I'm Just Happy to Be Here

by Janelle Hanchett

  I did not know this, nor did I care. I was simply aching for something new.

  My mother worked in the school’s kitchen for my discounted tuition, so the trip made little sense in the financial context of our lives, but I presented it to her as a situation deciding my continued survival, as only a sophomore with a vision can. My mother leapt in my support as she had always done, my grandparents donated to the cause, and, somehow, a few months later, I was stepping off a plane into a wall of humidity.

  In the Tegucigalpa airport, I watched men in green camouflage uniforms pace the halls with machine guns in their arms. They were terrifying, but my teachers explained they were “protecting us.” As we approached the yellow school bus that would cart us around for the next week, my friend Gloria asked, “Are those bullet holes?” and I looked up with delight at the black spider punctures around the bus. They were indeed bullet holes. My God, I thought, how exotic!

  Sweaty and giddy and wearing fanny packs, we shuffled into the bus and drove in what appeared to be the wrong direction on a highway into thick vegetation. We spent the next week hiking in the wet, green rainforest behind a man with a machete, who whacked a path in front of us while teaching us about local plants, animals, and indigenous populations. We dove into glistening swimming holes below warm, white waterfalls until we broke for naps on shaded rocks. We ate lychee nuts, beans, rice, and tortillas at every meal, every day. The other girls complained of the monotony, but I loved watching the Honduran woman who made our tortillas in a clay oven. I would wave at her and smile and she would wave back, but never move from the oven’s face. I felt we were experiencing something sacred when we ate her food, something old and vital. It never occurred to me that she never seemed to leave that spot in front of the roaring oven, cooking for a bunch of wine country kids.

  Nearly every day we would take an excursion in the bullet-hole bus, and every time we did, we would for reasons unknown pick up a lady with a cage of chickens. If our bus got stuck in the sand, the driver shoved palm fronds in front of the tires while we lined up behind the rear bumper and pushed with all our might. When our bus broke down completely, the driver walked down the road a few hundred feet, bought a Coca-Cola in a tall glass bottle, reclined against a bus tire, and took a nap. We just sort of waited there, dumbly, while he snoozed, wondering what our next move was. Drink a Coca-Cola, I thought, that’s the next move. So I did. The other kids refused, for fear the bottle was washed in unclean water.

  We drove by people living on cardboard, sweeping dirt floors, riding ten to twenty in backs of trucks. I saw a young girl taking a shit in the street. I felt enlightened. I watched the poverty with a distant gaze, as if it were occurring in a fishbowl on the shelf. I was too young to see real suffering, too ignorant to understand my country’s contributions.

  One day on a hike in the rainforest, I accepted our guide’s suggestion that we try eating termites out of a tree “for protein.” I stuck a stick into a small hole in the bark just as he had done and ate the few unlucky bugs that wandered up. He was correct; they were crunchy and tasted like sap. I was the only girl who did it, and I was disgusted as their little bodies crunched between my teeth, but I wanted the other girls to wonder at my bravery. I wanted to shock them with my valor. But mostly, I wanted to not be bored. At sixteen, I was already bored: with school, church, my family, my little job at a local pool’s snack bar. I needed some damn escapades.

  We spent the second week on Roatán, an island in the Caribbean with dirt roads, a plumber who stopped by occasionally from the mainland (whether or not your shower was broken), and where the mail came every two weeks by way of Florida. We spent our days there snorkeling above the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, learning about its fish and destruction, and how urine soothes the burn of jellyfish stings.

  Before we left the United States, we attended ominous meetings with our parents in which the teachers described in somber tones how dangerous Honduras could be for American children.

  “They will steal you, and then they will kill you because your passports are worth more than you are.”

  “They will steal you, and they will rape you, and you will not come back.”

  “There have been many accounts of tourists getting kidnapped. You must never leave the teachers’ sides, and you must never stray from the group.”

  In the rainforest, men with machine guns paced outside our sleeping quarters and occasionally fired their weapons into the night sky “to ward off guerrillas.”

  I was so terrified by all this I decided I needed to sneak out in the middle of the night with my friend Stacy. I was tall, slender, and very tan, with blonde hair that fell past my waist. Stacy looked absolutely identical but with larger breasts. We crawled out the back window of our motel room in the middle of the night, and while Stacy was chatting with some locals down the beach, I met a wandering American hippie with unwashed dreads, patchwork pants, and a heavily pregnant girlfriend. We bantered with each other until the man asked, “Hey, do you want some acid?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “Yes, I do.”

  I was an expert on acid because my mother had told me about dropping it with my father at the Fillmore in the 1960s. The man handed me three hits and said, “These are strong. Share them with your friends.”

  So I tore off two tabs and gave Stacy one, telling her he only gave us two, and set the remaining hits on my tongue. Without hesitation or thought, in the middle of the night, on a remote island in Honduras, I took a drug most people live their whole lives without taking, and I did it with a lie.

  • • •

  Two months before the acid hit my hungry tongue, I sat in our Mormon bishop’s office confessing my mistake of smoking weed, once, in a moment of weakness, because Satan had overcome me.

