We joined a knot of kids outside the chain-link fence in a poorly lit corner of the stadium, where some guy with wire cutters was patiently clipping a hole link by link. Thirty or forty people shook the fence until it collapsed and kids spilled onto the concrete promenade inside, tumbling over each other and running off. The last stragglers—me included—were sprayed with tear gas by the security guards. For hours I was stuck on the stadium lawn in a grip of bodies, my head pounding from smoking that greasy joint, my ears ringing from the too-loud concert, my eyes boiling from tear gas.
Duane gave Paula a stack of small square manila envelopes, big enough to fit a silver dollar, filled with a gram of angel dust that he’d carefully weighed on the four-beam scales Paula had stolen from the chemistry lab. As compensation for her distributing dust to kids in school, Duane gave Paula free grams. We smoked dust every day, often twice. When we ran out of the free grams from Duane, we’d buy a gram, if either of us had money, or we pinched from each envelope, not enough for anyone to notice that the packet was light but enough to get us dusted.
When Paula started dealing, she had instant cachet. People sought her, needed her, or needed what she had, which seemed like needing her. She seemed to embody her new stature: a certain looseness to her gait, her neck held a bit straighter, shoulders back; she looked taller. She walked with her hips thrust forward, wearing Frye boots and a leather coat, dangly earrings, her thick reddish brown hair rippling down her back. She developed a slight slur to her speech, s sliding into z, as if it were too much effort to articulate.
There was a party in someone’s house on the west side of town, near the prison. I don’t remember how I got there, or with whom, only that I was wasted on angel dust and alcohol, a lethal mix—my mind erased and my body incapacitated. I could barely stand and I was seeing double. The kitchen was packed, people pressing around me, closing in on me. I need air. I had just enough animal sense to stumble outside, puke on the lawn. The rest of the night was blacked out, at least until the next day when I was walking downtown. An older boy I passed on the sidewalk grinned at me. “Do you know where you live?” I expected a punch line, but there wasn’t one. I walked away puzzled, but ruminating on his odd comment triggered a memory from the previous night.
After I staggered out of the house, I crawled into the backseat of some car and passed out. The car belonged to Chucky Hickman; his passenger was the kid who’d made the remark. They cruised around without knowing I was in back until they heard a moan. Chucky Hickman drove me to my house and woke me. In a stupor I opened the car door and lurched across the lawn to the house, except I was walking toward the Gibsons’ house across the street. I was nearly to the front door of the Gibsons’ when my mother saw me and called out, before someone—maybe Chucky Hickman—chased after me and turned me around. I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home, Eric Clapton sang on his album released the year before. Was that the night that my mother dragged me by the collar to the bathroom mirror? “Look at yourself. Just look at yourself,” she said. “I can’t see,” I replied, though I could see my blurry reflection, my stupid smirk.
One night when I was hitchhiking alone, dusted and drunk again, that annihilating combination, a young man in a pickup truck pulled over. When I struggled onto the running board and into the passenger seat, he said, “You shouldn’t be hitchhiking.” I didn’t know him, but he was older, maybe in his twenties. “I don’t have any other way to get home,” I slurred. I remember I could barely talk. “It’s dangerous,” he said, pulling away. “You could get picked up by some crazy.”
What if instead of being a Good Samaritan, the man who picked me up had been “some crazy,” someone like Tony Costa, a clean-cut, good-looking man in his early twenties who resembled a killer as much as any boy I knew, which was not at all. Costa had worked as a carpenter in Walpole for Starline Structures, a home-improvement company, the same year he killed three young women. The next year on Cape Cod he murdered, then raped, then dismembered four other young women. Tony Costa was already dead that night I hitched a ride; he had hanged himself in his cell in Walpole Prison the year before.
What if the man who picked me up had been just an ordinary guy who saw an opportunity to take advantage of a girl so out of it that she’d never be able to defend herself, never be able to identify him? Nobody saw him pick me up at that desolate hour on the lonely streets of downtown Walpole. Nobody knew where I was. My friends could have stated only where they’d left me. She was last seen at the corner of East and Main.
