Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (18 page)

I went back to street singing for extra cash. Pearl Street promenade
was a busy spot and I could always make a little money this way. I met a lot of locals and made friends as people would stop and strike up a conversation. I discovered that street singers had a way of looking out for each other. One day I was walking down the promenade, stressed because I had no money for food. I walked by a busker who asked for five dollars, and in exasperation I declared, “Man, I don’t have five dollars!” He looked at me, stopped playing his guitar, reached into his jeans pocket and said, “Here, have what I made today.” It was such a touching gesture.

For Thanksgiving we went to Andrea’s parents’ house. It was fairly impressive, and I did my best to feel the warmth of the holiday even though I was in a new and strange place. There was something a bit cold and stilted about the atmosphere that was hard to put my finger on. Andrea was clearly enjoying being in her childhood home and around her brother and family though. After the meal I was surprised when her dad invited me for a walk, just the two of us. He was a sober and thoughtful man, it seemed. He’d watched everything carefully that day, I could tell. As we walked, he asked me a lot of questions but the conversation didn’t seem friendly somehow. After listening to me talk about my plans, or lack of plans, for the future, he began to speak. He chose his words precisely and it took me a while to realize that in the politest of ways I was being invited to leave Boulder and stay away from his daughter. He clearly thought I was riffraff and would go nowhere, and he feared his daughter was drifting with no focus and that I was the cause. In the spaces between his words, in the subtext, he made it clear that he was paying his daughter’s rent, not giving me a free ride. Finally he suggested that I earn enough money to move on.

I never told Andrea about it, but began to look for better-paying work immediately. Sadly, I wasn’t qualified for much. I applied for a nanny job with a nice family. They had three lovely kids. I didn’t have a car, so the husband gave me a ride home after my interview. They wanted a
long-term commitment, and I just wasn’t sure I would be in Boulder that long, but I really needed a better job to earn a plane ticket out of there. The husband told me to think about it and that he would touch base with me soon.

He called and asked what my thoughts were a few nights later. When I told him that I liked the idea but that the logistics might be a bit complicated, he invited me to dinner to discuss it. I was excited by the prospect of a hot meal, and hoped maybe there was a way to work something out short-term. At dinner I explained that I needed to leave town in a few months, and that while I’d love to take the job, I wasn’t sure I could commit much further than that. He asked how much money I needed. I said about a thousand dollars. “I have that much in my pocket right now,” he replied. I didn’t see what he meant until it suddenly dawned on me that his posture had changed. He was leaning forward. He had assumed a powerful energy and an opportunistic one. He was a shark sitting across from me and he smelled blood in the water, and I was no longer a kid. The difference a birthday makes on the eighteenth year was suddenly tangible. It dawned on me that we were eating at a restaurant in a hotel. A nice hotel. I had learned that the best way to diffuse a volatile situation was to expose it, and so I said, “Are you propositioning me?” He stiffened. “Don’t you think you’re putting the cart in front of the horse?” he said, feeling clever about turning it back on me, trying to make me doubt my perceptions. “Well, am I?” I responded. He said, “Look. You seem nice. And I’d love to help you get to wherever you’re going next.” I sat back and took it in. I’d like to tell you I told that man to take a hike. I’d like to tell you I immediately told him off. But the gravity of the situation was hitting hard. A thousand dollars would take me months to earn, and I was not welcome to stay where I was. It was shocking to think I could get the money in a matter of minutes. I see why girls take guys up on things like this. He was handsome. He was going to cheat on his wife
with someone. I needed the money. I’m not above saying I was also flattered by his attention. I felt so down-and-out and lonely, how could I not be flattered by the attention? But my heart spoke loudly and there was just no part of me that could get on board with this. I found my way back to the apartment and told Andrea all about it.

