How to Grow an Addict

by J. A. Wright

  It only took a few weeks of living with Arnold before Aunt Flo was transformed into a new person, someone seemingly younger and definitely friendlier than before. She started exercising with a guy she hired to walk with her, and to make her do sit-ups and lift weights. She stopped listening to show tunes and started listening to Paula Abdul and Madonna. She had her hair cut in a shag style, dyed it dark brown, and began to wear clothes similar to Sissy’s—kind of hippie-like.

  Music, exercise, and shopping became her new hobbies. She began phoning our house regularly on Thursdays to see if I wanted to go shopping with her. I always said yes and I always thought the long drive to pick me up was a big deal, but she didn’t. We’d shop for hours and I’d often arrive back home with bags full of stuff that Mom thought was unnecessary or extravagant, like the leather fringe poncho and beaded moccasin boots Aunt Flo bought for me. Mom told me I had to return them, but I never did.

  I liked the new Aunt Flo, and I loved her new home. I also missed Uncle Hank, but I only talked about him if she mentioned him first because I didn’t want to make her sad. Aunt Flo said I was welcome at her new home any time. So just after school got out in June, a few days after I turned fourteen, I decided to stay with Aunt Flo rather than drive to a car convention in Texas with Mom and Dad. They dropped me off at the bus station a couple of hours before my bus was due to leave because they were eager to get on the road before the traffic got bad. Mom got out of the car with me and walked me to the ticket counter. “Here’s some bus money and sixty dollars for you. Try to make it last, okay?” she said.

  “Thanks, Mom, I’ll make it last, I promise,” I replied.

  She kissed me good-bye before she got back into Dad’s newly rebuilt, cherry red Mustang. I tried to get Dad’s attention so I could say good-bye, but he was busy filling his flask from a bottle of bourbon and didn’t look up.

  After I bought my bus ticket, I found a seat on an empty bench outside the station and read the Life magazine someone had left behind. “Mind if I sit down?” I heard.

  I looked up to see a strange-looking guy about my brother’s age holding a stuffed unicorn under his arm. I scooted as far as I could to the other end of the bench. “Sure,” I said.

  I went back to reading, but he started asking me questions and wouldn’t leave me alone, pestering me to give him ten dollars for a few pills he was selling.

  “I spent all my cash on this present for my sister,” he said, holding up the unicorn. “She’s got it real bad and I’m trying to get to her place in Chicago before she kicks it.”

  I was sort of curious about his sister but decided not to ask any questions.

  “Let me see the pills,” I said.

  He reached into his pocket, took out a plastic bag, opened it, and poured a few pills into his hand. I recognized them straight away as the same ones Mom kept on her dresser—the ones she used to give me small pieces of when I was little and couldn’t sleep. I helped myself to them sometimes now; they made me feel good. But I couldn’t take very many or she’d notice.

  “I’ll give you twenty dollars for twenty of them,” I said.

  “Sure thing,” he said, and he counted out twenty pills and put them in my hand. I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and watched him stuff it in his shirt pocket and walk away.

  I broke off a piece of one pill, swallowed it, and put the others in an empty Sucrets tin that had been sitting on top of the Life magazine. Then I shoved the tin deep down into the bottom of my bag.

  About twenty minutes later I felt more relaxed than I had in months and was grateful that guy had shown up out of nowhere.

  Once I got on the bus, I settled in for the ride. I wasn’t expecting it to take more than four hours to get from Huntington Beach to Malibu, but it did. I’d never taken such a long bus ride before, and I didn’t know about the three transfers until the first bus driver told me how I’d have to get off at the station in downtown LA and catch another bus west to another station to catch a third bus that would drop me off not far from Malibu.

  Aunt Flo was waiting for me at the last bus stop. She looked worried when she got out of the car. “I’ve been here for an hour,” she said. “I thought something had happened to you.”

  “No, nothing much happened, but it takes a few buses to get here,” I replied.

