A Soft Place to Land (24 page)

“What happened?” asked Dara. “Can you tell us what happened?”

Ruthie shook her head no, continuing to cry in long, shaky sobs. She could not yet say that she had lost her sister. That she had driven her sister away.

From
Straight
,

a Memoir, by Julia Rose Smith

C
HAPTER
O
NE

The first thing you need to know about the Center is this: no one there looked like Winona Ryder or Angelina Jolie. Netted from the suburbs and rural outposts of Virginia, we were the dregs of American teens—a pasty, pimply assortment of losers—all swept into a series of low buildings with particleboard ceilings and oversized combination locks on all of the doors. This was not finishing school for bad girls. We did not inhabit a pseudo-campus with soft hills and architecturally significant buildings made of stone and mellowed brick. Nor did our daddies come and visit on the weekends, bringing us gifts of roast chicken and perfumed soaps.

No, we were on our own during our tenure at the Center, no visitors allowed, no contact with the outside world at all until we were deemed recovered, turned eighteen, or our parents’ money ran out. Whichever came first. No health insurance covered the
Center. They were unaccredited. (Even Harvard, the brochure claimed, was unaccredited in its nascent years.)

I would like to believe that “Bobs Squared”—as founders Bob Mack and Bob Spurgeon jokingly called themselves—began the program with good intentions: to help out troubled kids, to channel teen anger into something other than drug use, to provide an alternative for when home life was no longer working. The Bobs were just so jolly, with their penchant for nicknames, their guayabera shirts. Surely they did not intend for the Center to become a sort of ground zero for sadomasochism cloaked in evangelical language. But if my theory is correct, if the Center was founded on good intentions, how did it become such an unholy place, disastrous to so many?

I only have to reflect back on my time there to know the answer, a trickle-down theory, if you will: The fundamentalist Christian viewpoint is one that embraces a strictly hierarchical universe, where those at the top have all the power. At the Center, the counselors were on top, and therefore were granted the power to do with us as they saw fit. And power corrupts, which in the case of the Center led to cruelty. And you better believe cruelty is contagious, especially when everyone—from the “Bobs” all the way down to the “Addicts”—is encouraged to participate in it. And most crucially, there was no one from the outside looking in. There was no one the Center had to answer to but God. And they were pretty sure they had him all figured out.

Everything that took place at the Center was shielded from the public eye. We could write as many letters as we wanted, just “to get things off our chests,” but no postman ever delivered them. We telephoned our parents once a week—whether we wanted to or not—but never without a “Buddy” sitting beside us, making sure we did not go off the script we were given to read from during the call. Yes, there were actual scripts, similar to the ones telemarketers read. I have a script sitting before me. A small miracle that I managed to hoard it away without anyone noticing.

Addict:
[That was us. We were all referred to as addicts during our time at the Center, whether our “addiction” was sex, drugs, or general rebellion.] Hi, [name of parent or guardian]. I only have two minutes to talk, but I just wanted to call and say thank you for having the wisdom to get help for my addiction. I was in a bad place, physically, mentally, and spiritually, but now I am starting to heal. And though my addiction caused me to do terrible things, at least it has brought me to this place, where I can truly learn about Christ and what He has planned for my life.

And on it goes. With all sorts of “choose your ending” options. If a parent asks about the food, the addict can say: “It’s delicious,” or, “It’s good but not as good as Mom’s,” or, “It nourishes my body just as Christ nourishes my soul.” If the parent asks about Bible study, the addict can say, “I am becoming grounded in the word of our Lord,” or simply, “I am learning so much.”

If we veered from the script we were punished, and at the Center punishment was real. To Bob and Bob, the Bible was inerrant, and the Bible warned about sparing the rod, which at the Center was actually called Rod with a capital R, as in “I think you need a visit with Rod.” As if the Rod were an actual person.

The lingo at the Center was filled with jokes and puns.

But before you get too worked up, before the details become the stuff of pulp fiction (Juvenile Delinquents Get Spanked!), let me say: I never visited with the Rod. I suffered my own humiliations, but that particular one was reserved mainly for the boys. Some overgrown kid would get really pissed off, would throw a chair or cuss out a counselor, and suddenly there’d be calls for backup. “We need some cowboys to come hold down a wild bull,” the Buddies would say. And while he’s down, might as well beat the shit out of him.

