Burn Down the Ground (28 page)

I looked through the blinds but the three of them had run out of sight. My adrenaline raced as I wondered how long the voyeur had been watching me, and what he had seen. Soon the front door flew open. David came raging toward me, baring his teeth like a rabid wolf.

“Did you catch him?” I asked, my heart racing. “Where’s Derek?”

“You fucking set me up!” David screamed. “You knew I was barefoot.”

Raving mad, David pointed his finger an inch from my face and continued yelling. “You didn’t want me to catch him. You timed it so I couldn’t chase him because I’m barefoot.”

With each word, I took another step backward. I was confused. David was making no sense and I was scared.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Did you get him?”

“You know him don’t you? Are you spying for the police?”

“Are you crazy? What’s wrong with you?”

David was acting insane. I reached my bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it.

I wasn’t sure who was worse: the Peeping Tom or David.
I thought I knew why David looked so skeletal and wild-eyed. I suspected he was high on crank, a form of methamphetamine. In Montgomery, we had all smoked our share of marijuana, but David’s proclivity for getting high had graduated to stronger drugs ever since we moved to North Richland Hills. To date, high school and the drama club had helped keep me busy and away from questionable behavior, but David seemed to be going further and further astray.

In the past, I’d felt safe under his watchful eye even when I was smoking pot with him. If I had gotten caught, my assumption was that David would be in bigger trouble because he was supposed to be my protector. As long as he was in charge, I thought I could do whatever I wanted.

Most parties were limited to beer and pot, although during the summer we were still on Grove Street we had dropped acid a couple of times and ordered pills from a magazine. They were supposed to be like speed, but they were fakes. But now crank was the drug of choice. My turn to try it came in the wee hours one morning, when I heard my brother and Derek banging on the front door to be let into our apartment. I had just gotten changed for bed, so was very annoyed to see them.

“Y’all, it’s late,” I complained. “I gotta be at Malibu in a couple of hours and I’m working a double.”

Derek suggested that I do a line of crank because then I wouldn’t need to sleep at all. I had never heard of it, but it seemed like the perfect solution to get me through my early morning shift. Too afraid to snort the white powder for fear of it burning my nose, I wrapped my line in a little square of tissue paper and swallowed it.

Soon I was jolted with enough energy to run a marathon.

“Oh my God, you weren’t kidding!” I paced wildly through the house, singing and talking faster than my mouth could keep up. Nothing could stop me.

“What’s got into you?” my manager asked when he found me reorganizing and cleaning every nook and cranny of Malibu’s snack counter.

The drug zipped through my veins, energizing me to work. As the day wore on, the high subsided and my head began to pound. Exhaustion was deep and sleep was inevitable. I hadn’t eaten a thing. I was coming down hard. A bed was not necessary; the freshly cleaned counter would do. Or maybe the floor; I could sleep right under the cash register.

“We need to get you home,” my manager decided. “You look like hell.”

I may not have looked great, but the counters and cabinets and popcorn maker never shone as bright as they did that day.

The crash after the high was debilitating. I had planned on going shopping before my next shift at Malibu, but could barely lift my head from my pillow to see what time it was. It was almost three in the afternoon and I was to report to duty in two hours.
If I could take a little bit more crank, just enough to wake me up, then maybe I could still get to work on time
. That fleeting thought frightened me. I knew that was how addictions started. I never did crank again.

Being around David was like living at the base of an active volcano. I couldn’t guarantee drugs were the source of his paranoia, but David’s unpredictable and ferocious behavior kept me vigilant. I stashed my cash and cigarettes in different hiding places
and slept with my bedroom door locked and keys under my pillow. When he stopped by, I quickly left to avoid any confrontations, careful to avoid eye contact. With my mother’s work schedule, her dance troupe, and other activities at the Deaf club, she wasn’t home to witness most of my brother’s rages. When she was, however, David’s bombastic rants reached epic proportions. He demanded cash and, if she refused, cursed and called her names, feverishly raving around the apartment shouting like a madman, spittle flying, teeth bared, arms flailing. I could tell she was afraid of him but nothing she said or did could calm him down.

