by Jewel
I remember the first bum I saw freeze to death on our sidewalk. The alcohol made him sleepy and the cold soon made him numb and he slipped from this world. His spirit making the short journey from our side of the street to the next, I thought to myself. In the dusky twilight an ambulance came and lifted his stiff body into the back. From that time on we kept a number taped to our fridge that we would call when we saw a drunk asleep on our sidewalk. Good Samaritans would come and load them up, some groggy and spitting, others grateful and compliant, as they were driven to a safe, warm place to sleep for the night.
We may have developed a reputation for being helpful to the homeless, as several started camping on our street and coming by. My brothers and I were home alone in our basement when a belligerent drunk knocked on our front door. Shane went upstairs and peeked around the corner to see the man’s red face, swollen with anger and drink. “I need some aspirin!” he was saying. He looked scary and we decided not to answer. We returned to our video games downstairs, and the drunk followed from outside and rapped on the tiny basement windows. He was on his knees, hunched over, face pressed against the window, hands cupped up to his eyes to reduce the glare. “I can see you in there! Goddamnit! I can see you in there! I need some fucking aspirin!” He began to shatter the window. We picked up the phone and shouted that we were calling the cops and he left. We of course did not call the cops. They would not have come in time anyway.
The window remained unfixed the rest of the winter, the cold air seeping in and making our rooms down there bitterly cold. We kept our doors shut and turned the heat up in our rooms, and avoided the basement as much as possible, although it was where the TV was, which is powerful motivation for three teenagers. So we would grab all the blankets off our beds and wrap ourselves in them and enjoy some mindless distraction in arctic temperatures.
My mother took the master bedroom on the main floor for herself but she never slept in it. There was a separate apartment upstairs with a private entry that would have been perfect for renting out, but instead that was where she stayed. When I heard her get home, I would go up the stairs in the back. I loved to visit with her. She seemed magical and calm and serene. She talked about art and her dreams. She said some people in life were dreamers, and others were warriors. She said she was a dreamer and told me of her elaborate visions. She was like a medicine woman, full of portent and premonitions. She said I was a warrior, a doer, and capable of handling anything. This made me proud. It reminded me of a time years before, when we were visiting her after the divorce. I was about nine. I finally confided in her that Dad had started hitting Atz Lee and me. I’m not sure how I expected her to react, but it was somewhere in the realm of protecting us. Maybe taking us away from that place. Taking us back. I hoped. Instead she looked at me and said, “Jewel. You have a steel rod in you. You cannot be broken. Atz Lee is more fragile. You need to look out for him.”
Children are incapable of comprehending the whole picture. Incapable of being angry at a parent and saying, Hey, that isn’t what I need to hear right now. I need you to protect me and want me and love me. I am fragile too. I’m afraid I’m breaking. Instead I saw my mom as most kids do, especially because I had so much need. She was a deity and I assumed she must be telling me the truth. In a way it was the truth, and I knew that down deep too. I can take anything. I will not break. It was like being given marching orders to get back in the trenches and take it, take it, take it. And at age fourteen I could add I am a warrior and a doer to the list. I had no idea the dreamer was grooming me to be her servant; at the time she was pure oxygen for me.
My mom worked with glass mostly, but that winter had begun working with ice. She liked the impermanence of ice, she said, that her art would be experienced for only a moment before it disappeared. She said it made the experience more special. I felt the fleeting moments of our interactions were the same. Special, ephemeral, and intense before she disappeared again.
In our backyard she covered female mannequins with satin sheets and lay them on the ground. Each day we used a water bottle to spray the sheets down so that a new layer of ice built up each night. After a week she lifted the sheets off the mannequin and the ghostly, silken frozen forms of women were propped up all over our backyard. It was eerie and beautiful.
