The Sunset Strip Diaries (9 page)

My sister and I were floored. We were not angry with her for wanting to divorce him over all of that- we totally got it. But it was still a shock. I could barely process the information. I had so many of my own problems going on that I couldn’t even really think about my dad. I knew he wasn’t the same man I knew as a child. I knew there was a new anger to him and a creepy sexual edge to him that wasn’t there before. I knew I didn’t ever want to be alone with him and did my best to avoid him. Still, I never thought he would be a drug addict and it still surprised me that he would have affairs, even after the way he behaved. It was hard to hear concrete facts about this man who was supposed to be the person I admired, the person who was supposed to protect me from the outside world. It fucked with my perception of reality. Everything seemed to be swirling in my head like a horrible whirlpool.

My mom was a basket case. She was especially mean to me during that time. She told me that she was going to kick me out along with my dad. She told me to just go with him, wherever he was going. My dad was around for another month or so, as if he didn’t believe he was being kicked out of the house. One day my mother was in her room crying. My sister and I were sitting in the living room, feeling uncomfortable. My father took me aside and told me she was crying because of
me
.
Although I did feel she didn’t like me because I blew the lid wide open on our family problems, I didn’t buy it. My dad was manipulative and hurtful. I wished he would hurry up and leave.

One night I went out with some guy and I think we went to a drive-in or something, I can’t remember. We were drinking and hooking up and I didn’t get home until very late, probably three in the morning. Before I left, my mother told me if I didn’t come home by my new curfew (I was thinking,
you are trying to implement a
curfew
? I am so far beyond that, I am in deep fucking trouble here!),
she would put all of my belongings on the front lawn in garbage bags. I wasn’t sure where she got the idea, but she was starting to mention “tough love” a lot, so maybe she had received some pamphlet on it and this was one of the suggestions.

I was too chicken to tell the guy to get me home on time. I was scared I would look childish or unsophisticated or whatever, so I waited for him to take me home when he felt like it, which happened to be three in the morning. I entered my room wearing only my tight black dress with white skulls all over it. When I flicked on the light, I saw that my room was completely bare. Everything off the walls, all the furniture out, no clothes, no belongings, no nothing. Just a bare mattress remained. My beloved stuffed animals, my favorite stacks of books, and framed pictures of old movie stars- they were all gone. I panicked. They were my only comfort. I was really into “things” as a way to comfort myself, which was never healthy, but that is the way I was.

I started screaming at my mother that I needed my birth control pills and she tried to remind me that I broke the rule. I was thinking,
What the hell are these flimsy rules? These are so ridiculous and they are coming
way
too late. The damage is already done. These rules will not protect me, I have already suffered and have been abused and wronged and stripped of my dignity and my soul and my innocence. I need guidance, I need
help
, I am very lost and I am in trouble. I am sinking, I am drowning, I am up to my neck in quicksand. You are offering me what should be a rope but instead is thread that will snap if I try to use it. I am wayyyy past where you think I am; I am in deep, deep trouble. A fucking
curfew
?
But truth be told, it was good that she was trying to discipline me. I needed that. The reason it didn’t work is because of the inconsistency. I had done what I wanted for years and then suddenly there were rules that night.

My mom went outside in her nightgown and glasses, and came back with a few trash bags so that we could find my pills. When I opened one of the bags, I became enraged. My trinkets that were ceramic or glass were broken into pieces because they had been shoved in with shoes, books, and anything that was in sight. It was as if my existence was just thrown away, as if I didn’t matter. It was as if I was dead and my things were not going to be opened again. I fished out my birth control pills and popped one, in tears. At least I wouldn’t be
pregnant
during all of this misery.  I wanted to change out of my clothes and into pajamas, but I didn‘t know where to find pajamas. I sat around crying in my bare room for a few hours. I then became so livid over my belongings being broken that I lost it. I went to the kitchen, puffy-eyed, and examined the knives. I thought,
Oh my gosh…I can’t control myself. I am going to kill my own mother.