The Bobs would be pleased to know that being at the Center made me forever suspicious of Eastern religion. Not because
Buddhism is blasphemous, as they would have said, but because I came to understand that no matter how perfect your downward dog, no matter how long you meditate, no matter how many times you try to see the lesson in every single thing, you can never escape the fact of your physical body and what can be done to it. No matter how much you might want to.

But let me take you to those low buildings secured with padlocks, instead of just alluding to the worst of what I experienced there. And let me tell you that despite all of the stupid mean wrongness of that place, there were some funny moments. And good food, if you can believe it; the cafeteria ladies really knew how to cook. I wish to this day that I had their recipe for okra, which they split long ways, rolled in what tasted like salted cornmeal, fried, and served with homemade ranch dressing on the side for dipping.

“Better than drugs,” they called it.

On the day that I was checked into the Center, I had just returned from a trip to San Francisco. Flew the red-eye back to D.C., where my dad and stepmom were waiting. For good reason they did not trust that I would board the puddle jumper that would take me from D.C. to Roanoke, which was much closer to Virden, our pretty but dull little town, surrounded by the Blue Ridge mountains. They greeted me at the gate, both stony and surprisingly reticent. I had expected my stepmother to be full of rebuke.

I had been in San Francisco visiting my little sister, whom I called Biscuit, who lived with our aunt and uncle. Biscuit was my half sister, and the year before, our mother and her father—my stepdad, Phil—had died in a small-plane crash. By some utter blindness on my mother and stepfather’s part, they had decreed in their will that in the event of their deaths Biscuit, who at that time was the closest person in the world to me, would go live with Phil’s sister out in San Francisco, while I would live with my dad in Virden. This separation would have been traumatic enough even if Dad hadn’t married Peggy, who shall from here on be known as my mortal enemy.

(Ah, but I can just hear my favorite writing teacher
tsk-tsking
now. I must evoke sympathy for poor Peggy! I must make her real for the reader, and therefore lift her out of the one-dimensional role I have cast her in as “the villain.” I must give you reasons for understanding why she came to be the way that she is. Well. I will have to receive an F in character development. I have nothing nice to say about my stepmother.)

I was arriving home in trouble. I was, at seventeen, fundamentally troubled. I had become convinced—not entirely irrationally, as you will learn—that my mother’s and stepfather’s deaths were my fault. I was trying to anesthetize the guilt in whatever way I could. Alcohol worked. So did pot. Acid not so much. Beyond that—who knows? I stuck with booze and weed. I had met a guy in San Francisco, a runaway from Ohio who slept in the van he had parked out by Baker Beach. I had run away from my aunt’s house, from my little sister. I could not handle being there with her, with them. I could not bear to compare my life in Virden, with my awkward father and my resentful stepmother, to her life in San Francisco. My aunt and uncle adored her, sent her to a charming private school, stuffed her wallet with spending cash, let her loose in the city. And my sister, who had always looked up to me before, who had seemed to want nothing more than my approval, my little sister now looked at me with judgment.

She had grown so sophisticated after ten months of living in the city. And here I was, the big sister, aware that everything I did marked me as naïve. Before we were split apart, Biscuit had shared my addiction to junk food. Now she turned her nose up at Cool Ranch Doritos and Pop-Tarts. Now she and our uncle spent afternoons cooking elaborate meals that involved Dutch ovens and large cuts of meat, red wine, stock, and lots of garlic. On my first full day in San Francisco I played the Dead, danced around, pretended I was at Woodstock. My sister merely winced. I put on a tie-dye over old jeans and my sister tried to wrap me in a fleece before we left the house.

“You’re going to get cold,” she said.

When I told her I was fine, I’d deal, she looked at me pityingly
and said, “It’s just, people in San Francisco don’t really wear tie-dyes anymore.”

As if she was one of them.

