The Sunset Strip Diaries (8 page)

It was cool the first day. I went to one of his friend’s houses and it was amusing. We drove to a hip record store in Sherman Oaks called Moby Disc, and Casey shoved a cassette tape down my pants and made me steal it. I had stolen plenty before, so I wasn’t scared. I was excited to hang out with him and his friends, who were nineteen, twenty. One the guys had been in the
Metal Years
movie. I felt like I was getting somewhere.

After hanging out a few times, I started to realize two things: One was that Casey was not planning on bringing me to hang on the Sunset Strip with him. He wanted to scam on girls. Two, I didn’t much
like
Casey. He was rude, he was disgusting, and he was fatter than I had remembered. He had a gut, a double chin, and frightful hair extensions. His head must’ve looked okay out of his truck window, because the rest of him looked like he had fallen from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. To make matters worse, he didn’t seem to have a conscience. I knew I needed to end the relationship or whatever it was, but I didn’t know how to do it.

I was so intensely nervous around Casey and his friends that I never spoke. I decided I needed alcohol to calm my nerves. I meekly asked him for Southern Comfort, remembering the initial buzz I felt when riding in the car with Jamie. Casey all too gladly provided my fifteen-year-old ass with hard liquor. As soon as that occurred, things started sliding downhill faster than a fucking bobsled. I drank enough to pass out and Casey often locked me in a room full of bottles of his piss (he was too lazy to go to the bathroom), and went about his business. I recall his room having trails of ants in it as well. Sometimes he brought me to other people’s houses and left me there. Once he brought over a young bisexual girl and tried to get me to have sex with her. Another time his father was chasing his friends around the house with an ax, trying to kill them. Then there was the day he took me to the house of some old, rich guy who had a teeth fetish, and offered me up like a sacrificial lamb. The guy examined my teeth and said he wanted Casey to bring me back to ‘party.’ I was like,
What is
this
all about?
Casey said that he and his friends often came to the guy’s house for parties and they bit his hand and he paid them.
Good Lord,
I thought. When things like that happened, I drank up.

I often feared I wouldn’t get home at night and I was scared of missing school the next day. But I was so full of self-hatred and misery, that I wanted to be anywhere but where my parents were. I just remember wanting to be away from them. Casey scared me, but I was determined to deal with it. I told myself to toughen up and handle it.

One evening, we were at some guy’s house and I saw Casey go into a bathroom. He was so antsy and excited, he didn’t close the door all of the way. I saw him first tearing a piece of a cotton ball…then fumbling with a spoon, and something else…what was it? A lighter? I squinted my eyes in my alcohol-induced haze and saw him tie some sort of rubber tubing around his arm and inject something into one of his tattoos, like a shot…I don’t remember how long he was in there, but when he came out, he immediately laid down next to me, wrapped his limbs around me in a grip and fell straight asleep. He didn’t wake up for a few hours.

I was not prepared to deal with any man, let alone a heroin addict. I was a kid. A kid from the suburbs, at that. It appeared to me that heroin was the ‘in’ thing to do because of Guns N’ Roses, who were well-known addicts. Casey bragged of seeing Guns guitarist Izzy Stradlin buying drugs at the “shooting gallery” where he bought his heroin.  He probably deliberately bought heroin just to run into him, as he loved Guns N’ Roses.

Casey also bragged about being bisexual. I guess it was another ‘in’ thing to do. He told me some of the guys in Ratt were bi and so was this person and that person- it was like he was trying to be cool. It was the same thing I was doing, but on a higher level. It was as if he was identifying the “cool” variables in these rock stars, and trying to emulate the ones he could.

One night he said we were going to a party.
Party?
I had never been to a party, besides the one where I got so drunk I locked myself in the bathroom and woke up when the party was over. I was ready to try again. I got all dressed up in a tiny outfit that even Kelly Bundy would have thought was too skimpy. I put on some four-inch high, purple snakeskin pumps; a tiny, tight tube skirt, and a shirt that barely covered my bra on all sides. I had a huge silver heart charm resting in my visible cleavage. My midriff was on display to show that I had a six-pack from doing so many v-sits in my room throughout the past two years. I thought the party would be like something I had seen on MTV or in the movies: People would be dancing on tables. The trees out front would have toilet paper in them. Long Duck Dong would be on an exercise bike and Jake Ryan would be clearing beer cans stacked into pyramids. The Beastie Boys would be there, throwing pies at each other. A couple of the guys from Mötley Crüe would be arm wrestling at the coffee table and there would be a game of strip poker going on. Once again, I had this fantasy that I would walk into the party in slow motion and all heads would turn. Guys would turn to mush and similarly dressed women with less fortunate bods would sneer with jealousy…

(small voice) But that was not what happened.

I got out of the car and realized that we were at a house party in Studio City. It was still light out. The sun was almost down and people were standing around outside …
in jeans.
Lots of jeans. Jeans on guys, jeans on girls. The girls were wearing shirts that covered their whole bodies and they wore barely any makeup. Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians were playing on a stereo, singing “What I Am.” People turned and stared all right, but they started laughing right afterward. Not what I was going for, once again. I really just did not get it. I honestly thought Kelly Bundy looked cool and I always tried as hard as I could to look just like her. Anyway, once I saw the crowd I didn’t want to walk up to the party, but I had no choice. I could barely walk in my spiked heels down the driveway. I was wobbling like an old woman with Parkinson’s. Twenty people were outside squinting at me and whispering to each other. I heard someone ask if I were the entertainment. Just then, I reached the end of the driveway. I had one foot on the gravel and another in the grass when my heel sank. The grass was soft, so my heel poked through to the dirt underneath. My other foot caught on the gravel. The next thing I knew, I was going down. That is where the real slow motion started- Down, down, down, down …into the splits.
I had one leg out in front of me and one behind me. I couldn’t get up. My skirt had ridden up around my waist. Casey grabbed my hand, yanked me up, and pretended it didn’t happen, which was my preferred method of handling embarrassment.

