just slats separating indoors from out, and so the breeze swept through each classroom. Hallways were open, no walls, just canopy coverings for protection from daily rainfall. I was optimistic, but all illusions were shattered within five minutes of my first class, when a young boy said something clearly rude to the elderly math teacher in what I assumed was another language, but later learned was a broken English dialect the locals call pidgin. The student then took the teacher’s toupee off his head and flung it out the window. I was gobsmacked. The teacher just hobbled outside to get his toupee and the kids laughed. My heart shrank.
In the days and weeks that followed, I was called tuna (slang for “slut”), haole (pronounced “howly,” derogatory slang for “white”), and many other new and colorful terms I wished I’d had a dictionary for. The White Girl’s Guide to Being an Underdog, it might be called. It’s an odd thing to know you are being insulted and have to ask someone to define the insult for you. I nearly got jumped every day, and learned to keep my head down and be as invisible as possible. I found a few other white girls to form loose alliances with, and stayed out of trouble mostly. Every day at school felt like living in a powder keg—one wrong look at a local girl and she would say, “What you lookin’ at, haole tuna? You like beef?” “Beef” meant a fight. I had to ask about that one too. At first the term made me hungry, and I almost said, “I would love beef!” but once I caught on, I would say, “No, no, I would not like to beef,” so properly that it would elicit giggles. I kept my tail between my legs and was able to walk away most times, but one day a local girl accused me of liking her boyfriend. I said I didn’t even know who he was. When she enlightened me, I said, “Him? I don’t even think he’s cute.” I thought for sure this was a great way out of the mess. It was true. He was not cute. I had no interest in him. Of course she was insulted and said, “Oh, so you think I’m dating some dog?” Oops. I saw the error of my ways but was unable to take it back, and soon a group of girls surrounded us and were yelling, “Beef, beef, beef!” Soon the circle closed in and I could hear chants of “Knock dat grin off dat haole’s face!” I did not want to fight. I had never hit anyone, but I had been hit enough to know I hated it. And this girl was big, half Samoan, and outweighed me by a lot. That, I was wise enough to not point out. But still, here I was, facing certain death and feeling more like throwing up than like fighting. My antagonist leaned in to push me, and as she did, she whispered in my ear, “Next time I push you, just run.” I looked in her eyes and could see she had no fight in her. We were both victims of the group around us. But the others had formed such a tight circle I didn’t think I could break through it without one of them hitting me for running. Luckily, there was a guy who stopped in a beat-up old Toyota truck when he saw the commotion on the street. He opened his door and he hollered, “Hey, you need a ride?” I had no idea who this man was, but just the presence of an adult made the blood lust dissipate in the group, and I walked to the truck and got in. He didn’t say a word that I can recall. I told him where I lived, tears quietly streaming down my face. He was kind enough not to ask me about it.
My home life began to turn sour as well. Larry, it turned out, was controlling, rageful, and mean. It started with small outbursts, where his anger didn’t match the trigger—after doing chores one day I covered an unused portion of dog food with Saran Wrap and put it in the fridge so it would not go bad on the counter. He found me in my room and screamed that he would now have to throw everything away because I was so disgusting as to put animal food in the fridge with our own.
Another time, a neighborhood friend and I were playing in the storm drains with some other kids, throwing rocks and yelling in the long tunnels to hear our echoes. I lost track of time and Larry came looking for me and heard us playing in the storm drain. He ordered me out like a drill sergeant, grabbed my wrist, and dragged me home. He was a quiet volcano during the walk to the house, but at dinner he exploded and let me have it. I was eating peas and they kept falling off my fork, which seemed to be driving him nuts. My aunt was chatting nervously, trying to keep the peace as she felt the tension escalate, and to keep Larry calm. The veins began to bulge in his face like a rabid pit bull. “You make me sick! You are a fucking slut and you make me sick! You fucking whore! I bet you have been fucking all the boys you were playing with today!” My aunt just kept saying meekly, “Now, Larry, let’s stay calm, Larry.” I remember looking at her and thinking, It’s your job to be protecting me. What are you doing? It was then I realized she must have been in complete denial, or that she had her hands full protecting herself and she couldn’t protect anyone else. All I knew is that it was my job to keep the tension from spilling too badly onto my little cousin Catty. I already knew how to toe the line and be as small a target as possible, to just do my time.
I had no money to get home, and I couldn’t sing or raise money easily in the suburb we lived in. I was stuck until my Alaskan dividend came through. Every Alaskan resident is paid a royalty from the oil the state sells, as long as you have been a resident for a year. I would have to stay in Hawaii half the school year while I waited for the check, and I often listened to music as an escape. I remember Kate Bush helping me to pass much of my time. I wrote to my mom about how miserable I was. She reminded me to hold the pink stone she had given me a few years earlier. It was a piece of smooth round rose quartz. She said she had one too, and to imagine an invisible silver thread that tied the two together. That tied us together. I would fall asleep at night with it clenched tightly in my hand.