I couldn’t tell my mom my suspicions about David using crank. How would I explain knowing such a thing? She would question me. Surely she could deduce that his moods were drug-related. Hadn’t the “Just Say No” campaign taught her anything?

“Tough love,” I insisted. “Tell him he can’t come over here anymore. He can go to Dad’s if he has to.”

She sighed. She was already overwhelmed with the IRS, bill collectors, her exhaustive work schedule, and my father. Although Dad was settled into his own studio apartment just a few miles from ours, he was still our frequent guest after a late night of drinking. He’d bang on the front door until Mom or I would let him in. Usually too hammered to stand upright, he crawled to our living room couch to sleep off the drunken stupor.

A few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I began dating Rob, a twenty-two-year-old petty officer in the U.S. Navy. It was summer break, and with no more classes to attend, I was working full-time at Malibu Grand Prix and in training to become a manager. On my nights off, I liked to go dancing with Alexis, my
friend from Richland High’s drama club. The legal age to get into Panama’s, our favorite dance club, was eighteen, but I used a fake ID. Alexis was nineteen, a high school graduate, and was an aspiring art student taking courses at the junior college across the street from our apartment. She had deeply tanned olive skin, a mouth full of braces, and an edgy New Wave haircut. The gobs of Liz Claiborne perfume she wore lingered for hours after she left a room. She never wore a bra, in part to snub society’s oppressive rules but mostly because she was so flat-chested she didn’t need one.

I was out with Alexis at Panama’s the night I met Rob. Our attraction was immediate. He was shy and tanned with a slim muscular build and drove a white Pontiac Trans Am with a bird insignia and fake vent on its hood. My mother thought he looked just like JFK, Jr., but other than their thick heads of brown hair, this comparison was only vaguely accurate.

Rob was stationed at the Dallas Naval Air Station, where he worked on F-14 Tomcats—the same plane flown by Tom Cruise in the movie
Top Gun
. When I saw him in dungarees covered in grease from repairing a fighter jet, I wanted to devour him like a hungry Venus flytrap.

That summer, Alexis snagged a sailor of her own. His name was Jeff and, like her, he had a slight frame and funky haircut. The four of us quickly became inseparable. Since navy rules wouldn’t allow for women to stay over in the barracks, we needed an alternate plan. Alexis lived with her elderly grandmother, who wouldn’t allow us to bring a Ouija board into her house, let alone two strange men. That left the apartment I shared with Mom as our only logical choice for crashing after a night of dancing. As long as Alexis was there, it wasn’t a big deal to Mom to have a
coed slumber party. Rob and I slept curled up in my twin-sized bed while Alexis and Jeff slept together on the floor.

That arrangement came to a halt when my father showed up at the apartment one time in the middle of the night and flipped on my bedroom light to find Jeff and Alexis sleeping in my room with me. Rob was working the overnight shift at the naval base and thankfully was not there. When Jeff and Alexis awoke to find my father standing over them, they were terrified. Neither of them knew sign language, so Alexis shook me until I opened my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Who is this man?” Dad signed. Alexis and Jeff cowered on the floor, pulling the blankets up to their chins and squinting at the bright light.

“J-E-F-F,” I spelled.

“Who is he? Why is he here?”

“He’s Alexis’s boyfriend.”

“I don’t like strange men staying here,” Dad fumed, even though it was no longer his house.

Jeff, who was known to start a scrap or two at Panama’s, froze. Who could blame him? Dad looked like a lunatic looming over them, flailing his hands wildly at me. To my surprise, instead of interrogating me further or starting a fight with Mom, he turned on his heels and left in a huff. Having Jeff there was a good thing.

“Let’s get a hotel room,” Jeff suggested on our next night out as a foursome.

“I don’t wanna sleep on the floor anyway,” Alexis said.

For $19.95 a night, Motel 6 was perfect. We loaded up on cigarettes
and cases of Busch beer, filling the tub with bags of ice to keep the cans cold over the weekend. The guys took turns paying for the room, a simple accommodation set up with two double beds.

