High On Arrival (3 page)

“Why not?” I asked.

“These are special grown-up brownies,” Donovan said. It turns out Donovan had found my dad’s pot and added it to the mix. Well, that was just plain mean. When he went into the other room, I looked at the brownies. They didn’t look different from any other brownies. They sure smelled like regular brownies. I was hungry. And besides, I was in my dad’s house. There were no rules here. I helped myself to a brownie. And another. Next thing I knew everything was funny and Donovan and I were sliding down the banister over and over again. If you don’t count my hammock suspension with Paul McCartney,
that
was the first time I got high. I was ten.

Two days later I was playing Barbies by the pool in Tarzana with my best friend, Julie, to all eyes looking like a kid who comfortably straddled two worlds. But the Barbies masked what was really going on. At Dad’s I was a weird little savage on the periphery, tap-dancing and singing, eager for any kind of attention. I’d transform over the weekend into an out-of-control little maniac, and when I came home to Mom’s, she’d spend all week retraining me in manners and etiquette. How hard it must have been for my mother, watching us go off every Friday and knowing that the kids who came home weren’t going to be the same. In Tarzana I wanted to fit in too—I faked failing an eye test to get glasses and fashioned a retainer out of paper clips so I could look like the other kids—but between the controlled order of my mother’s home and the wild freedom of my father’s decadence, I already knew which I’d choose. I was my father’s daughter.

2

My father wanted me to live and learn as he did, through experience and experimentation, so he sent me to Summerhill, a “free” school, which meant that going to classes was optional. The teachers were hippies and the kids were rich and undisciplined. Our class was called the Electric Bananas—from the Donovan song “Mellow Yellow.” People generally thought that line referred to smoking banana peels to get high, but Donovan ultimately revealed that it wasn’t anything so unseemly—he was only referring to a yellow vibrator. Either way, as a name for a school class it set a clear tone. Ollie, the headmaster, took us dumpster diving. Smoking was permitted. I picked up the habit in fifth grade. Sex ed was our favorite course—the teachers drew diagrams in the dirt with sticks, caveman style. You know, life lessons.

When we opted not to go to classes, which was most of the time, there were horses and chickens and lots of land to get lost in. We pretended to be Jesse James or cowboys and Indians on real horses. And deep in the woods we played kissing games, the standard “doctor” scenarios but amped up by the hippie culture. Jefferson Burstyn, Ellen Burstyn’s adorable son, was my sweetheart. In the shade of the trees we climbed under a blanket, took our pants off, and thought we had sex. Those stick drawings left a lot to the imagination.

For a while California had brought out some of the hippie in my mother, but as soon as she got involved with Lenny, a big Jewish businessman who wore slacks, button-down shirts, loafers, and a belt with a gold buckle, she shaped herself to his ideal, acting the role of a proper wife. The other Summerhill parents had beat-up VW buses, braids, and fringed boots. They lived in Topanga Canyon or Laurel Canyon, Bohemian enclaves. Meanwhile, Lenny would drop me off at school in his Cadillac. Once I got out of that car, I was in my father’s world. Poor Mom, she must have seen that her hold on me was slipping. I was a person with no boundaries going to a school with no boundaries.

To celebrate my tenth birthday, Dad threw a party at the Bel Air house. All the kids from school were there. I met Dad’s new girlfriend, Genevieve Waite, that night. She was eighteen, a South African model, singer, and actor. Also there was my now-ex-stepmother Michelle’s daughter, Chynna, my new little sister, who was only a year old, so it couldn’t have been an easy time for them, but as far as I was concerned the shift was subtle. I watched my father’s lovers and wives crisscross paths: involved, broken up, jealous, mellow. As far as I knew, love and lust ebbed and flowed and my parents and their lovers were just splinters of driftwood bobbing along with the tide. Michelle and Chynna were still always around the house, so I never felt like I lost them. Half the time I wanted to play with Chynna—she was like a little doll—and the rest of the time I wanted to strangle her for dethroning me as Daddy’s little princess.

For the birthday party, my father screened
Dumbo
on his movie projector, though at ten we were too old for it. It was probably a stoner favorite. Then, oddly, he screened the Monterey Pop Festival. I guess he was showing off. Dad was proud of having organized the festival and introducing not just Hendrix but the Who, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding to the American public.