It hurts to write that, but it is what I felt. I was going to take a knife and stab her; that is how mad I was. I found myself crying again because I was scaring myself. I couldn’t control my anger and I couldn’t control my hand. I picked up the knife and stared at it. Then I put it back down. I went into my mom’s room- I didn’t know why I was going in. I don’t know what I wanted or how it could have helped me. I looked at her sleeping on my dad’s old side of the bed. There was no one on her side. His side was closest to the bedroom door and the bathroom. I saw the old headboard in the dark, with its big mirror and the stained glass cupboards on either side. She loved stained glass. There was a tissue box above her head and an alarm clock and other necessities that would grow as she got older into a jumble of earplugs, pills, lotions, and pens.

I looked at the lump sleeping in the bed. The lump that single-handedly shattered any comfort I had left in the world.  I became full of rage, enough to make me snarl, snarl like a fucking panther. A feeling shot through my body- it was a feeling of pure wrath. I punched her as hard as I could, in the general vicinity of her face. She jumped up out of her dead sleep and I remember seeing the whites of her eyes in the dark. She looked like a scared animal. I actually felt remorse at that moment and wished I hadn’t done it. But at the exact same time I wanted to kill her. I beat her with my fist as hard as I could and she tried to hold up the blanket, as if that would be a shield to stop me. She was screaming my name, begging me to stop.

All of the screaming woke my younger sister, Becky. She quietly went outside, where the rest of the garbage bags were hidden. She took out the things she knew I liked most and lined them all up in my room. My white stuffed cat, Nicky; my big fat Warner Brothers book, my pictures of Rita Hayworth. She pulled out some other things she knew I loved and quietly put them out in the midst of my hysteria and screaming. I always loved my sister for that. She knew what to do. It did calm me down.

Unfortunately, I never retrieved a large portion of my belongings. My mother swears to this day that she really only meant to teach me a lesson so she moved everything out and off to the side of the house. Goodwill thought it was part of a donation and took it all. I was kind of confused as to how Goodwill could make house calls so late at night, because I left at like seven p.m. to go out, but hey, what do I know. Regardless of that, regardless of
anything
my mother ever did or didn’t do, I was deeply, deeply wrong for striking her. I don’t care if she beat me to a pulp or abused me herself. Striking a parent is an abominable act and I am still gravely ashamed. I am telling the truth in this book, so that is why I mention it here. It affected what was left of my future relationship with her.

My sister says:

“I feel like I understood this all back then, especially the curfew part.
 It’s just really, really sad you went through feeling that way and had no comfort.  None.  And the bags on the lawn- I remember being stunned.  I don’t remember when she put it all there, like, I don’t remember being there watching her bringing it out - but I remember trying to bring it back in and she stopped me.  I remember feeling SO badly.  That was a horrible time.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Mental Ward

In January of 1989, my mother wrote me a letter that pissed me off, but also kind of relieved me. It said that we were moving away from our neighborhood because she knew I was in trouble with a bad crowd. What really happened was that our house was in foreclosure because my dad hadn’t paid the mortgage in months. Luckily, my mom ended up being able to sell the thing at the last minute. Anyway, she didn’t mention that. She stuck to her story that we were moving because of me, and hell, I
did
need to get out of that neighborhood and away from my new crowd.  She said that Jeff Hunter came to her and told her I was in trouble with some older guys. I was pissed at him for butting in.  He was only an afterthought to me at that time, even though he was my world six months prior. I think I told him my happenings in passing, but I didn’t want to deal with his angry girlfriend if we were caught speaking to one another. I was mad at him for telling her about me, because she still yelled “Whore!” at me any time she saw me at school, no matter where we were or how many people were around. It hurt more once I wasn’t a virgin, because I
did
feel like a whore and she was basically rubbing it in.