  It was a ten-minute drive to her Malibu house. When we got there, I was surprised to see Sissy and Tyler walking down the stairs. I’d just put my bag down in the foyer when I heard Tyler say, “Hey everyone, the dancing girl has arrived.”

  My face turned red, my stomach did a complete flip, and when I tried to laugh nothing came out. I knew he was teasing me, and I liked it, but I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I didn’t look at him or say anything. I just kicked my bag to the side so that Sissy wouldn’t trip over it as she reached in to give me a hug.

  “We’re gonna have a great summer,” she said.

  “I really like your hair, Sissy, how’d you get it so straight?” I asked.

  “Flo has a little iron and she helped me take out the curls this morning.”

  I liked her long, straight hairstyle almost as much as I liked the braids she’d worn at the wedding. Sissy shook her head, turned completely around, and said, “It’s grown a lot since you last saw it, hasn’t it? Looks like you’ve been growing it out.”

  “I’m trying to, but it doesn’t seem to grow very fast,” I replied.

  She reached over and tucked a piece of my hair behind my right ear. “It would look much better with a side part and some blond streaks.”

  “Blond streaks? My mom will have a total spaz attack if I do that,” I said.

  “She won’t care, probably won’t even notice. But then again, my mom’s not around, so what do I know?”

  “Just do whatever Sissy says,” Tyler yelled out to me as he headed out the front door. “It will make your life easier.”

  Aunt Flo nodded her head in agreement and laughed.

  I’d never thought much about changing my hair. I’d always worn it in a bob, just past my chin and parted in the middle, because Mom and Ken told me to. But I was willing to spend my first Saturday at Aunt Flo’s Malibu home sitting as still as possible while Sissy gave me a new hairstyle. Not because I wanted one, but because I wanted her to like me.

  “It’ll hurt a little bit, but it’s gonna be worth it, I promise,” she said.

  I tried not to complain about the pain as she pulled a tight rubber cap down over my head and used a crochet hook to pull strands of my hair through little holes, but I did say something about my head being on fire after she spread on a white paste that was supposed to turn those pulled pieces of brown hair blond.

  I didn’t think it was worth it at all. It took about three days for my head to feel better, and the strands of my hair she pulled out of the cap holes were too blond, almost white.

  “I look like a zebra,” I told her once she’d finished.

  “No you don’t. You look great—exactly what I was after,” Sissy said.

  It wasn’t until Aunt Flo told me how beautiful I looked that I started to like it.

  “Now about your makeup,” Sissy said over breakfast the next day.

  “I’m not allowed to wear any until I’m sixteen,” I confessed.

  “If you don’t tell anyone, I won’t. Besides, wearing a little foundation and concealer to cover up zits really can’t be classified as wearing makeup.”

  That seemed like a good explanation, and I suddenly felt better about my sneaking into Mom’s bathroom for the past few months to use her face powder.

  Aunt Flo nodded her head in agreement with her. “Concealer is not makeup, it’s a facial necessity. Are you still using Noxzema?” she asked.

  “No. My mom won’t buy it. She says it’s awful, so I use Ivory soap.”

  Aunt Flo sighed and patted my head. Then she left the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with twenty-five dollars and two coupons for Max Factor products. She handed the money to Sissy.
“I just cut these coupons out of the newspaper yesterday. Why don’t you two walk down to the drug store and get a few things? Don’t forget the awful Noxzema,” she added, laughing.

  I said thank you to Aunt Flo about ten times before Sissy and I left for the store. I felt special that day, like I was something important, a project worthy of Sissy’s time and Aunt Flo’s money.

  When Sissy and I got back from the drugstore with a whole bunch of stuff for my face, she invited me into her room to show me how to apply it all. “I have a big mirror in my room for one reason: so I can see what I’m doing,” Sissy said.

  It was when she was brushing the purple eye shadow onto my eyelids that she told me she was a witch. “I’m not an evil or dark witch. I’m a white witch, the type who helps people, animals, and other living things. Do you know anything about witches?”