Not long after that party I started hitting puberty. My dad and his friends were sitting around rolling joints on a Saturday morning when, in front of ten adults, my father said, “Look at my little girl. She’s poppin’ tits.” It was the kind of thing that some men of that time used to say—“Look, she’s becoming a woman”—not lascivious, just oblivious to how sensitive a young girl is about her development. I felt horribly exposed. I wanted to disappear. To this day the word “tits” creeps me out.

Anyway, maybe it hooked into my father’s head that I was getting older, because later that day he gave me a new, adult responsibility. That afternoon his friends were … still sitting around rolling joints. I was bored and bouncing off the walls: “What can I do?” “I want to plant flowers.” “Can we go get sea-shells?” “Can we go to the store?”

At loose ends, I tried to find ways to occupy myself, but you can only make so many sand castles or expensive covert phone calls. So on this particular day—the same day he outed my blossoming womanhood—Dad said, “I’m going to give you a project.” Dad had a job for me! This was exciting. I was in. He took the top of a shoe box and put a bunch of Thai sticks in it. Then he tore off the stiff cardboard top of a rolling paper pack. He showed me how to scrunch up the dried buds into pieces, shuffling the leaves with the cardboard so the seeds fell to the bottom. Once the pot was clean, he showed me how to attach two papers to make a fat joint. I had ten-year-old fingers, but in short order I got really good at rolling joints. I was the official joint-roller for all the adults. Sort of a rite of passage to go along with puberty, I guess.

Parents have certain responsibilities. Most have an innate sense of what might be good for their kids, and what might be bad for them. They make choices based on those beliefs. They shelter their children from activities and influences that might harm them or lead them in the wrong direction. That feeling of protection hit me the instant I saw my newborn son, and it was so powerful and intertwined with love that I can’t imagine separating the two. My father was different. He loved me, but under ordinary circumstances he didn’t see himself as my protector and guide. He saw himself as a very cool person who loved to hang out with other cool people, including his own cool children.

And so it was that my father and Genevieve, while hanging out in their new part-time digs—the penthouse suite at the Chateau Marmont—had no qualms about dipping into a cereal bowl filled to the brim with white powder and inhaling it in front of me and my brother. We watched them, fascinated, until they went to “take a nap,” which seems an unlikely thing to do after snorting massive quantities of cocaine, but whatever. They stowed the bowl of coke in the cabinet under the TV. After they left the room Jeffrey said, “Let’s try it.” It wasn’t his first time. He was twelve, after all. I asked him what it felt like. He handed me a vibrator—because such things were occasionally randomly accessible (though not, in this case, yellow like Donovan’s legendary dildo)—and told me to put it between my teeth. That, he said, was what cocaine felt like.

I didn’t snort enough to feel a physical response, but the ritual of it was fun, and it made me feel bigger and older and grown-up. Because, as most parents realize,
children want to grow up to be just like their parents
. The following weekend I found a silver box that had a little spoon attached on a chain. I filled it with my dad’s coke and took it to school.

I was now enrolled in Highland Hall, a Waldorf school. We read Tolstoy in fifth grade and studied Greek, Spanish, and German, each once a week. My friend Lisa, who’d moved from Summerhill at the same time, was my best friend at school.

I brought my secret stash of coke to our seats near the back of the class. Lisa was a funky girl who always carried a briefcase, and now she opened it up on the desk to shield me from the teacher’s view. I took out the coke, but just as I was about to snort my first spoonful I accidentally dropped the silver box and coke spilled all over the floor. The teacher said, “What’s going on back there?”

I replied, “It’s only baby powder for gym class.” The teacher let it slide. I guess the notion that sixth graders would be snorting coke in the middle of math class didn’t occur to him. I didn’t care so much about the lost drugs—the point was to break the rules and get away with it, and we did. The next weekend when I walked into the beach house, Genevieve said, “Oh, here comes the little drug thief.” I was worried that my dad would be pissed—he really didn’t like me dipping into his supply. But that was the last I heard about it.