Sometimes I wonder how I was not raped or killed or both, why was I not brain-damaged, ruined, sent away, locked up. I could have disappeared like some girls did, runaways, or girls abducted and never found, or found in a ditch somewhere. Disappeared girls were the ones who sought adventure, excitement, who rode on the back of motorcycles, like Dawn Shaheen, Miss Walpole of 1974. She represented all of us then, the aspirations of girls to be beautiful, to wear that crown. I remember the front-page article in the Walpole Times, Dawn Shaheen, winner of the Miss Walpole pageant for the town’s two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary. I was fourteen when I stared at her beautiful smiling face in the black-and-white photo, her big doe eyes. I didn’t know her, but she belonged to all of us, the whole town, Miss Walpole—she was our beautiful beauty queen. She’d just graduated from high school, had been Miss Walpole for two months, when one day she rode on the back of some boy’s motorcycle and when they crashed she lost her life. Everyone said her face was unmarked, not a scratch on it; they said this in a hushed way, as if this proved something, that some force of fate had spared her lovely face.
The next year, 1975, Karen Quinlan’s name was on everyone’s tongue, this girl from New Jersey in a coma from drinking too much, mixing alcohol with pills, her story the cautionary tale—“You’ll end up like Karen Quinlan,” forever asleep, like Sleeping Beauty. Disappeared girls were the ones who smoked and drank, who took drugs, who opened the door to strangers, who got in strangers’ cars. Careless girls, wild reckless girls, girls who courted thrills, girls like me, a “girl by the side of the road,” like in Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker, a 1970s TV movie about a girl who got into the wrong car. The ad for the movie asked, “Where is your daughter tonight?”
The bogeyman of my childhood was a kidnapper, an escaped prisoner, the Boston Strangler. Never take a ride from a stranger. I knew the warnings, but I failed to heed them—too lazy, too careless, too naive, too arrogant, considering myself immune from those abstract perils. Too young. One day in tenth grade I missed the bus after school and was walking home when a man in a two-toned sedan, rusty in spots, pulled alongside and asked for directions, then asked if I wanted a ride. I was the perfect target, in my burgundy corduroy skirt and knee socks. I knew I shouldn’t accept, but the man—froglike, balding, with bulging eyes, a potbelly—didn’t look dangerous the way Charles Manson or the Boston Strangler looked deranged and menacing, with wild eyes. This man was out of shape, toady, like Mr. Klein, my ninth-grade civics teacher, a short, thick man with bristly hair who kept candy in his desk at West Junior High, which he gave to girls when we visited him after school. Or Mr. Hood, the chemistry teacher, with his oversized head like Fred Flintstone. Mr. Hood let me do anything I wanted. Get a bathroom pass? No problem. I knew he favored me, but I didn’t know why. These men seemed harmless, these paunchy, baggy-eyed, middle-aged men.
I was tired and hot and still had two miles to walk, including up long, steep Pemberton Hill. “Okay,” I said, and slid onto the vinyl front seat. The man, who wore a suit coat and shirt but no tie, chatted as he drove away. How do you like school? What’s your favorite subject? Do you have a boyfriend? We crested the rise near the Boston Edison station, near the turn that brought me to the final mile of my journey. His question about a boyfriend was a segue to prurient interest. Do you have sex? What do you do with him? He saw that I was put off, alerted, and so he spoke faster, his questions increasingly graphic. Do you give him blow jobs?
At the bo
ttom of Pemberton Hill, I said, “This is fine. I’ll get out here.” He said, “I can take you all the way home.” I said firmly—or with alarm—“Let me out right here.” He pulled over and I got out, and I didn’t say thank you for the ride. That was my response to his lewdness—I was impolite. I walked the last mile home, Pemberton Hill like penance for my stupidity. I felt relieved, then angry, then embarrassed and ashamed, finally frightened. How could I have been so stupid?
How could I have been so stupid again? One night Nicky’s sister, Andrea, and I hitched to the Flats in Norwood looking for a boy she liked. The Flats were the working-class section of Norwood, dense with flat-roofed triple-decker houses jammed close. There was a feeling of crowdedness in the Flats, like a tenement. We were picked up by a lone man in a car, someone a year or two older than us. We closed the door and he pulled away before we realized how fucked up he was. He weaved all over the road, partly because he was so drunk, but also because he wanted to kill himself, he told us.
