The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  Dad had always thought Mom was beautiful and sexy, but she had been insecure about her appearance since contracting polio in her early twenties, which had left her face a bit paralyzed on one side. I thought it gave her a lovely crooked smile, which I emulated. Still, no matter how many times Dad told her she was beautiful, she didn’t believe it, and naturally, that frustrated him. As it turned out, it was during the acid trip she took with him that she turned to Dad and suddenly said, “I’m beautiful.”

  Dad said, “I’ve been trying to tell you that for years.”

  * * *

  Tripping together was so bonding for them that they decided they needed some more time alone. Dad suggested they go off to Montreal where they were already beginning to put up new experimental buildings in preparation for Expo 67. Mom had always been fascinated by architecture, and Dad wanted her to explore her creative side that she really hadn’t utilized since she’d stopped designing clothes when we moved to LA.

  When we lived in New York City, they had been able to go away alone frequently because Mom’s sisters and Peggy were there to care for my brother and me, but now they did not have that safety net. Since we were still pretty new to the LA area, they did not know a network of families who could recommend reliable babysitters. Mom did not know of anyone who would be willing to be responsible for two young kids for an entire week, and in the absence of that individual their plan was going to fall apart. My father never liked the idea of hiring people to take care of kids, but now he missed having BB and Peggy around. He felt he really needed some time alone with his wife, so he turned to Larry Hall, who was not working at the time and had, after all, guided Dad safely on his initial LSD journey. It did not occur to him that taking care of children was serious business and that this single man who was not responsible enough to have a job and who got high all the time might not be the best babysitter.

  * * *

  While Dad was exploring his inner world, I was discovering that my life in Santa Monica was completely different from my previous life. In New York Peggy held my hand and walked me to a little school on the Upper West Side where I wore a pink gingham uniform. Once there I made art and sang songs and learned poems all in French. Ganny thought it would be so chic for me to be in a French emersion school. In New York I was never allowed to go anywhere without an adult, but in Santa Monica all the kids walked to school on their own. During the first month at school the reality that I could not read became very evident to me. Everyone else seemed to be able to read the adventures of Dick and Jane but it was not in French. I did not have my foreign teachers smiling at me with understanding nods because of course the little American could not be expected to read in French yet. I did not know what was wrong with me. A year later I was tested and began to get help with dyslexia but during these first weeks I was lost. I had arrived in my new school just when everyone was taking the Iowa Tests for Basic Skills. I could not read the instructions and I just sat looking at the paper. The teacher kept me after class thinking I was just being stubborn but after watching me sit for an hour silently crying she finally let me go. I had to go to the bathroom but I raced out of the school building not wanting to be in that horrible place for one minute longer. I hid behind a bush to relieve myself but I had not noticed that a group of girls had been following me to taunt me for being kept behind after everyone else went home. They had seen me in the bushes and started teasing me and kicking me. I crouched down to protect myself, and I started to cry again. They kept telling me how gross I was for peeing in public. I did not know it was bad to pee behind a bush; I had done it often when we were driving across the country, and Mom and Dad had told me to do it when we pulled off the road. When I got home I told Mom about it, and she said what I had done was perfectly natural, but it was not a good idea to pee on the way home from school. After that, I stopped talking to the girls at school. I was sad and lonely much of the time during my first few months in California despite the beautiful weather and all the trees and lovely flowers in our neighborhood. Finally I did make friends with a nice girl who lived close by, but she had violin lessons a few times a week, so I was still on my own a lot.

  There was a boy in my class, Jimmy, whose really short hair made his ears look like they stuck straight out at right angles from his head. He lived down the street from us in a house that I passed every day on the way to and from school. He had several brothers, and his mom ran a day care center at their home. One day, he started talking to me as we were walking the same way, and soon, we began to play on many afternoons in the vacant lot between our houses. There was a big oak tree that we climbed. He showed me that there was a secret hiding place behind the back wall of our garden where it was dark and thick with foliage. There was lots of debris to make pretend houses with. After building our wobbly structure, we pretended that we were the mother and father of our new home.