The 1971 San Fernando earthquake happened exactly at six in the morning. In my bedroom at my mom’s I had one of those pre-LCD digital clocks where the numbers flip by and I remember waking up, seeing the clock turn from 5:59 to 6:00, and feeling the whole place go bananas. We kids were oblivious to the lives lost and damage done and thought the earthquake and its aftermath were great fun. School was canceled. The sidewalks were all buckled and broken up, so roller skating, which was one of our favorite pastimes, became an obstacle course. With a pack of the neighborhood kids, I went skating for hours. Those post-earthquake days were unexpectedly special for me. For that moment in time, having good, clean, post-disaster fun, I felt the rare sensation of being a normal kid, just like the other kids. We were all in something together. I was oblivious to the deeper meaning then, but later I would collect and cherish memories of feeling like I was part of a community instead of an oddly privileged outsider.

Our double life affected both me and my brother, but whereas I was willful and mischievous, my brother was downright bad. It was the usual stuff between him and my mom:
clean your room—you live like a pig; do your homework; don’t give me any lip, young man; stop playing your saxophone— it’s midnight!
But it always escalated to a screaming match, and there were times when it almost got violent. Dad didn’t help matters, of course. He bought Jeffrey a BB gun, and my brother promptly shot out all the lights around my grandma’s pool. Jeffrey always had a sweet heart, but in those days he was a volcano, ready to erupt.

Unlike Jeffrey, I tried not to ruffle my mother’s feathers. I wanted everything to go smoothly. I tweaked my attitude and style to fit in with different friends, the chameleon act that I was mastering with my parents. With my Highland Hall friends it was all about dropping acid most days, wandering around the hills, wondering at the flora and fauna. The kids I knew from Tarzana—the Valley—were a different scene. There was a huge group of really rich kids who lived in very fancy houses in the hills. In the daytime the Laundromat in the nearby strip mall was our hang. We’d drink beer and lounge on the warm dryers for hours. At night I’d crawl out onto the ledge outside my bedroom window. My Valley friends would wait for me below. I’d climb down the fire escape, jump to the ground, and be free.

My friend Julie and I would drop acid, “borrow” her sister’s car, and meet up with friends. Julie was a much better underage driver than I was. The only time I tried to drive I ran straight into a mailbox. One night we went to a party somewhere in the hills. I was wearing what hipster kids wore in those days: a polyester button-down shirt tucked into high-waisted baby blue bell-bottom corduroys, and a sparkly belt. My hair was cut in a shag. I had a shag for years.

The party was in one of those big ranch-style Encino homes with a terraced backyard and pool. Gwen, who straightened her hair with an iron, then rolled it in soda cans with setting lotion to get it even straighter, lived here. There was a huge open floor plan. The living room furniture had plastic covers and the white carpeting had plastic runners to preserve their purity. But now kids were everywhere. Gwen’s parents were obviously out of town. Gwen said, “Everyone stay out of the living room or my parents will know for sure I had a party.” Good luck with that, Gwen.

I had some rum punch and a few drags off a joint. I had a thing for this kid Henry. I was gangly, with big teeth and a big smile, kinda goofy-looking, but Henry was one of the cool guys. He took me into a closet, a big walk-in closet. We started making out. Then we had sex. It was my first real time, unless you count playing doctor at Summerhill, which I don’t. So we had sex, then Henry walked out of the closet and never spoke to me again.

When it came down to sex in the closet, my reaction was:
What’s all the fanfare about? That wasn’t very much fun.
The act itself was insignificant, but I didn’t have huge expectations for sex. I had never been told that it was deeply meaningful, or romantic, or something that a girl might wait to do. But I did want that boy to like me, and the way he walked away was devastating.

I played it up for my girlfriends, but I don’t have a good poker face. If I’m hurt you can see it. I felt like a piece of meat. We busted out of the party. On our way out I saw the party damage. The white rug was trashed. The living room was a war zone. Poor Gwen. She would be grounded for a month.

Back at the condo complex the morning sun cast a golden mirror on my third-floor window. My friends formed a pyramid and I climbed up to reach the fire escape. I caught the bottom rung of the ladder and swung myself up, as I’d done so many times before. I crawled into my bedroom window and sobbed into my pillow, mourning not something I’d lost, but something I’d never had.