My relationship with Rob wasn’t just about sex. We had a real connection. We drank, chain-smoked, and talked while quietly huddled under the blankets of our bed, as Jeff and Alexis twisted and writhed in theirs. As Rob and I bonded over our parents’ divorces and sharing our dreams for the future—college for me, working as an airline mechanic for him—we ignored the awkward sounds of sex going on three feet away.

Not exactly a fairy-tale courtship, but then again I was no princess.

As a member of the military, Rob had to leave town on deployment on occasion. In August 1988, he set out for a two-week stint at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, California. I was devastated.

We had been dating for barely a month. His time away would equal half of our entire relationship. We were young and wildly in love. What would happen to us without constant contact? Our insecurities crept in, both Rob’s and mine.

“I’ll call you when I can, but they keep us busy in training and work.”

“Okay,” I cried, as though he were headed to Vietnam. “I promise I’ll be here when you get back.”

To prove to him how devoted and faithful I was, I decided to keep a journal of my daily activities during his absence. The afternoon of Saturday, August 13, marked the second day of Rob’s being gone. Mom had been away from the apartment visiting my father’s sister Cathy, who’d recently moved to a nearby town.
Mom looked haggard when she arrived home that afternoon carrying several bags of groceries. As we unloaded the food, a wicked smile crossed her face. “Hey, Kambri, do you want to smoke a joint?”

I froze.
Mom wants to get stoned?

“Ummm … yeah!”

She whipped out a joint from her purse and took a drag. When she handed it to me, I wasn’t sure how to act. I was worried she’d be able to tell that this wasn’t my first time. Then I realized that of all the things I had tried to keep from Mom, getting high was the least to worry about. She smoked, after all. I took the joint and inhaled like a pro. I saw my mother studying me, so I glanced away to avoid eye contact. Soon we were both too stoned to care about proper social mores.

To satisfy our munchies, I cooked us La Choy Chow Mein from a can while we chatted about Rob’s family in Ohio and how he had told me that Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, has the most roller-coaster rides of any amusement park. Mom got another mischievous look on her face. “Let’s go to Six Flags!”

We pooled together our singles and counted up loose change, which totaled a little over twenty dollars. Mom stopped by the corner gas station to buy a Pepsi with a “buy one, get one free” park admission offer on the can before we drove the ten miles to Arlington, where the park was located. As we walked toward the Six Flags ticket booth, empty Pepsi can and plastic bags filled with coins in hand, a man approached us. “Excuse me, ladies. I bought these passes for the week but we’re leaving town tonight and can’t use ’em. I’ll sell ’em to you for ten bucks. You want ’em?”

A single ticket to the theme park cost more than double that.
Still, I had once been duped into handing over twenty dollars to a cute boy selling magazine subscriptions in front of North East Mall. Adding insult to injury, he took my phone number and gave me a long, deep kiss while I waited for Mom to pick me up. A phone call never came and the magazines never arrived. I had been conned. Faced with another too-good-to-be-true scenario, I shot Mom a cynical look.

“Really?” Mom asked, slack-jawed.

“Yeah, why not? I ain’t got no use for ’em.”

She and I stared at each other in disbelief. Nothing lucky ever happened to us.

The guy grew impatient. “You want ’em or not?”

“Sure!” Mom said. She paid him the ten dollars and gave our Pepsi can to a family approaching a ticket booth, figuring we should share our good fortune. I expected rejection when we handed our tickets to a pimply teenager working the turnstile. What if they weren’t real? But the ticket taker waved us in and said, “Y’all have fun now!”

Mom and I were overjoyed. “Wow! Can you believe it?”

“We sure are lucky!”

“Yes, we sure are! Now let’s hurry before the park closes.”

“You know what this means? We’ve got money for food!”

We stayed until closing time eating cotton candy, fried dough, and turkey legs, racing from ride to ride, and squealing, screaming, and laughing like kids who had been let loose from an attic.

I was two weeks shy of starting my senior year of high school. Mom was free of Dad and I was in love with a man in the U.S. Navy. We were in control of our lives and having fun together again. Everything was as it should be.

It was one of the best days of my life.