Body Leaping Backward

by Maureen Stanton

  I was melancholy and moody, awkward and self-conscious, but I began to see those traits as positive. If I was self-conscious, that meant I was at least conscious, not absent, as I was on dust. If I was moody, at least I had a mood, felt something. I wasn’t numb. As I smoked angel dust less and less often, there was a clearing in the mental fog, through which I began to see the waste of it all—thinking about getting high, preparing to get high, being high, crashing from being high. In the end, it was just boring.

  As I sat in the church parking lot those twilights before counseling, I’d crank the volume in the Egg, filling the car with Andy Pratt’s haunting soprano, a sudden plummet to baritone—All your fears are gone, gone, gone, gone, gone—like a bell ringing, an alarm waking me up. There was another Andy Pratt song I played over and over, “Inside Me Wants Out”: the authentic self that I’d buried, effaced, that I’d nearly destroyed—she wanted out.

  With Gerry I began to relocate my interests, to know myself by being myself, as Jim had advised. Like Gerry, I was bookish and philosophical and analytical, a little neurotic, a little political, hungry for something I couldn’t find in Walpole. Gerry had cracked open the world, shown me its molten core, Gerry my unconventional teacher, with whom I’d begun to fall in love.

  One weekend we drove into Boston for a free concert at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade, featuring Heart, “the Wilson sisters,” Gerry called them, as if he knew them personally. I hadn’t been to the Hatch Shell since the Cowsills concert with my family a decade earlier. Now with Gerry I had a flashbulb memory: our blanket spread on the lawn, standing on tiptoe to see the band way up front, sitting on my father’s shoulders like it was the top of the world. But the Cowsills, America’s wholesome family band, were no longer happy happy happy as they’d sung in 1968. The band split up in 1972, the year my parents separated, and by 1977, when Gerry took me to the Hatch Shell, some of the Cowsill kids were struggling with drugs and alcohol and depression. One brother was addicted to heroin.

  The lawn was jammed that afternoon for Heart, the field a patchwork of blankets, girls in halter tops riding their boyfriend’s shoulders, bare-chested boys perched in tree branches to see over the crowd, the whiff of pot. Gerry took my hand as we pushed through the sea of people, and for a moment, with my hand in his, I felt like his girlfriend. But Gerry mooned over the sexy Wilson sisters and jealousy bloomed in me, a brine in my mouth. The crowd cheered raucously as the blond sister strummed hard on her guitar, the sound percussive like the hoofbeats of wild horses, and the dark-haired sister screamed Cra-a-a-a-a-zy on you, her haunting, witchy tremolo, then a whisper, Every time I think about it, I want to cry.

  I wanted Gerry to kiss me, to fuse the current of desire between us. Gerry called me “jailbait,” which I thought was a synonym for a tease, a flirt. I didn’t understand the possible legal implications if Gerry had sex with a seventeen-year-old. Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 272, “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency and Good Order,” Section 4: “Whoever induces any person under 18 years of age of chaste life to have unlawful sexual intercourse shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years.” If we’d had sex, if someone, like my parents, had enforced that law, Gerry could have wound up in jail, though I’m not sure I could have proved I was “of chaste life.”

  My mother found loose change on the floor of my car that summer and told Sue she was worried that I was having sex, that the coins had fallen out of my pockets during sex. My mother’s fears were those from her adolescence, unwed pregnancy being the worst thing that could happen to a girl. But she misread the evidence. The change had fallen on the floor because I’d been fucked up, too high to be able to conduct fine motor movements, like opening a purse; too fucked up to fuck.

  My mother needn’t have worried because Gerry never acted on the erotic energy between us, the electric circuit when we sat close in the Egg and talked. Things between us became cross-wired. Feeling rejected, I pushed Gerry away, or I picked at him to demand his attention, to get under his skin, to release a charge, which only pushed him further away. This was the opposite of what I wanted, but that was my modus operandi since my father had left—if I felt rejected or unseen, unloved, I pretended I didn’t want or need you, pretended I didn’t care.