  “Only a little bit from The Wizard of Oz,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes, laughed, and said, “Perfect, a blank canvas makes the best student.”

  Sissy could read tarot cards. She owned three decks, all of them with different designs and shapes. She also had an old, round oak table in the corner of her room that she used as an altar to give praise and thanks to the Goddess. The altar had all kinds of stuff on it, including two rainbow-colored candles, photos of her friends (and enemies), and twelve strands of her brother’s hair, seashells, driftwood, and a bunch of dried sage tied with twine. She lit her sage stick every time she entered her room—for “cleansing and purification purposes,” she said.

  “That stuff smells like burning grass,” I said.

  “More like burning pot,” she replied.

  She must have been right about that because one day when I was in her room, learning to use a sage stick, Arnold walked in and asked, “Can you spare a doobie for your old grandpa?”

  He seemed surprised when she replied that it was sage, not pot. I was surprised to hear that he smoked pot.

  I asked Sissy at least a hundred questions about witchcraft and magic before she finally said, “You should become my student. You’re someone who could really benefit from being empowered with the wisdom of the crone.”

  That sounded good to me, even though I had no idea what a crone was and didn’t understand anything she said about witches or wisdom. I was just so happy about the idea of becoming something interesting that I told her I’d do whatever she asked.

  My first lesson was learning numerology. Sissy handed me three books and told me I had a week to read through them. “If you pray to the Goddess for guidance, you won’t have a problem figuring it out,” she said.

  All the number stuff was hard for me to understand, but I was determined to learn it. I spent two days in my room reading and working out my parents’, Aunt Flo’s, Arnold’s, Tyler’s, and my own numerological life path.

  When I presented Sissy with what I’d figured out a week later, she was surprised but happy. “I didn’t think you’d catch on so quick, but you proved me wrong.” She gave me an orange altar cloth with a big yellow star in the middle of it, and talked to me about the waxing and waning moon as she shuffled a deck of tarot cards. “Women’s bodies are always waxing and waning, just like the moon. The moon has no light of its own; it only reflects from the source of all the world’s power, the sun.”

  “How do you know these things?” I asked.

  “An old witch taught me a long time ago. She was from Ireland, and she took care of Tyler and me from the time we were babies until I was twelve and our mom left with her massage teacher for Idaho and our dad went to prison. She’s the one who taught me about Pagans. They’re people who worship the moon, sun, and Mother Earth rather than a man from the Bible.”

  I found it all hard to swallow at first. It didn’t sound like anything Uncle Hank had taught me about God. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of God being a woman. It certainly made more sense than an old guy living high in the clouds and sending people to burn in hell for talking back to their parents or stealing a candy bar.

  A couple of days after I became her official student, Sissy took me out to a clearing near the beach to teach me how to “bless clouds away.” It was a sunny day with a few fluffy clouds floating high in a very blue sky. We put a beach blanket on a big sand dune and lay down to look at the clouds. She picked out a medium-size cloud for me to focus on. “See that one next to the big ribbon cloud, the one that looks like a beach ball with rabbit ears? That’s yours. Now squint your eyes so that you can barely see, and in your mind make a large circle of gold and purple light and send it to your cloud. Ask your cloud, in a very nice way, to go away. Say something like this: ‘Go away, go away, you needn’t stay, we’ll see you again another day.’”

  It took a while for me to focus my colors on the cloud but I finally did it. “Okay Sissy, I’m doing it,” I said.

  “I’ll time it,” she replied.

  It only took three minutes for my cloud to disappear. I was thrilled as I watched it come apart, and was delighted to learn I could do something magical. I stayed and made other clouds disappear. I only stopped when Tyler arrived with six of his friends. He had his guitar, and his friends were carrying a few lawn chairs and a keg of beer.