Giving myself up like this would divert my energy from my writing and derail me from becoming my own best work of art. I had a lot to figure out, and this was not a solution. It was a terrible temptation that would be a devastating distraction I could not afford. I believed in myself, despite the odds. I believed I could dig in and figure things out on my own. I felt frightened and overwhelmed but my Alaskan pride was intact. I remembered my gratitude ritual to help me focus my thoughts on everything that was working for me. I had a roof over my head. I had food. I had a job. I was young. I had health and energy. I was better off than so many.

I read books about physics, which inspired me to think anything was possible. If light particles could be in two places at once, or be a wave at times and particles at other times, then what else was possible? How did our thoughts affect our reality and interact with the world on a quantum level? How do you describe having an idea and then, the artist’s job as alchemist, transmute that invisible thought and give it actual form in the real world? I saw so many correlations between science and art and they inspired and intrigued me greatly. Ever since I was young, I have seen shapes and patterns when I sing. They are three-dimensional and they expand and contract, collapse and climb. They have different colors and move when pitch changes. The colors change when the tone and vibrato change. They shimmer, snap, bend, all in reaction to what I’m singing. I began to read books about interference patterns, and when I saw drawings of fractal patterns, I was blown away—these were two-dimensional images of what I saw in my mind when I sang. When I tune my guitar, or
find pitch, I see the shapes in my mind and they vibrate at different rates. When the notes are the same pitch, they unify and vibrate at the same rate or frequency. Onstage, I hear or see wave patterns that move through the air more than I hear the note in my ear. Sound pushes through the air in a different way if I am hearing a tone in headphones. It’s harder for me to match pitch when I wear headphones because I feel cut off from my feedback system of hearing the sound wave move through the air, where I can then match my tone and vibrato to it. This has always made singing in the studio hard for me even though I am hearing my own voice clearly. Though I can hear an instrument to match pitch to, my own pitch will be way off. When I take the headphones off and listen to my voice through speakers, hearing the sound travel through the air, the patterns will come back and I can find my pitch instantly. I have learned that if I tighten my throat and brighten my tone, the shapes respond and tighten, making them appear rounder. When I darken my tone and slow vibrato down, the edges of the shapes are more visible and move slower. If I add emotion in, the frequency and color intensify.

I knew my reality was my perception of reality. Perception was everything. A glass half empty and a glass half full were both true. Schrödinger’s cat was both alive and dead. I learned years later that my gratitude practice actually helped me form new neural pathways. The hippie rituals of positive affirmations are not just baloney. Gratitude doesn’t exist only in your mind—you have to
feel
it in your whole being. Feelings are the shadows of thoughts. When we have negative thoughts, our emotions mirror them with anxiety. You can often see what you are thinking by reverse engineering and studying your feelings. I worked hard to identify my feelings, and when I grew anxious, I came to see that my thoughts were often skewing negatively. This is where I had a chance to stop the cycle. I didn’t have to be a victim of my own mind. I thought change was going to come in big dramatic moments and grand gestures. Instead I
realized change came in small and seemingly insignificant ways. It came by breaking a thought or a feeling down to its fundamental building blocks.

I buckled down and after a few months scraped together money for a ticket and headed back to San Diego, where my mom was. She still had health issues, and I was going to live with her and help out and enjoy the beautiful climate. The palm trees and blue ocean were calling me. Plus it would be nice to be around family and I would have someone on my side looking out for me.

Since I was a kid, my mother would have these mysterious bouts that would disrupt everything suddenly. I remember one Christmas, when I was about fourteen, she became faint and said her heart was hurting and lay down on the floor, asking us to call the paramedics. We were at my aunt’s house. I worried and held her hand as she lay there, my dear mom whom I loved so much. The medics found nothing, but I still worried. She had a tranquil face that belied her failing body. I was totally hooked.