  Gerry began to frequent the local dives, smoking angel dust more often—Walpole was flooded with it—just when I was trying to quit. He turned sullen and irritable and started to fuck up at work, and then he was arrested, some bar fight. Henry called in a favor and Gerry was released from jail. Gerry had come to Walpole to leave trouble behind, but in Walpole he found trouble anyway. At some point Henry became fed up and fired him, or Gerry quit. Whatever happened, one night Gerry no longer worked at the station. I don’t know where Gerry went, but I never spoke to him again. Summer was gone, and with it my erstwhile mentor.

  In my junior year I’d spent more time at the gas station than in school; I missed thirty-eight days of school and racked up fourteen times tardy. Work was school. For pumping gas I earned five credits through the school’s work-study program. The work-study teachers must have thought I’d learn something at the gas station, and I did, though not what they might have expected. The job was like the practical lab to my sociology class, “America in the Twentieth Century.” The gas station was where I learned about sexual harassment (the Supreme Court recognized the term for the first time that year, 1977); how women traded sex for basic necessities, a place to live; homosexuality; witches and the occult; the socioeconomic and race demographics of prisons, based on visitors who passed through the station; the petty corruption of small-town cops (even though it worked in my favor); the country’s dependence on oil from the Mideast, the embargo flaring up every now and then, creating long lines of impatient, anxious customers as I changed price signs daily, a few cents at a time, but the price doubled by the end of that year; the dull safe sameness of American life in a parade of cars guzzling their precious foreign fuel.

  On the first day of school in my senior year, September 1977, I smoked angel dust for the first time in a month and the last time in my life. Some kids were in the parking lot smoking dust before the morning bell and I joined them. Maybe it was the anxiety I always felt on the first day of school. Maybe because school, for me, had been a locus of intoxication, high school a place where I went to get high, and so I fell back into the habit of the place. Perhaps because I hadn’t smoked angel dust in a while and my tolerance was lower, after I got dusted that morning, gloom fell over me like a shroud. I felt an almost physical sadness, not just a broken heart but a broken body, but I couldn’t cry. I never cried while dusted—the anesthetic properties of the drug prevented that.

  The sky was gray—at least in memory—and I hallucinated a chain-link fence around the parking lot. I felt locked out and also somehow locked in. I couldn’t tell if the chain-link fence was real, if it had been erected over the summer, or if I was imagining it. Whatever conjured the image, it gave rise to a sinking despair powerful and frightening enough to deter me from smoking angel dust ever again.

  In school I reconnected with Terry Littlefield, a girl I’d known from gymnastics before I quit, and she introduced me to Angie Harper and Linda Kelly, and the four of us grew close, cooking spaghetti dinners and drinking cheap rosé, having heart-to-heart talks, practicing being adults. We went clubbing. The drinking age was eighteen, but we had fake IDs. I danced wildly under strobe lights on parquet floors in dive clubs in Walpole and just over the state line in Rhode Island, a club called the Edge, flinging myself around like a happy fool, sticky with sweat, my hair pinned up with cocktail straws. I spent myself on exuberant eurythmics, the joyful spontaneous physicality I loved as a kid twirling around the living room to my father’s boogie-woogies. Dancing was the opposite of the ataxia of angel dust.

  Ed gave me his old pickup truck, a 1966 Chevrolet with three speeds on the floor and a cab over the bed, its windows adorned with black-and-white gingham curt
ains like the ones my mother had sewn for the camper. I found some old couch cushions to line the truck’s bed, and someone gave me a plastic sign that said PARTY, red letters on a white background, which I stuck in the window, as if inviting the cops to stop me. Sometimes I drove the truck to Friendly’s parking lot and loaded up with anyone who was around and we drove to the Braintree Twin Drive-In. Sometimes a half-dozen kids piled in and we headed for Cape Cod, sleeping in the back of the truck in the parking lot of a beach, swimming at midnight in the warm salty sea.