He veered purposely into the opposite lane and we screamed. The roads weren’t busy—it was a weeknight—but the few cars that swerved out of his way blasted their horns. The rest of the people in town were home, with work or school the next day, in bed or getting ready. Andrea and I begged the man to let us out, but he refused. He’d kidnapped us. Yelling seemed to encourage him, so we began to sweet-talk him, to cajole. I crouched on the floor in the backseat, braced for the collision I expected any moment.
Finally Andrea convinced him to pull over, and we jumped out in the middle of nowhere, or somewhere we didn’t recognize. We had no choice but to stick out our thumbs again. This time two other Norwood boys picked us up, nice boys, and they invited us out for Chinese food, and we told them the story of the crazy suicidal kid. We ordered drinks with tiny umbrellas and the boys paid for our dinner, and they did not rape or kill us but drove us home to Walpole.
As a teenager I was fascinated by stories of runaways, hitchhikers, the wild girl a collective fear/fantasy in the 1970s, an archetype of the decade. First there was Go Ask Alice, which sold four million copies, a runaway bestseller about a runaway girl. The book was purportedly the true diary of a girl who got involved with drugs, written by Anonymous, which made the story seem more real. Alice, the diarist, died at the end, death being the punishment for girls who strayed.
Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring, a made-for-TV movie, starred Sally Field, who’d played a nun before that, innocent and uncorrupted, now a druggie runaway. Even Eve Plumb, who’d played Jan on The Brady Bunch—my TV proxy, the middle daughter, a little whiny, a little misunderstood—became a delinquent in Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. The film’s theme song, “Cherry Bomb,” was sung by the Runaways, an all-girl band—Can’t stay at home, can’t stay at school . . . Hello world! I’m your wild girl.
How powerfully I was drawn to these girls in pulp paperbacks and TV specials, girls who’d crossed the tracks. “Sally made spaghetti. Paula came over. Watched Sarah T., a movie about a teenage alcoholic,” I wrote in my diary. Sarah T., Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, about a girl from a broken home, starred Linda Blair. It wasn’t all fiction. In 1976, Mary Anissa Jones, who’d played Buffy on Family Affair, died of a drug overdose at eighteen. A toxicology test found high levels of PCP and other drugs in her system. Lovable freckle-faced Buffy, America’s girl in the fifth-ranked show from 1967 to 1970; six years later the actress who played her dead from drugs, angel dust among them.
Why did these girls leave home? What were they looking for? I sensed there was something out there that they were running to, some ideal place, like California. Nicky and I dreamed of running away to California, that great escape, the antithesis of Massachusetts, big and sunny, not small and cold, as far away as you could get from Walpole without taking a boat across an ocean. We were not like Dorothy, who wanted to leave the glittering surreal city on the hill and get home. We wanted to find the glitter, the glamour, the grit. We wanted flying monkeys and smoking caterpillars and Big Sur and Haight-Ashbury and communes and love and everything from the sixties that we didn’t know was already gone. What we yearned for was someplace bigger and more thrilling than suffocating suburbia, something compelling to which we could belong, a movement, a purpose, a point to our lives.
In ninth grade, Cathy Byrnes, a girl I knew from smoking cigarettes in the girls’ room, ran away from her overbearing military father. She hitchhiked, caught a ride with a truck driver, and made it to California in three days, we heard, but then she was caught shoplifting and shipped back to Walpole. Her father sent her away to some strict academy and we never saw her again. There was something in her desperate run that I admired—the sheer audacity, the blank stupidity, the blindness to possible consequences. She seemed brave.
December 20, 1975—Marco, Dan Valerio and Rod Tyler drove Alison and me on a couple dust runs, then had to go home. Wish I didn’t have to come home at all.
Why did I wish I didn’t have to come home? Where did I imagine living, changing clothes, sleeping? What would I eat? But I didn’t need to run away. There was nothing oppressive about my home life; the opposite—nobody was paying much attention.