  “I will never, ever do it again,” I told the bishop. “I think I had to try it once to get it out of my system.” I looked at him from across the wooden desk and tried to show my sincerity with my eyes. He told me to repent, and ask the Holy Ghost to come back to me. At home that night, I got on my knees and repented and vowed to stay on the straight and narrow.

  Four months before the acid soaked my blood in Technicolor, I stood at a high school lunch table proselytizing to my classmates how drugs ruin lives. At that age, I was staunchly opposed to anything that would ruin my life.

  I knew in my heart I would never be so misguided. I believed myself lucky to have been shown a better way than the foolish teenagers around me smoking weed out of peer pressure and insecurity.

  “My father is an alcoholic,” I preached. “It is the reason for my parents’ divorce! I know where that life leads!”

  Six months before I ministered at the lunch table, I stood behind a podium in a blue tank dress with a jean jacket to cover my shoulders, “bearing my testimony” to an entire Mormon congregation. With tears in my eyes and a quiver in my voice, I explained how I knew the church was true, and the Holy Spirit was in me, and I would never do anything that would make my body—my temple—unclean, and therefore uninhabitable for the spirit of God. I rose voluntarily almost every month to get behind that podium.

  And I meant it every time.

  Eight years before I stood at the podium, my mother took us to the Mormon church for the first time. I was eight years old and wore puff-sleeved dresses with shoulder pads and big, innocent flowers to the chapel. We went every Sunday and Tuesday, and possibly Saturday, but in between these meetings, we would leave completely, in body and mind. Or at least that’s how it felt.

  We listened to “How Great Thou Art” on Sunday and Grace Slick on Monday. We snuck into high school football games we couldn’t afford by passing ticket stubs through the fence, a form of stealing my mother explained was “small stealing” that didn’t harm anyone, and therefore, need not make us feel bad. It was not a real sin. And if we could pay, we would.

  My brother and I heard stories of Joseph Smith and “the fullness of the gospel” after my mother’s stories of drinking Southern Co
mfort with Janis Joplin in the Haight. I was intrigued by both, though I found Joseph Smith something of a bore compared to, say, watching Ginger Baker play drums in Golden Gate Park during the Summer of Love. Salvation is divine, but it’s tough to compete with bra burning and Jefferson Airplane.

  When a song she loved came on, my mother would turn it up and sing loud and tell us what the song was about, even if it was weed or acid or free love. She’d tell us where she heard it first—maybe the Polo Fields at Golden Gate Park, or the Berkeley Hills, or the Avalon Ballroom. My favorite story was the first time she heard Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on the radio, how she pulled her car over and cried because she never knew music could be like that, and how San Francisco in the sixties was electric with hope and change and none of the parents understood. In fact, Grandma Joan said Dylan sounded like “a dying cow.”

  I always thought he sounded like God.

  I knew that feeling, the one my mother had when she first heard that Dylan song, because it happened to me the first time I heard Jerry Garcia sing “Ripple,” and I dropped my head against the giant 1980s boom box on the shelf in my closet, closed my eyes, and cried. It was the saddest, most jagged and piercing sound I’d ever heard.

  And it felt true, truer than the gospel, truer than Jesus. But still, on Sunday, I got up and bore my testimony, reverently.

  • • •

  The next thing I remember after dropping the acid in Honduras was rolling around in the gentle surf in front of a local bar about a quarter of a mile away from our motel. Stacy and I were in bathing suits now, and we laughed and sang and let the sand and water move across our bodies and hair. We were on earth, yet severed from it entirely. I looked up from the ground and observed the silhouette of a young, skinny white man with bleached, wavy hair standing above us. And then he was with us.

  Acid trips are like that. Things appear, disappear. Technicolor flashes.

  Stacy and I swam and walked and ran along the shore. He watched us while we played in the ocean. I asked him why he was there. He said, “Well, I can’t really leave you like this, can I?”

  I dove back into the surf.

  • • •

  My mother was a “convert” to the church, meaning she was “not born into it,” and since I was baptized at nine instead of eight, I was a convert, too. This placed us figuratively just outside the church hall. My mother was also a single mother, divorced at thirty-six, with two children and a non-Mormon boyfriend, who later became her husband. This placed us more literally just outside the church hall—we lived differently from the true, better Mormons, and weren’t allowed into all the rooms of their temple.

  My mother converted to the church as a young girl after missionaries showed up at her family’s door. Her sisters and mother were also baptized, but my grandfather preferred to stick with his evening gin and tonic. At eighteen, she met my father, a non-Mormon, and for the eighteen years of their marriage, she didn’t attend church. So she carried with her, whether she wanted it or not, a history of falling in love in a bar at eighteen, of rock and roll, of working for Francis Ford Coppola in San Francisco as the girl who brought him lunch and snacks, of playing the Stones so loud you broke woofers, of alcohol, and a touch, I heard, of the harder stuff.