I asked her to take me to Haight Street. I thought we would have fun looking around. I thought getting out of the flat might ease the tension. Plus, I was seventeen. I liked the Dead. I liked smoking pot. I imagined Haight Street to be the epicenter of cool. But my sister complained about going, claimed it was lame, boring, passé. Once there she took me to a clothing shop where a cotton T-shirt cost seventy dollars. In 1994. I felt like a yokel. I felt so disconnected, so uprooted. I was clearly not a part of Biscuit’s San Francisco, but I certainly didn’t belong in Virden either. I went to get a coffee while my sister finished trying on expensive clothes. And it was at the café where I met Logan, the Ohio runaway, a sweet kid who, when I think back on it, probably was gay.

And it was off with Logan I ran. Crazy now, thinking back on that. How impulsive my decisions. How destructive. Logan was part of a pack of runaways. He was better off than most, because he had his van. These kids carried sleeping bags on their backs and kept mangy old dogs for protection. They all had weed, all the time. They would shoplift for food, or dig through the garbage cans at Golden Gate Park, finding half-eaten hot dogs, half-drunk smoothies, bags of stale popcorn.

I try to remember what exactly I was thinking at that time, and all I can come up with is a sort of foggy memory of self-satisfaction, sitting in a circle of kids in Golden Gate Park, so far away from my unhappy home in Virginia, so far away from the judgmental eye of my little sister. That first afternoon I kept telling myself I would go back to my aunt and uncle’s flat that night. I was just having a little adventure. I was just blowing off steam. But I kept thinking about my sister, about how much she seemed to dislike me now. And how finally I was with kids who understood me, kids who felt so alienated at home they decided it was better to leave. And then some guys built a campfire and it was so warm beside it. I was only wearing a T-shirt, had not taken
my sister up on her suggestion of bringing fleece. And I thought,
I can stay here. I can bum around until I turn eighteen, seven months away
. At that point I would reappear in the real world and collect the trust fund money left for me by my parents, having already learned how to survive on my own.

I was missing for five days. Twice in Golden Gate Park I spied my uncle Robert and Biscuit looking for me. But I was always one step ahead of them. Always knew how to turn a fast corner, duck behind a tree, become obscured by a sea of Japanese tourists. Or maybe it was just that I’d colored my hair, using a box of dye Logan shoplifted from Cala Foods. My most distinguishing feature, my auburn hair, was swallowed by what looked like black shoe polish. I cried when I first saw it, but two weeks later, when my head was shaved as punishment for trying to run away from the Center, I was pleased that at least my hair was already ugly, at least I was not giving them the satisfaction of stripping me of my red hair, the color of my mother’s.

On the fifth day Logan and I were walking alone on Baker Beach, looking for sea glass. It was unusual that we weren’t a part of a bigger group. I was barefoot, having left my sandals in his van. I was proud of the calluses on my feet, proud I could walk over hot sand or prickly grass without feeling a thing. An older guy passed us, wearing a loose T-shirt over jeans. Steel blue eyes. Little goatee. Said he had some weed. Showed it to us, wrapped in a plastic Baggie. Let us smell that it was good. Logan asked how much, he quoted a decent price, and Logan reached for his wallet. As he was counting out the bills, the man told Logan that he was under arrest.

“I should arrest you, too,” he said to me. “But I’m going to make you a deal. You’ve got five seconds to get out of here, and I better not catch you in public again without your shoes on.”

He handcuffed Logan, as I darted away, hoping that Logan would know, by telepathy, that I planned to bail him out. I did not have keys to Logan’s van, so I had to make my way on foot back to Sharon Meadow in Golden Gate Park, the de facto meeting
place for our group. It took a while. Sunny was there when I arrived, exhausted, my feet aching. Sunny was a petite white girl with blond dreadlocks who wore scratchy wool sweaters on top of long skirts made from hemp. When I told her what happened, she said I needed to find Saint Joe, an older man who helped out runaways. She said he worked at a used bookstore on Twenty-second near Mission.

I had to take the 33 Stanyan bus, which seemed to stop at every block. When I was halfway there one of the drivers noticed I wasn’t wearing shoes and kicked me off. I waited for the next bus, entered from the back, got off at Eighteenth and Mission, and walked the rest of the way. Finally I arrived at Twenty-second, where I found the bookstore, a cramped and dusty space that smelled of mildew. The man behind the counter wore a gray T-shirt with a hole near the collar. He was probably in his fifties though he had a full head of hair. I asked if he knew where Saint Joe was, and, smiling, he said, “I’m Joe.”