School life at least eased up a bit once all the local kids learned I could yodel. I dare say yodeling saved my life. Well, it saved me from a lot of fights, anyway. There was a very proud cultural heritage among the locals, and many of the kids performed traditional Hawaiian dance and music. I noticed how the voices of the singers often cracked, similar to the crack employed when you yodel. The Hawaiian version was much more melodic, more similar to what I would call a Swiss style of yodeling, whereas German is more rapid. On the bus ride home one day some kids were practicing, and I began to visit with them about their singing. I showed them how I could yodel. Before I knew it, one of the local girls told the whole bus to “Shut up and listen ta da haole girl yodel!” And yodel I did. The whole busload of brutes turned to me and I yodeled for all I was worth. From that day on, anywhere I went on campus, I heard, “Hey, dere’s dat haole girl who can do dat ting wit her voice, check it!” And like some organ-grinder monkey, I yodeled on the spot. In hallways, classrooms, on bus rides. I didn’t complain; it was way better than nearly being beaten up every day.
nine
my own ladder
After that first semester, my money came in and I got a ticket to Alaska. The plan was for me to go live with my mom and brothers in Anchorage. When I left for Hawaii, my dad had moved off the homestead again, staying with a string of girlfriends, and I never had a place to stay. I learned early on to farm myself out, sleeping on a girlfriend’s couch, sometimes with my aunt Mossy, helping her run a bed-and-breakfast on her ranch. I ran hay equipment in the summer and sang for money. But my dad was always in control and we fought horribly. I was so excited to finally live with my mother. I got on the plane in sunny Hawaii and got off in gloomy, dark Anchorage, where it was ten below zero. Snow was piled high and the sun set around 4 p.m. My mother lived in a seedy part of town, called Bar Alley, in a small pink house sandwiched on a block between the infamous Chilkoot Cha
rlie’s bar and project housing.
My mom and her boyfriend-slash-business partner had converted the front room into a showroom for glasswork. The back had a small kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, where my brothers and I slept. My mom slept downstairs in her studio, a basement with a workbench full of sheets of stained glass, soldering tools, a sandblasting booth for etching, and a small bed in the corner. We would go to an alternative school around the corner, called Steller, that had a reputation for being the place where social rejects who couldn’t make it in regular public school were sent. All the kids there had a story. Some were openly gay, some were pregnant teens, some were failing out of other schools. It was full of individual oddballs, and I felt much more at home, even after transferring in halfway through the year. I fell in with a group of kids from the projects. Dionne was half Aleut and half African-American. She looked Polynesian somehow, with exotic almond eyes that were the deepest brown they shone like a watery midnight peering back at you. Bethany was full-blooded Athabascan. She was tall and slender, with the grace of her culture. Her mother came to school occasionally, and had the traditional facial tattoos of her tribe. Dutima and Kalindy were twins, half East Indian and half French Canadian, and they modeled in their free time away from school for catalogs and the like. They were tall, with eyes the color of the brightest yellow gold that were set off by skin that was creamy olive. They introduced me to Garrett, whose dad was black and mom was white, yet he hated all other white people. He was very reluctant about becoming friends. On the fringes of our circle were Sam and Tyrone, who were Cripps (yes, the Cripps and Bloods made it to Anchorage). I heard that both have since been killed in gang-related violence.
Dionne and I became the closest, and by the end of the year I was staying at her house more often than my own. Her mother, Eleanor, became a sort of surrogate mother and the three of us did a lot together. Eleanor was a full-blooded Aleut (Alaska native), and as a child had lost her right hand just above the wrist but could use the bit of wrist she had quite handily to carry things like grocery bags. She was a single mom and worked hard, and she was very close to her daughter; they were like a team that stuck together. I craved that closeness. They lived in the projects, and Eleanor was putting herself through school, taking odd jobs where she could without losing her welfare status. They lived on food stamps but she fed me as if I were one of her own.
I learned to adapt to the city as a teenager, and my pidgin slang came in handy as it made me sound a little more urban. Or at least I thought it did. I began to dress like my new friends, very mid-’80s. I relinquished the grubby secondhand homestead gear and work boots and saved up some money for flats, pegged skinny jeans, black stockings with short black stretchy miniskirts. White button-down shirts with bolos, tank tops with blazers (sleeves rolled up of course), and then there was the ever-present smell of enough hairspray to be a fire hazard when we were all gathered for lunch. The school operated more like a college, where we could attend and create class schedules with some flexibility. Garrett and Sam would often hot-wire a car and take me out for lunch, then we would return it an hour later, no one ever the wiser that I knew of. Garrett and I became close friends, and he often confided in me about his home life. Sometimes his dad beat him so severely that he had to miss school so that no teacher would call social services, staying home for a week to let the bruises heal. I had never been beaten like that. I hoped never to know that feeling. Dionne and I would ride the city bus to his house and visit with him during these times. He was stoic and hard on the outside, but as I got to know him I could see his heart was tender and breaking behind the wall he was building to survive. He was, after all, still just a child. I knew that feeling.