  At the start of the week that Larry Hall was supposed to be taking care of us, I walked home from school alone and found a strange, long-haired teenage boy in my backyard. He was sitting cross-legged and wouldn’t respond when I spoke to him. Larry explained that the boy was too high to talk to me. I did not really understand why he was at our house; he was too young to be Larry Hall’s friend and too old to be a playmate for me or Preston. I had not seen people as stoned as that before.

  Memory is fallible. When any given group of people experiences a particular event, each person will remember it in a different way. Memory is especially fragile when it comes to recalling something that frightened you; those are the moments that can be the most difficult to remember clearly and the hardest to completely forget.

  A day or two after the long-haired guy was at our house, Larry took me to my Brownies meeting. There was a special ceremony that day about crossing a bridge that was meant to signify my transformation from a Brownie to a full-fledged Girl Scout (a young woman with purpose). I was excited to think of myself as growing up and being good and taking on more responsibility.

  I have a picture of myself that Larry took of me in my new uniform when I had just been initiated as a budding Girl Scout. I was a chubby little girl with thick, blond, blunt-cut bangs, looking shyly at Larry behind the camera. When I look at that picture, I always think that it had captured the last moment in my life when I was totally innocent.

  The day after it was taken, I came home from school, and Larry was not there. Instead, there were three teenage boys in my room; one of them was Jimmy’s older brother. I remember that they had a big bowl of tomatoes and a baseball bat. Jimmy climbed up to the top of the bunk beds my brother and I shared. He squished the tomatoes in his hands, sending their pulp and seeds flying all over the ceiling. At first I thought this was some strange game they were playing. I told him my mother would be mad and he should not do that. But then his big brother smashed the baseball bat against the wall and said, “Your head is going to look like those tomatoes if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do.”

  I remember them laughing at me and one big boy taking his pants off. He got on the floor, and I could see his penis standing up. I remember protesting that I did not like it, and that was when the big boy told me what a bad girl I was. He said everybody knew I did bad things; I peed outside and played with boys. He got louder and said that if I did not do everything he told me to do, he would make sure everyone at school and Girl Scouts knew I was a bad girl. I remember that my clothes were off, but how they came off is something I don’t remember … I remember being on the floor looking at his penis with all the other boys around me. He told me to lick him. I didn’t want to, but I did it. I licked him just the way he told me to do. I felt guilty, wrong, dirty, bad.

  When they were leaving, the big boy who had had his pants off said he would know if I said a word to anyone, and he would come back into my house and tell my parents what a bad girl I was, and then they would not want me anymore.

  When the door closed, I saw tomato stains on the ceiling. For months I saw them when I climbed up
to my top bunk; each time I saw them, I thought again about that terrifying afternoon. In the morning, the first thing I saw was those tomato stains on the ceiling, and I would remember again that my own bedroom was not a safe place to be.

  * * *

  For weeks following that event, I had horrible headaches that came on every day as I walked home from school. I spent even more time alone than I had before, watching TV and drawing pictures. I felt even more distant from the other kids at school. I felt they could tell that I was different. I tried to hide in my bed every night, afraid the boys would sneak in to my room again when everyone was asleep. I slept with the covers pulled over my head, thinking if I could be perfectly, perfectly still, no one could see I was in the room. To be as still as possible, I held my breath; sometimes I held it until I passed out. I was afraid to tell my parents what happened because they would think I was not their good little girl. I felt so alone.

  Not long afterward, we moved to Malibu. My violin-playing friend, Sarah, came out to our new house for a sleepover, and I told her what happened. As will happen when kids move far apart, I did not see Sarah much after that, but I also thought maybe she did not like me after I told her, and that reinforced the idea that I should not tell anyone ever.