Large chunks of glacial ice would come off barges and she did installations like launching ice lanterns filled with candles into lakes against the backdrop of the black Alaskan night. Now that I write this, I can’t remember whether she actually did this one or only talked about it. It’s hard to say whether my imagination took over or whether it happened in real life. Much of my experience with my mom was this way. My mind filled in holes and vacancies with vivid and beautiful experiences to keep my heart from breaking with the ugliness of the bitter truth.
One art installation I do remember. She took over a three-room gallery and filled it with ice carvings of women with berries placed inside their bodies. I imagined they looked like frozen molecules of blood in a crystalline flesh. My mother placed rock salt in their hands, which caused them to melt—symbolic of the way women embrace what destroys us so often, I overheard her say. Leftover salt covered the floor except for paths that led from one room to the next, lit with tea candles. A song she recorded a cappella played on a loop, an old folk song with a haunting melody. The ice fragments shimmering like wet crystals in the candlelit darkness. It was stunning and she was brilliant. I could hear those who walked through comment on the symbolism of it all. They were moved.
One day at the graveyard house she came downstairs from her apartment, sat us down, and announced that she had cancer. It didn’t dawn on me to ask what kind. I was so scared for her. She said she needed to go to Hawaii to heal. I think she got money out of my dad to go for treatment. Not much changed with her gone. We got ourselves out the door as usual. When she came back several weeks later, she told amazing tales of vision-questing and sleeping in caves, where she had dreams of lizards that taught her things about life and the universe. She brought me back feathers and rocks and taught me how to make medicine wheels. She also brought me totem animal cards, and we would stay up for hours as I asked the cards questions about my worries and fears. She would help interpret the cards I turned over, teaching me about myself and what I could do to improve my life. I was always looking for deeper meaning. She was always happy to help. We sat on her bed and I asked the cards about boys and school. She never mentioned the cancer, and when I asked her about it, and where it was, she said dismissively, “Oh, it was something small on my leg. It’s gone now,” and it was dropped.
Money was scarce. Things were disjointed and fractured. Other than these encounters in the evening with my mom, we rarely saw her for breakfast or dinner on a daily basis. My brothers and I fended for ourselves. I often stayed with Dionne and her mom, over in the projects on the other side of town. I took the city bus several connections to school, her house, and back to mine at times. I met lots of interesting characters on the bus lines, and saw a lot of life. Girls giving boys blow jobs in the women’s bathroom at the bus station. Drug baggies quietly exchanged. I remember one pimp who got on the bus, then stopped in alarm and said loudly, “Am I in Hollywood?” He began to walk down the aisle toward me in the back, the petite white girl wearing a miniskirt and leather jacket complete with an ’80s tidal wave of bangs. I knew enough by then not to take the bait and kept looking out the window, sensing a punch line coming. He made it over to me and said, “’Cause, honey, I am seeing stars!”
It was the first time I’d heard this line, and it did make me laugh. I would have the opportunity to hear him say the line to others many more times that year, as we always seemed to be on the same bus line.
I took care of myself, and took jobs where they came up. I gigged quite a lot during this time, which is how I bought many of my nicer school clothes. I was frugal, though, and saved everything I could, keeping my cash in a box in the cupboard. Sometimes m
y dad and I traveled on weekends to remote towns for shows. Sometimes I would sit in with other bands or players I had met through the years.
One such musician was Paul. He was the father of three young girls and had a nice wife. My dad and I had been to his house several times to rehearse. On this occasion my dad was back in Homer, and Paul asked me to do the gig solo with him. I was probably fourteen. The gig was at the Gaslight Lounge, a small, dingy place, but it paid two hundred bucks, so I learned the songs—a blues set—and he played rhythm and lead. When the gig was done, we went into the small back room to get our jackets. Paul turned to hand me my coat, leaned in quickly, and tried to shove his tongue down my throat. I was afraid and frozen and quiet. I pushed him away without saying a word and walked out without my coat. He let me go. I walked down the street at 1 a.m., in broad daylight. I had never been so thankful for the midnight sun, lighting my way to our little black home with the white trim. It was freezing out, but I did not shiver. A numbness settled over me, and a fear that touched something much deeper in me. This feeling would take years to understand as well.