  Tyler was looking better than ever. I could hardly bring myself to look at him if he was looking at me, but when he wasn’t, I couldn’t do anything but look at him. I wanted him to like me, and I’d been keeping track of things Sissy said about him and things I observed. He was left-handed, tied his shoes one loop over another, had two middle names (Whitmore and Julius), and, according to my numerology book, was an old soul (the total of his birth date was twenty-two). I even drew an illustration of him wearing his wiener on the right side of his pants, after Sissy made me look at a picture of a naked guy one day and then told me that if a man wears his penis on the left side it means he wants to do it with another man.

  Tyler didn’t do much all day except play his guitar and sing. His singing voice was much higher than his talking voice, and the first time I heard him I thought he was joking around and trying to sound like a woman or one of the Bee Gees. According to Sissy, Tyler wanted to be a musician more than anything and had already written a bunch of songs. He was even planning to record an album. “Arnold has friends in the music business and he got Tyler a meeting with a famous record producer,” Sissy said.

  When Tyler and his friends arrived at our cloud-blessing spot, Sissy wasn’t happy. “Why can’t you find your own place, Tyler?” she said.

  “Free country, sister,” Tyler replied.

  Sissy wanted to leave, so I got up to go back to the house with her. “Hey, no need to run off, dancing girl,” Tyler said.

  “You can stay if you want, Randall. I’ve got better things to do,” Sissy said.

  When I told Sissy I was staying, she took off back to the house in a huff. I sat down next to Tyler and grabbed the beer he offered me. Then I drank it down pretty quick. All of Tyler’s friends played the guitar. One of them offered to teach me, but I’d bitten my nails all the way to the skin the day before and they looked bad, so I said no. About an hour into their jam session, Tyler said he wanted us to hear his new song, even though it wasn’t finished and he didn’t have any lyrics for it. He played it on his guitar and I loved it. It sounded a little bit like Neil Young’s “Old Man,” only with an upbeat tempo.

  I thought about Tyler’s song all night, and wrote a few lyrics I thought might suit his music. The more I thought about his song, the more I was sure I could come up with the perfect words to match it, but I needed to hear it again.

  When I saw Tyler out on the back lawn with his guitar the next day, I went out to ask if he’d play the song into a cassette recorder I’d borrowed from Sissy. When he finished he told me about his voice lessons and that he might be getting a recording contract with a big company. It sounded so exciting, and he was so cool, that when he showed me his bag of pot and asked if I’d ever smoked before I lied and said yes. I’d never seen tha
t much pot before. He pushed the bag into my face and said, “Here, smell it. This is good shit, you’re gonna be smooth in ten.”

  I watched him roll a joint. “You wanna learn how to do this?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I replied.

  “Ya know, there’s nothing wrong with smoking pot. It’s completely natural, and way better than smoking cigarettes.”

  I almost told Tyler what Robbie had said about people who smoked pot, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to ruin my chances with him. He put the burning joint right up to my mouth and insisted I take a puff. I didn’t want to, but I did. I didn’t inhale very hard, but it still burned my mouth and throat and made me cough. When I finished coughing he handed me the joint again, “One toke is never enough. Take a big puff and hold it in,” he said.

  I took a little puff and quickly handed it back to him. He smoked it until it was so small it barely fit between his fingers. I sat quietly and waited for something to happen—for some great feeling to arrive, like he’d promised it would. But nothing happened, and after watching Tyler sit still, like he was spaced out, for a few minutes, I got up and went into the house because I was hungry and I knew there were Oreo cookies in the kitchen.

  I got a big lecture from Sissy that night about what a good student of the craft would and would not do. Basically she told me that I had to do whatever she asked whenever she asked it. “And stay away from my brother. He’s seventeen. He’s too old for you!”

  It was a few days later that Sissy and I attended a midnight ceremony celebrating the first day of summer. She told me all about it when I agreed to become her student. Every June 21 an old hippie couple who had a huge farmhouse just down the beach from Arnold’s place held a party to help guide in the new season—the “Solstice,” Sissy called it.