My father lived somewhere else, his visiting hours restricted. He wasn’t around often enough to know what was happening. Even when my father visited, there weren’t private moments between us. I remember just one day in my childhood when I had my father to myself, on my tenth birthday, when he took me to a Celtics game to see my hero, John Havlicek. On the way to Boston, we ate at a diner, which wasn’t fancy—brick facade and glass-block windows—but they served my favorite food, steamed clams. After I ate an enormous mound of clams, a midden of shells left on my plate, my father asked, “Had enough?” I nodded, knowing it was piggy to want another whole plate, but I was still hungry. I wanted to sit in that restaurant eating steamed clams dipped in butter and talking to my father for the rest of my life.
One night when I was sixteen I was supposed to meet my father for dinner. I don’t know how this plan came about; it was odd. Maybe he felt the need to spend time with his troubled middle daughter, or more likely my mother suggested it. That night he called me from a bar—I could hear the background noise—and said he couldn’t make it. I suspected from his slurred voice that he was a little drunk, which surprised me. I’d never seen my father drunk, or even sloppy from a few drinks. He drank a beer or two sometimes on weekends, let us sip from his can when we were little, amused at our sour expressions.
On rare occasions after work my father would mix a caramel-colored drink called a highball in a short heavy glass with ice cubes clinking. The liquor cabinet held a couple of half-full bottles of alcohol, a copper shaker with the strainer top, and a weighty metal canister with a trigger you pressed to carbonate drinks, an accoutrement that we sometimes played with as if it were a toy and which my parents used only for the occasional New Year’s Eve party or summer barbecue they hosted. There wasn’t even enough alcohol in that cabinet to steal and water down the bottle.
My father didn’t give an excuse for canceling our plans that night; there wasn’t one. But I knew why he canceled. He was having too much fun at some happy hour and didn’t want to drive out to Walpole to dutifully spend time with his dour teenage daughter, one who’d become a stranger to him.
“We’ll do it another time,” he said. I could hear the guilt in his voice.
“Okay, no problem,” I said.
Just before he hung up, he mumbled, “Love you,” and then I knew for sure he’d been drinking. Maybe he muttered those words hurriedly, just before the phone hit the cradle, because he didn’t want to leave time for me to respond; maybe he feared I wouldn’t say it back.
It was not our family ethos to declare our love for one another. My parents didn’t say “I love you” as we walked out the door or hung up the phone or at night before bed, or even as words of comfort when one of us was crying or hurt. It’s almost as if those words were too intimate, too private, embarrassing. My moth
er always reprimanded me when I said I hated anyone; hate is too strong a word, she’d say. Maybe love was, too.
My father wasn’t aware of angel dust, but he wasn’t entirely clueless about our drug use. When I was fifteen, he flew Sally, Joanne, Barbie, and me to California for a week; he’d amassed frequent-flyer miles working for a client there. We stayed in Culver City, east of Los Angeles, at the Stern’s Motel, a mom-and-pop place, all of us in one efficiency with a rollaway cot and a foldout couch.
The first day we ate lunch at Venice Beach, which epitomized the California of my imagination, the California that Nicky and I had dreamed about—balletic roller skaters weaving along the boardwalk in white tie-up skates, the kind we rented in seventh grade at Rollerland with the rubber toe brake, skating outside in the sunshine as if they’d rolled right out of the contained loop of a rink; sun-bleached, long-haired teenage boys, tanned and beautiful, and girls in macramé bikinis or cut-off jeans; and bikers in black leather vests, chains hanging from their back pockets; and stoned-out druggies with dirty feet leaning against walls painted with psychedelic murals or trompe l’oeil. Bicycle cops in shorts laced through the crowd, kids on skateboards, buskers strumming, gay men in flamboyant clothes like I’d seen in Provincetown on Cape Cod, where my friends and I rented mopeds and buzzed along dune roads, the sheen of brown and black and bronzed skin, a stream of humanity pulsing with energy, scented with sweet musky marijuana and coconut oil.
Body Leaping Backward Page 14