  When I was an adult, I tried to look Sarah up, shyly leaving notes at her house, but I never found her. Having moved back to my same neighborhood in Santa Monica as I was writing this book, I ran into a very old couple who looked like her parents. They walked every day on the bluffs that overlook the ocean just as I had made the habit of doing. Each time I saw them, I wanted to stop them and ask about Sarah, but I thought I might frighten them. In a strange series of coincidences, I finally found her through a contractor I’d hired to do some work at my home. He told me that his sister and I had been in my same grade elementary school. I had coffee with her. She remembered Sarah and found her on the Internet and connected us. All the fears I had been carrying around since my childhood, that she would shun me, melted away. She was now a science professor in a city a few hours away, and she was coming to town in a week or so, and she suggested we meet at her parents’ house. The house was exactly as it had been when I was a kid. Few things in life stay the same, and this part of my childhood, which had been so difficult to remember, had physical form in the familiarity I felt as I walked through Sarah’s door. We sat at their dining table and had coffee and muffins. I told them I was writing a book and how hard it was to remember details about the past. I did not want to talk about my shame and the incident I had shared with Sarah so many years ago at our sleepover in Malibu; I could not even hint at it in front of her family, but when we were alone in the kitchen together, she brought up the fact that her older brother said that some of the older boys in the neighborhood back then had been mean bullies. In that moment, I finally felt someone knew what I knew. It was like having a fact check of what I’d always known.

  Even at that time, so many years later, whenever I thought of that awful day, I wished there had been a grown-up there to protect me. I blamed Larry Hall for not making sure I was safe. Ironically, he came to visit me after my first child was born, and he brought her a carved wooden Native-American totem of a mother protector to hang over her crib. The gift prompted me to say something to Larry. I asked him if he had any idea of what had happened to me while I was in his care back in the house in Santa Monica. He stared at me blankly. I don’t know if his expression said, “No, I don’t know,” or “I know, and I am not going to say anything unless you do,” or if it simply meant, “Uh-oh. What happened while I was too stoned to notice?” So I told him everything I could, only what I clearly remembered, and he seemed sad about it and apologized. The apology was like a soothing balm that I needed to hear. It helped me let go of a lot of anger.

  * * *

  That sense that my home was not a safe place was a feeling I held inside me as long as I lived at home with my parents, and it may be something that few would understand. Most people thought that living in our Malibu house was utopian. When guests arrived, they found the Jacuzzi, lots of wine, music, and food, and a happy family. Most of the time, that illusion was also the truth; as chaotic as our family existence often was, my parents, with the help of my mother’s sisters, created a warm home life. Still, there were some people who misunderstood that even our freewheeling lifestyle had its limits. These were people who failed to recognize that being naked in our Jacuzzi did not give them a license to have sex with everyone they laid their eyes on. People roamed around the house at all times of the day and night, and as I approached puberty, I learned to tell drunk and stoned men of every kind to get out of my room.

  Because Dad talked openly about his belief that drugs connected a person to their higher consciousness, our home got a reputation for being a place where people came to take psychedelic drugs, and it was known to be a safe place to come down from a trip if things were feeling too strange. But I knew the dangerous place our open home could be at times when my aunts or my parents were not there. And my fears of an unwelcome visitor forcing me to do things against my will again came true many years after we left the little house in Santa Monica, where the boys had traumatized me.

  I still struggle to unravel fact from fiction about this story too. I’ve gone over it time and time again. I have heard my father retell this story of Dennis Hopper misbehaving in our home with many variations and his own embroideries and additions. I have my own version of what happened; my memories are harsh and consistent.

  My parents went out of town for a week. I was just fifteen, and my brother was eleven. My folks rightly thought we were too young to be alone, so an old friend of the family, John, stayed at the house with us. We had known John since our days in Sterling Forest; he was the son of John Houser. He had become a regular at our house, and after Dad had been stopped several times by the highway patrol and been tested for drunk driving, he figured that the odds were against him and that the next time he was stopped he could lose his license and the publicity would cost him work, so Dad hired John to drive him to and from work every day. Having a driver meant Dad could be comfortable drinking throughout the workday knowing he could relax all the way home to Malibu. Dad didn’t think anything of the fact that John was often stoned; pot driving was not the same as drunk driving. John was a nice guy, but he was not the kind of guy who knew anything about taking care of children. Again, Dad had chosen the wrong person to watch over my little brother and me.