  Maybe she found God in all of that. I had trouble seeing it so seamlessly. By fifteen, I had persistent questions about the Mormon church, but mostly I wondered whether I was good or evil. I felt like I was good. I meant well. I was not particularly mean and I didn’t seem evil (I was sure as hell nicer than some of the delinquents I went to school with). I didn’t cheat and I didn’t steal. When bored on summer days with my best friend Elizabeth, I wanted to break into the house down the road to see if we could do it (but not hurt anything, of course), and spray the stucco of Elizabeth’s house with hair spray and light it on fire, to see what would happen. In junior high, we wanted to steal her grandmother’s Cadillac for a quick trip around town, because who wouldn’t want to drive a Cadillac down Main Street on a summer night?

  I was sure I loved my family more than most people loved their families, and yet I wanted to masturbate occasionally. I wanted to do things my church told me were sins. I could ask forgiveness all I wanted, but then I’d just want to do them again.

  I was never holy enough. I could never purge myself of the impure thoughts, and I could never shake the sound of Jerry Garcia’s black-tar beauty from my mind.

  I wondered why my non-Mormon father was not going to the “highest degree of glory.” I only saw him a few times a year since he lived on the northern end of California, but he struck me as morally sound. And Grandma Bonny, too. She had her own deeply held religious principles. In fact, that whole side of my family seemed decently wholesome. I wondered why, if you had to be Mormon to get to the Most Excellent Heaven, God had people born into remote parts of the Amazon where they never met missionaries. I wondered how there could only be “one true church.” What about all those other people on the planet? Were they simply wrong? When I asked these questions, the church leaders said, “There are some things we just don’t understand,” and that felt to me like a cop-out. How could you possibly know the plan of salvation but not know how everybody can get there? Later, they explained that people wait in the spirit world until somebody on earth is baptized for them. But then why the hell would I obey the rules if somebody could just do it for me when I die?

  “Because you’ve already been shown the plan of salvation. You can’t go back now.”

  Well, fuck. So I would have been better off born somewhere where the church never was so I could live without all these goddamn rules and still get to heaven.

  And there were so many rules. Don’t date until age sixteen. Once you date, only kiss, but not with the tongue. Don’t have sex until marriage. Don’t drink coffee or black tea. Dr Pepper is a gray area. Don’t buy things on Sunday. Don’t wear tank tops.

  I liked tank tops. I liked my shoulders. I wanted to show them without shame.

  But really, it didn’t matter how many times I showed up on Sunday in my “modest dress” and paced the halls with the stoic face of holiness, I still got angry sometimes and chased my brother around the house with a butcher knife, explaining to my mother and brother that a person named “Margaret” lived inside me, and she was a real psychopath. We all laughed because it was such an innocent name and they thought I was joking, but I knew I was not.

  Nobody named Margaret would chase people with knives.

  But I would.

  And it didn’t matter how many prayers I whispered at night, I still couldn’t sleep with my hair flipped over my pillow, even though it was more comfortable and I wanted it off my neck. I couldn’t do it because I feared there was a man under my bed who wanted to cut it off, and though I knew intellectually this was not true, my fear was untouched by rationality. Or whispers to my Father in Heaven.

  And even though the church elders praised how eloquently I spoke of the truth God had revealed to me, telling me I was a leader among young women, I was still unable to say the thing that would help my mother see that my stepfather was never going to change, and that we couldn’t move again, because it wouldn’t be different across town or in Texas. It didn’t matter how brightly I shined on Sundays, I yelled and screamed and chased with knives and masturbated when nobody was looking.

  I couldn’t even muster the Holy Ghost’s presence when unspeakable tragedies came, like when my mother told me she had three miscarriages before my brother was born, or when kids made fun of my brother’s acne, or when my stepfather mocked my mother, again. Or when my brother and I would go fishing, and even though I always wanted him to catch a fish more than I wanted to, I always did, and he did not, until once when we were camping in the summer, and he and I went down to the pier at dusk, threw our lines in, and caught fish after fish after fish without even trying. Big, fancy trout. We couldn’t believe our luck, the way we’d cast a line and immediately catch one. As the sun went d
own, we filled the stringer until every spot was taken. We only stopped because there was no more room.

  We caught them together and nobody had to go back to tell our mother who caught more. But when I untied the stringer of fish, our faces beaming at the mass of them, the bottom fish pulled and the wet string slipped through my fingers, back into the lake. In an instant, they were gone, strung together through the gills, to die.

  We were going to show them to our mother and eat them for dinner. I can’t remember if we tried to catch them again, or who hurt worse, or even how long I cried or apologized.

  Where was God then?

  The one time we both caught fish, I let them all go, and I couldn’t find Him there, in my guilt and pain, in my “irrational reaction” I couldn’t seem to quell, in the desperate sadness of my mother’s miscarriages and the way she told me so matter-of-factly, saying we would “see them in heaven.” But my siblings were dead. I had dead siblings. Who let them go? I raged and wept, and my brother and mother looked at me like I was deranged. I knew I was crazy, but I couldn’t stop. They said I was “just too much,” but I couldn’t be less.

  Maybe it was Margaret. Maybe I was evil.

  It didn’t matter how eloquently I testified, I couldn’t get my mother to stay when she wanted to leave for the night, even though I was convinced she wasn’t coming back alive. I would rock and cry on the couch, getting herded by our border collie, who seemed to think, If we can just get this one home, she’ll be fine.