Around this time my mom picked up and moved to Seward. There was a fire sale of her art and antiques, everything was sold. Shane was in Switzerland on an exchange program he managed to get into, Atz Lee went back to Homer, and I stayed alone in the house across from the cemetery so I could finish out the school year at Steller. I made my own meals and got myself to school just like I had always done, but I didn’t have my favorite roommate upstairs to visit with anymore. To remedy that I would hitch rides to Seward on weekends to see her.
My school’s administration was flexible, and when I realized I was able to fulfill my credits and class duties in four days each week, I was free to commute to Seward the other three days to be with my mom. I had a room there that I plopped my duffel down in. My mom lived upstairs in the attic, which had been converted into a living space, and she had a roommate as well. I cried a lot in this house. I was too busy surviving to cry in Anchorage, but in Seward a sadness and a fear came over me. My mom seemed sad too. She said she had developed a heart condition and had to rest a lot, and I did not see her much. I spent my time riding my bike around the idyllic town and pushing my body on runs over Resurrection Pass, a famous trail where a race was held each summer. Running had become a freedom for me. I would run as hard as I could to get beyond anxiety and to a feeling of calm. Flying across the mountaintops, down steep valleys, hearing nothing but my breath and my heartbeat. And my thoughts.
In Seward I had a lot of time on my hands, and heard through the grapevine that there was an American Indian powwow up north—a large gathering of many tribes open to anyone who wished to learn more about their culture. I had long been drawn to Native American culture, and my mom had taught me to do medicine wheels. My mom’s roommate and I hopped a train up to Denali, where the gathering was held. I had never been to Denali National Park and the sight from the train was breathtaking. I was warmly welcomed by the gathering and its organizers, who invited me to join in the opening ceremony, a talking circle. It wasn’t until this moment that it dawned on me that I was far from home, and I knew no one else there. I got incredibly shy in an instant, especially as it dawned on me that I would have to talk. A talking stick is passed around the circle, and while it is in your hand, you may say anything that is in your heart. When it was handed to me, I clammed up. I held the stick and I looked down at my lap. This was so much more personal than singing onstage. I passed the stick to the next person without saying a word.
When the circle broke, I considered grabbing my backpack and hopping right back on a train, when I was swallowed in a sudden shadow. I looked up to see two large Ottawa Indians standing over me, blocking the sun. One of them said I needed to walk with them. So I did, a raven-haired brave on each side of a small blonde girl. They both began to chuckle. I asked what was funny and they pointed to a tattoo on one of their forearms—two dark mountain peaks with a sun rising between them. It looks like us, one said. I laughed as well. They took me to a quiet place and sat down with me and became very serious. They said Great Spirit had told them that I would need to learn to speak from my heart. I explained that I wrote a lot from my heart. They said no, that was not what they saw. There was more. They said they’d had a vision that I would speak to many people one day and that I would need to learn to speak truth and with honesty from my heart. I was speechless. I was completely unable to do that. I went to a mountain by myself later that day and tried to say something to the clouds but nothing came. I began to cry. I had no idea how to say anything real. My feelings were so deeply hidden inside myself that the only way I knew to express them was through the tip of a pen. I stayed at the gathering that day and practiced in the talking circles. I grew very close to my Indian uncles, as they called themselves. I was close with them and the culture for decades to come. They started me on my path and were angels in my life.