Life with my mom was not mean at all. She was seemingly the opposite of my dad. She did not yell or hit. She was soft-spoken and calm and full of artistic imagination, always making me feel anything was possible. But all her time was spent reading or doing artwork, and very little was spent with us. I remember her crying a lot. We could hear her through the floorboards.
My favorite times with her were in her studio, where she taught me how to do glasswork. I watched as she drew a design on paper in Sharpie. She could draw freehand very well. I would then help her cut each shape and number them. We laid the paper cutouts on sheets of colored glass she had selected and then drew an outline around one using the glass cutting knife to carefully free the unique form from its generic former self. We’d wrap copper foil around the edges of the glass, and slowly a mosaic would come together as her drawing was reassembled, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. Then the fun work of soldering each piece, the lead melting like mercury when I touched it to the hot tool, and hardening again almost as quickly. I would accompany her on installations, going to rich people’s homes, listening in like a fly on the wall as the owners marveled at their new purchase and my mother waxed on about the philosophical and spiritual undertones of her work. On a few occasions my mom and I got singing jobs this way. She and I worked up an a cappella set, and she would offer to sing at any functions for the same clients. A few took her up on it, and we would dress nicely and walk around parties in backyards, singing songs for partygoers much like magicians walk around performing tricks in similar settings. Soon my mother would be talking with all the guests as if she were one of them. I took everything in, always from the outside.
My mom began to turn me on to music she liked—Odetta, Josephine Baker, Tracy Chapman. I listened, transfixed, as lyrics stirred my soul, and raw voices transmuted hurt and fear into hope. I had gotten hold of her copy of Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes singing “Famous Blue Raincoat.” I listened to the story a dozen times in a row, seeing Leonard’s lyrics come to life like a movie in my mind. I wanted to inspire that kind of tragic passing of two ships. I wanted to be able to write in a way that imparted the angst, the longing and moody undertones, an entire psyche as much as a scene or feeling. It would be the inspiration for “Foolish Games” five years later: I watched from my window, always felt I was outside, looking in on you. You stood in my doorway, with nothing to say, besides some comment on the weather.
My brothers and I continued to drift apart, as we had slowly begun to do after the divorce. I think we all became so preoccupied with surviving that it drew us each inward in solitary fashion, slowly causing us to separate rather than grow closer together. When I moved to Hawaii, Shane moved to Wyoming to work for an outdoor guide. By the time we were back together in Anchorage, the drift had become more pronounced. We went to the same school but hung out with separate crowds, and Atz Lee tried his best to fit in, though he always struggled the worst. He switched schools often to escape bullying, and looking back I wish I had taken more time with him and helped him. I was so busy trying to save myself and find friends to fit in with that it took all my focus, it seems. I was still operating under the belief that my little brother was the enemy because he was my dad’s clear favorite. I spent much of my childhood trying to feel better about myself by knocking down Dad’s favorite. Such a sad and misguided energy, one I aimed toward my brother but should have rightfully been focused on my dad.
At the end of the school year I went back to Homer, drifting with my backpack between couches again. Around this time Dad and I began to tour farther across the state, picking up a band here and there if a bar wanted a more up-tempo set. This was my first introduction to playing with bands, though I was just a backup singer. We still did covers mostly, old Hank Williams Sr. stuff, Jim Croce, Clapton, anything that the folks could dance to. I began to sing lead on a few songs, like Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “The End Is Not in Sight” by Amazing Rhythm Aces. I sang “The House of the Rising Sun” and learned to get the crowd going by belting it out. People requested to hear me sing for the first time, which was fun. Adjusting to a band was easier musically than it was socially, mainly because a thirty-five-year-old musician kept making moves on me. To save money on hotel rooms, w
e would pitch a tent on the beach in the wee hours after the gig and lay our sleeping bags out. It became an unspoken game of chess as the musician waited to put his bag down after he saw where mine was. I learned quickly to put myself against the farthest tent wall, and my dad’s bag next to mine.
The bars in the interior of Alaska were different and fun to play. I can’t recall the names of some, but remember that it seemed like they were in the middle of nowhere, strategically located so that folks from the many outlying towns could drive about the same distance to drink and socialize. The chasms between my school life and social life and my night life widened. I blended in with the adults quite easily, and the social aspect of kids my age became increasingly difficult to navigate.
For the next school year I wanted to continue going to Steller Secondary School, but my mom had moved into a new house, where we joined her. Our new home was a black house with white trim that sat all alone across from a cemetery in downtown Anchorage. It was not a good area. The project housing nearby had been demolished and heaps of crumbled lives were left for years in the lot down the road. Ours was the only house left on the block. I thought it was fitting the house was dressed in mourning colors for those who slept eternally across the street from us.