Despite that debacle
,
Casey continued to drag me around with him on his errands. I thought if I waited long enough, he would take me to The Strip, but it never happened. It seemed we were always driving around. He drove really fast around canyons at night, drunk and high. I was sure we would drive straight off a cliff. Other times, he brought friends with him in the cab of his truck and made me sit in the back. Not the back seat, the back of the
truck
, like, where you would carry a dirt bike or something. I remember he and his friends stole a big hard plastic Santa Claus from someone’s lawn and threw it in the back with me. I was freezing back there, rolling around with the Santa Claus while he whipped through traffic on the freeway. They were laughing at me, treating me like an animal.

I didn’t care. I didn’t care
what
happened to me.
Just kill me, let me die here, who gives a shit.
I didn’t even care if I was alive, why I would give a shit about
that?
I was kind of just waiting to die. I tried to stand up to Casey once by slapping him in the face, but he slapped me back even harder. He said, “You think you’re hot? You aren’t
shit
.”

Shortly thereafter, he thought it would be funny to hold a gun to my head to scare me. This was the worst possible person I could have chosen as company. 

One night when I had passed out, Casey and his friend took off all of my clothes and did horrible, humiliating things to me. I would have not even known this happened, but they decided to videotape it and show everyone they knew. This event is what brought me from depressed to truly suicidal. When I think back to the way that night was going before I passed out, I remember being flirtatious with them while I was drinking. I was wearing high heels, tight pants and a tiny shirt. I know that it is a total debate among people-
is
there such thing as ‘asking for it’? I can tell you what was going through my mind:  I wasn’t wearing skimpy clothing because I wanted sex. It was because I thought I looked cool, pretty, and sexy. I thought it gave me some power. I was also flirting. But when I was flirting, I wasn’t thinking that I wanted sex. I just felt attractive and liked the attention I was receiving in return. I don’t think these guys raped me, I think that they thought I was initially consenting. The fact that I passed out straight away and they went on doing who knows what- I can’t come up with anything to play devil’s advocate for that. They were totally vile and corrupted and I was the perfect target.

Casey tried to show me the tape one day. I was so incredibly disturbed, I couldn’t even speak. There were close ups of my private parts, which were still unmanicured, due to my being so young and not knowing how to groom. It was humiliating, embarrassing, and just crushing. I hid my face. I wanted to be pretty and flirtatious. I didn’t want
this.
Why did guys have to make everything so ugly and dirty? I didn’t even know something like that could even
occur
- it wasn’t in my realm of imagination.

Casey started blackmailing me with the videotape, telling me he was going to show my parents if I didn’t do whatever he said. I was devastated. I had only lost my virginity a month prior and had only kissed a boy for the first time a few months earlier. How it spiraled into being blackmailed with a videotape is beyond me. But it did. And it wasn’t a very good videotape, because I was
asleep
for chrissakes. But I didn’t learn my lesson after my first date. Or my second date. God was knocking on my forehead and I was ignoring the warning signs. I made the decision to hang with these people. I thought it would be exciting and fun and grown up.

Self-hatred was welling up inside me and coming out in other ways. My bulimia had escalated to such a degree that the glands on my neck were starting to swell up like walnuts. One of my teachers sent me to my school counselor, Mrs. Harrod. She was a tough black woman who had a way with teenagers. I think her secret was just asking them questions and showing interest. Most people are put off by teenagers’ attitudes and moodiness. Not her. She sat there and grilled me. She wanted to know where my parents were. She wanted to know why I couldn’t say the word “NO.” She wanted to know how I got such sexy clothes and why I was behaving the way I was with men. She thought I needed medical attention for my eating disorder and needed psychiatric help for my other problems.

She immediately called my mother to find out what was going on in my home. Thank God. It was right after that phone call that my mother finally decided to kick out my father. I wondered why it took my school calling for her to take action. I showed signs of serious problems for the three years prior, which had gone ignored. My mother thought my dad could have possibly abused me, as she admitted years later, but she wasn’t sure and she wanted to keep the family together. That meant keeping me in the house with him. And being in the house with my dad was eating me alive.

My counselor later revealed to me that my mom showed up at the school in tears, asking her what to do. She didn’t know the first thing about kicking out a husband, making it on her own, any of it. I guess she got some advice and got the courage to do something. Either that or she was kind of forced to act because now someone was watching. At any rate, my mother said she had come home one day and saw a drug dealer in the kitchen with my father and that was apparently the last straw. Within weeks of my school calling, my mother told my father she wanted a divorce and he had to leave the house.

She then pulled my sister and me next to the front door, in front of the Christmas tree. We stood side by side while she blurted out everything in a huge clusterfuck: Our father was a cocaine addict, with a habit that was up to $500 a day, which meant he had stopped paying the bills, including the mortgage. Our house was probably going to go into foreclosure and we would have to move. She had been trying to hide his habit from us, but couldn’t do it anymore. On top of that, he was unfaithful to her. He had had numerous affairs. I felt sadder about the affairs than the drugs. I felt heartbroken. My mom kept telling me she was doing it for my sister and me. I started to feel bad. Then I thought,
Wait, aren’t you
supposed
to protect us? Is it ‘going above and beyond’ to protect your children? If my school hadn’t called, would you have done this?