  When I quit dust, my consciousness awakened, and my conscience, too; I had to pass through guilt and shame, like wading across the River Styx back to the earth side. But on that shore was a luminous landscape, a brightness to life, a reverberant joy. Until I felt happy I hadn’t understood how unhappy I’d been. I grabbed at pleasure as if making up for lost time—the bounty of beautiful boys to kiss, to lie with on a sleeping bag in an open field under stars, or in the back of my pickup truck, tucked under a blanket together in innocent sleep. Everything was interesting, my mind, my heart, wide open.

  In school I was present as I hadn’t been in those lost sophomore and junior years. I rediscovered my love of learning, of thinking, like remembering myself. In “Creative Expression” I wrote poems about Gerry Delaney and Salem, about Alison and Westwood Lodge. Mrs. Springer, who taught “Modern Poetry,” took our class to the Charlwell House nursing home, where we sat in a circle with a dozen men and women in their seventies and eighties, writing poetry to prompts, then reading our words aloud. On our last visit, we celebrated with refreshments and someone put a record on the stereo, an old-time jazzy number. I extended my hands to an old woman to help her stand and she danced with me and then more of the men and women rose to dance. Afterward Mrs. Springer thanked me for bringing life to the party.

  After working at the gas station for thirteen months, in January of my senior year I asked Henry for a raise. “Why should I give you a raise,” he said, “when I can hire anyone off the street?” I mentioned my experience, that I’d never called in sick, that I was the only one who cleaned the restrooms. Henry refused to pay me another quarter per hour, so I quit. He was surprised, and maybe a touch pissed off, but I gave him a two-week notice, so he was free to hire anyone off the street. It felt empowering to assert my self-worth, even if that worth was just twenty-five cents.

  That spring, after I hadn’t smoked angel dust in six months, I thought about quitting counseling, too. Talking to Jim week after week for a year—this middle-aged man, a stranger who listened for twenty bucks an hour, the cost of two grams of dust—slowly pulled me back into the world. But lately in sessions I’d recite the events of the week and Jim would nod. He stopped offering advice, or if he did, his words were familiar. Intuitively I felt I was done with Jim, the way I was done with the gas station job, done with angel dust, done with Paula and Alison. That part of the journey was over, the stretch where I needed Jim to guide me, the way I’d needed training wheels on my bike when I was five.

  When I nervously told Jim I thought I’d stop counseling, which felt awkward, like breaking up with him, he said, “Do you think you have more work to do?” I nodded. I knew I did. “I’m sure someday I’ll be back in counseling.” In a strange way I felt that I’d outgrown Jim, that I’d reached the limit of his abilities. Maybe I’d just outgrown myself, that troubled girl, like shedding a skin.

  That June I turned eighteen on the same day I graduated from high school, and I felt a kind of aching happiness. For my birthday/graduation gift, I asked for money to take voice lessons. Earlier that year my friend Angie and I had met some boys in a garage where their band was practicing. We were to be the female vocalists in their all-male band. That afternoon Angie held the mic and sang mostly in key to Eric Clapton, If you want to hang out / you’ve gotta take her out, cocaine, and Yes, you look wonderful tonight. The boys asked me to try, but I was mic-shy, or perhaps I understood that, like my father, I couldn’t carry a tune.

  I had no burning desire to be a singer. When I asked for voice lessons—not singing lessons, not music lessons, but voice lessons—I think that I wanted something more literal: I wanted my voice back. I wanted to learn how to speak my mind, how to refine my smart mouth, that superpower—Critical Girl, with her laser vision and razor tongue. I wanted to find the courage to voice my thoughts, to speak without embarrassment, without the crutch of alcohol or drugs, to reclaim what had come naturally to me but had been tamped down because I was too assertive, too opinionated, too demanding, too truthful, too critical. Loudmouth. Back-talker. Fresh.

  My father gave me a check for $100, “voice lessons” noted on the memo line, but I never took lessons. I used the birthday/graduation money to buy cocaine and I blew it all in one night. As Jim had suspected in our last session, I had more work to do.