I was committed to staying in Anchorage because, for the first time in my life, school was a bright spot for me. It was the first school I had attended for more than one year. I had a teacher named Ken (all teachers went by first names there) who taught a philosophy class. Reading philosophy felt like the first breath of oxygen I’d had in a long time. I was drowning in my life, and here were these amazing minds reaching through time, speaking to me. I was severely dyslexic, and reading was very difficult for me, but I was so passionate about the ideas in these books that I finally developed a system that worked for me. First I learned to focus my eyes in a different way, so that the black type showed up, instead of all the white negative space. I could focus like this for only a line or two, and so I would paraphrase what it said in my own words in the margins before continuing. This helped my mind internalize the ideas and I would stay up late into the night, adrenaline running through my body as I contemplated the words and teachings of everyone from Pascal to the Buddha, Thucydides and Socrates, to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.
Reading the great classics transformed my life. I went from being a scared teenager who was stealing cars with friends on lunch breaks—complete with big hair and miniskirts, flirting with the local dime-bag dealer in the hood—to feeling like a semi-self-confident and self-possessed woman who had learned she could think. My teacher saw my love of the work, and in ninth grade he offered to let me have my own group of eighth grade students. I would get the reading assignment from Ken, and then it was up to me to get ten kids through the material and ready for a large symposium where other groups would join in. It turns out my dyslexia was a blessing in disguise. The system I used to help myself read also worked well for the other students. I watched these books transform other kids as well and build their confidence, showing them they could care, and they could think. I saw their clothing and their hairstyles change, and their posture change, just like mine had. My group shone with comprehension and ownership of ideas. They were able to internalize the concepts and speak from their own lives, debating difficult material. It was good to feel proud of myself instead of scared and sad.
Ken invited me to speak with teachers at neighboring schools and to lead symposiums. It was funny to watch teachers react to a small blonde student showing up, and many were dismissive and condescending, though it was also fun to surprise them by being prepared and to shake them out of their hubris with wit and a sharply placed point.
I felt so empowered by all the ideas in the books I was reading that I got a bit drunk on reason. It felt safe. If I applied logic and the dialectic process to my life, perhaps I could turn it around. Perhaps I could beat the fates and the stars I was born under. Even my journal writing at the time became less reflective and emotional, in favor of treatises and essays. I learned to hide in logic, and shutting my heart down felt safe.
One day my teacher wisely said to me, “Jewel, you are also deeply feeling. You might like some of the poets.” Another great change in my life. I began to read the works of Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Giocon
da Belli, and eventually Charles Bukowski and Anaïs Nin, and I felt the other half of my spirit find expression. My intuitive emotional self found a voice along with my analytical self. I began to understand that my mind and my emotions could be the ladder out of my life. Reading these works and feeling the ripple effect they had on my soul and creativity made me hopeful. They made me dream. Something I had lost.
While talking with my mom in Seward, I shared that I dreaded going back to Homer to live with my dad again, as was the custom in the summer. He was building himself a house on the homestead, and he and Atz Lee were living in a makeshift cabin there. My dad had a bed in the kitchen and Atz Lee had a tiny loft, narrow as a pocket, that he could barely crawl into, no room for sitting up. There wasn’t really room for me and I didn’t want to be back in a volatile cycle with my dad. My mom, always full of surprising ideas, said, “Why don’t you move out?”
Looking back now, I realize this is absurd. Most moms would say, Honey, you can always stay with me. You should never be afraid to live with a parent. You are safe here. Instead, she suggested I move out on my own. At fifteen. And anyway, why not? It’s what I had already been doing in many ways, though I’d never paid rent or bought groceries. That part would be new. But honestly the choice was not that hard: I could live in a cabin with an asshole, or I could just live in a cabin.
I did some asking around and found out my uncle’s cabin down the road from my dad’s place was vacant. I made a deal with him for four hundred dollars a month, and when I went to find my box of cash for rent, it was gone. I searched the house frantically. I asked my mom if she had seen it. “Maybe some movers took it when I was selling all the antiques,” she offered. It didn’t seem a likely scenario. In the meantime, I went about gigging, babysitting, driving tractors, and cutting hay to earn the first month’s rent. I was relying heavily on the fact that a steady, if small, stream of cash would come in from doing shows with my dad.