At Optimum Health Institute, she learned about nutrition and proper health and I loved learning about them too. I sang at the open mics at the institute and did cleanses in the program. We met people who were as passionate as we were becoming about health and spirituality. They introduced us to a group that gathered once a month to listen to an amazing teacher, they said. We went out of curiosity, and it was
so
California. There was a woman named Jacque (pronounced “Jackie”) who channeled a male entity named Zarathustra. I had never heard of channeling before, but I had read Nietzsche’s
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. I was beyond skeptical, but once I saw it for myself, it was hard to refute. Her face would transform as the new spirit came in her body, and her posture and very essence were unrecognizable as her own. Zarathustra’s spiritual and philosophical teachings were simple, but all of us there felt we were getting intriguing guidance somehow. It seemed as though pure love poured from him
and he taught us to be always more loving, more unconditionally gracious, more thoughtful. The world seemed wide-open and science seemed to be blurring with spirituality. Who was I to say channeling wasn’t possible. And really, I didn’t care if channeling was real or not—I just enjoyed what was being said. It was basically what I heard in church as a child. The point was that our future was up to us. It was inspiring. It was metaphysical. It made me feel anything was possible. I was in control of my life, and my future.

Eventually my mom quit working at OHI, and we moved to Poway, into a beautiful house that was, as usual for my mom, nicer than we could afford. I got busy working two jobs to pay rent. A friend in L.A. gave me a beater car he was going to leave with the junkyard. It barely ran, but I got a mechanic friend to tape it together so that if I never took the key out of the ignition, and if I turned my head just right and stuck out my tongue, it would get me to work. I worked as a hostess in an Italian restaurant. I also got a job as a barista at a local coffee joint called Java Joe’s.

Java Joe’s had great live music every night. I enjoyed listening to the local singer-songwriters, and one night a guy named Steve Poltz came offstage, walked up to the counter, and asked for an herbal tea. Poltz was tall and lean with messy brown hair and impossibly innocent, round brown eyes, like a kitten’s. His devilish smile, boyish charm, and offbeat humor endeared him to every man, woman, and child in the audience. He was a quirky and highly creative songwriter. We struck up a conversation and I told him that I sang. He got me up onstage during my next break and I told him to play a blues in E. Wearing my barista’s apron, I improvised lyrics about the patrons in the coffee shop. A harmonica player got up and belted out a solo. I got offstage and went back to my duties of caffeine pimp, but felt excited to have found a community of musicians who cared about the same things I did, who were looking to find their own unique art inside themselves. Folkies, blues cats, traditional
ragtime, jazz writers, and anyone else gathered at Java Joe’s to hear each other play. On nights off I came in to sing and hang with everyone. This was the first place I debuted songs I was actually writing.

The owner of Java Joe’s was an okay guy who got some stuff right. He recognized that his business depended on live music and he had a genuine fondness for local artists. He treated the musicians well and everyone thrived. But he was also human and fallible, and it showed up when he started talking about doing a calendar that he hoped us girls would pose for. I quipped that he could keep dreaming. He never asked me about it again. I stepped in and said the same thing to him another night as he was pestering someone else about it—and got fired on the spot. I took my apron off and walked outside and sat down at one of the only empty tables. I must have looked stunned, because a man sitting at the next table asked if I was all right. I told him I had just gotten fired. He said, Do you want a job? I looked up and he did not appear to be joking. What is it, I inquired. Answering phones at a warehouse. What a lucky break. I said yes, and reported to work the next day. I wound up playing a show at Joe’s after I was signed, ironically, to commemorate the first place I’d performed my original music.

My new boss seemed nice. He hired a small team to fill orders at a warehouse. I had no marketable skills but was able to handle this job of answering phones and taking orders. It wasn’t a fun job by any means, and I can’t say I was a very passionate or valuable employee. It was just a job to pay rent. After a few months my boss took me aside to have a talk with me, I assumed to reprimand me for not putting more heart into sales. Instead he propositioned me. By this time I thought I’d perfected the art of the turndown, one that uses humor to disarm and wit to protect myself while protecting a man’s ego so we could both move on with pride intact. He didn’t come on too strongly, and I joked it off, saying I was dating someone and it probably wasn’t a good idea. The conversation
didn’t seem overtly tense or strange, and ended with some talk about work. All was well, I thought.