  For my birthday/graduation, my parents also gave me a sleeping bag and a camera. After a year of art school, Sally was moving to California with her friend Vickie. I was going along for the ride. Terry Littlefield, my friend from senior year, would fly to San Francisco and meet us for the final week of our trip. In August we said goodbye to my family and drove in Sally’s used Datsun up our dead-end street, California bound, the hatchback of Sally’s car so packed we couldn’t see out the back window, even though Ed had built a storage box on top of the car. The cooler in the backseat was stocked with cold cuts from my uncle who owned a pub, logs of bologna and salami and blocks of cheese—we were setting off to see the country loaded with luncheon meats. We had a few errands before we hit the highway—bank, gas station, hardware store—and then it was noon and we were suddenly hungry, so we picnicked in the parking lot of a strip mall in Norwood, one town over, laughing at how we’d failed to get far in our journey.

  Soon, though, we were cruising Interstate 90, that promising black strip of highway, driving and singing, looking out the window, Vickie and I smoking cigarettes, through New York and past Lake Erie where the topography changed, the flatness of the Midwest like nothing I’d ever seen. We passed through Ohio singing, four dead in Ohio / gotta get down to it, and into Michigan, took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw, and then Indiana, where we exited in Gary for gas, the air sulfuric and oily and mustard-colored from billowing smokestacks, and we sang, Indiana wants me / Lord, I can’t go back there, the singer on the lam from the law, like my former coworker Tom Parisi. We drove and drove until we hit the snarl of traffic outside Chicago and we changed our tune, Daddy was a cop on the east side of Chicago / back in the U.S.A. back in the bad old days, slipping into a song that was an invitation— Won’t you please come to Chicago just to sing?

  We were free and we were young and we were beautiful, though we barely knew it; this was our epic journey, this was us seeking the world, reaching for it, three teenage girls, one just turned eighteen, two nineteen, looking for something we wouldn’t know until we found it, singing our way there, happy happy happy.

  Somewhere in the Midwest our brakes started to grind. We noticed it first at a tollbooth. We pulled off the highway to a hole-in-the-wall garage, one bay and an antiquated gas pump, and the mechanic delivered the bad news: we needed a whole new set of brakes, $90, a huge chunk from our kitty. We had no credit card. I’m not sure what gave us the courage to decline his offer—perhaps my experience working near mechanics—but we sensed that this guy was sketchy.

  On our way out of town we saw a brake-and-muffler franchise. We sat in the lobby as the mechanic, a guy our age, raised the Datsun on a lift. After a while he walked over to us, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “There’s nothing wrong with your brakes.” We told him what the other mechanic had said, and he shook his head. “They look fine to me.” Back on the interstate, we heard the awful grinding. Eventually we realized that the grinding occurred when we drove over grooved pavement, rumble strips, which we’d never seen in our small town of Walpole, our small state of Massachusetts. We dissected the incident for an hour—pissed at the asshole who’d tried to r
ip us off, congratulating ourselves on our cleverness in seeking a second opinion, thankful for the honesty of a young man, laughing at our naiveté, how stupid we’d been for not knowing about rumble strips.

  In South Dakota we drove through the convoluted spires and gulches and geologic formations of the Badlands, a name that promised outlaws in ten-gallon hats behind every butte, gunslingers in spurred boots, bad men in a bad land. We dutifully photographed the touristy but still astonishing Mount Rushmore, then drove through the night bleary-eyed, through thunderstorms with curtains of rain—we could see only a few feet ahead—a trucker at 3 a.m. nosing our bumper, forcing us to speed up, then passing and cutting us off, playing dangerous highway cat-and-mouse, scaring us into pulling into a deserted rest area, hoping he wouldn’t follow, then back on the highway into the downpour, one of us hunched over the wheel trying to see the lane through blurry blackness like being underwater, another one sitting shotgun to keep the driver awake against the hypnotic windshield wipers, the third curled up in the cramped backseat trying to sleep, driving for hours and hours, pushing to get there, to California, delirious with fatigue, Lord, I’m five hundred miles away from home, and then the sky lightened and I saw something in the distance, a formidable cloudbank, but as the sun at our backs lit the horizon, there before us were the Rocky Mountains, a great ragged wall of land, the snowcapped peaks rising into the heavens, breathtaking, like something out of a dream, grandiose mountains that belittled the adolescent peaks of New England.