  On one of the afternoons while my folks were out of town, Dennis Hopper came over uninvited. We had known him for quite a while, as he was part of Peter Fonda’s network of friends. He walked right into the house as if he belonged there, though our family had not socialized with him in years. The last time I had seen him was during one of our many camping trips across America in the summer of 1970. That summer, Dennis was holed up in Taos, New Mexico, editing a film in an amazing historic home that had been owned by the renowned arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. Dad was curious to see him in this interesting setting, and he also wanted to see some of The Last Movie, which Dennis was working on and which was said by everyone to be a masterpiece. Mom was uncomfortable about the visit, but Dad was not going to pass up the adventure. Easy Rider had made Dennis a counterculture icon, and bikers from all over America were making pilgrimages to Taos to see their hero. Dad did not have a motorcycle himself at that time, but he was very interested in the lifestyle of these folks. We drove through the beautiful countryside till we got to a big, run-down, old adobe home. It was interesting, but I picked up on Mom’s uneasy vibe, and I was very uncomfortable. There was too much male energy, and everyone, including Dad, was stoned and drunk; no matter how happy everyone seemed, there was a menacing undercurrent, a sense that things could sour or go off the rails at any minute. The Last Movie had been shot in Peru, and after seeing some of the footage, Mom called the movie a hundred-pound–cocaine film, meaning it only looked good after snorting a hundred pounds of cocaine.

  The lo
ud and unruly behavior of the bikers increasingly frightened me. I was relieved when we left New Mexico. And although Dennis and his film were frequent subjects of conversation among Dad’s friends, I don’t remember seeing him again until that afternoon when he showed up at our home in the Malibu Colony. I did not understand the business of moviemaking, but a big part of the reason we were not socializing with Hopper was because, at that time, Peter Fonda was in the midst of a terrible fight with him over money issues connected to the royalties from Easy Rider after it had become such an unexpected success and had made so much money.

  On the afternoon that Dennis arrived at our house, I was sitting in the living room doing my homework. John was leading Dennis and three other people around to show off the place. I was very surprised to see Dennis in the middle of the afternoon on a school day. His party was made up of two beautiful women and the eighteen-year-old John Paul Getty III, who, I was being told, had had his ear cut off by kidnappers the year before. That was creepy. I tried to ignore them, but they got John stoned and started playing music really loudly. I complained to John that I could not do my homework with such loud music on, but he was excited to have these people to socialize with and said, “They are high on acid and need to hang around for a little while so they can come down.”

  I packed up my books and went to find a quiet place to work. That’s when Dennis noticed me and began following me around the house. He wanted me to sit down and talk with him, but I wouldn’t do it, and finally, he turned to the women he’d brought with him and said right in front of me, “Get her in the Jacuzzi. I want to fuck her.”

  His voice at that moment was the same voice he used some years later when playing a psychopathic drug dealer and pimp in the movie Blue Velvet. Because of what would happen that afternoon, I was never able to watch that film, but during the writing of this book, I tried again to sit through it and still couldn’t because even now it brings back such vivid, frightening memories. When he used that voice with me, there was no ambiguity to it, and I sensed immediately that if I stuck around, something bad was going to happen to me. I immediately knew I had to get out of the house. Instinct or perhaps the self-defense training Dad had indoctrinated me with kicked in. Though I only had my learner’s permit, I grabbed the car keys from the kitchen table and ran upstairs to my room. The two women were following right behind me, and there was no lock on my door, but as I was accustomed to playing on the roof with the neighborhood kids, I climbed out the bathroom window, ran across the roof, shimmied out onto a tree; to the women coming into my room, it was as if I had disappeared. I lowered myself to the ground, ran to the car, and drove away to a girlfriend’s house. I stayed with her until Mom and Dad came home. When they got back, I immediately told them what happened, even though I was worried they would get mad at me because I was not supposed to drive the car without a licensed driver accompanying me. They heard me out and had me repeat the story to several family friends, including a man who told me he knew a woman who had been abused by Hopper.