It felt like I was living on one little AAA battery instead of the usual four D batteries. When in my room, I screamed at the top of my lungs and laid my ear against my stereo speakers that were on full blast. I had dreams of demons and devils and evil things. I drifted in and out of hallucinations. Then I stopped grooming. I stopped the skimpy clothes and started wearing men’s T-shirts. I wouldn’t brush my hair, wear shoes, or even turn my shirts right-side-out. I went to school with inside-out shirts that were backwards, with the tags sticking out in front, under my chin. I lost the will to live, so it didn’t really matter
what
I looked like. I still possessed enough vanity to wear makeup though. I felt as if my being pretty was the only power I held. But as for the rest of me, I looked homeless.

The kids at school left me alone, except for the random gangster girls bussed in from South Central L.A. who shouted at me and called me a crazy bare-footed bitch. The Latin cholas left me alone, raising their penciled-in eyebrows and shaking their heads. I was so tired, depressed, and suicidal that I feared none of them at that point. I would have beaten the shit out of or tried to kill any one of them who stepped to me. People stayed away- even Jeff’s hateful girlfriend shut up after a certain point.

My mom made a plan to move us all into our grandmother’s house. We had nowhere else to go. When everything was packed and being moved, my sister and I had our belongings in these little train cases. Mine was covered in stickers on the inside and it held my favorite cassette tapes, some makeup, rocker jewelry, and little knick knacks that made me happy. It was a little tiny piece of luggage, but it had my
life
inside. What was left of it, anyway.

We moved in with my grandmother that February. She still lived in a small house in Canoga Park, which was the house where my mother grew up. I normally loved and felt comforted by the house, but this time, it felt dark and sad. Canoga Park was not a bad neighborhood in the 1950’s and even in the early 1980’s it wasn’t
that
bad.  But by 1989, the homes in that particular neighborhood had a lot of security bars on the windows and the surrounding area had become infested with illegal aliens. The neighborhood wasn’t as safe as the one we had just left.

I got my mother’s childhood room, and my sister got what was the TV room (and Aunt Billie’s room before that), and my mother shared a room with her mother. When I opened my closet, I saw 1950's nursery wallpaper with lambs and ribbons on it. It was pretty, but my taping pictures of L.A. Guns all over it soon destroyed it. My bedroom floor became quickly covered in clothes and shoes and the bathroom was soon full of wet towels. Within a month or two, the kitchen had roaches that scattered when a light was turned on. We were slobs and my poor grandmother said nothing.

***

One day, I started scratching my private parts and couldn’t stop. I laid in my bed and cried non-stop because it hurt so badly. There was no down time; it felt like someone had my skin in a vice grip and was pinching me as hard as they could for hours and hours. My eyes watered, my teeth clenched. I was taken to a doctor at some point and the mystery was solved: I had a horrible, horrible case of VD. It hurt worse than pretty much anything I have ever been through. They put me on some big horse-pill painkillers and tried getting rid of it, but it became so painful I had to go to the emergency room.

I was referred to a doctor who I couldn’t stand.  One time he was trying to treat me with a Q-tip of acid and he accidentally spilled the entire bottle between my legs, into my butt crack. I screamed in pain. It burned me so terribly that big pieces of my skin were falling off in clumps when I got home. I think the thing I hated most about him though, was the fact that he constantly told me I was pretty, and he always wanted to examine my fifteen-year-old breasts. But instead of having me lie down and put an arm behind my head as he felt in a circular motion (the proper way to do a breast exam), he had me stand against the door as he lifted up my shirt. It was just a man squeezing my breasts and getting off on it. I knew it wasn’t right and wanted to scream but I was defeated and exhausted. Who was there to tell? I actually did tell my mother once, but she thought I was being dramatic and ignored me. I even brought it back up to her a few years later and told her it was still bothering me that he was a practicing doctor. This was another scenario where I wanted her to cock a rifle on a mountaintop and vow to shoot the nuts off anyone who touched her child in a sexual manner. Instead, she told me to write a letter to his higher-ups and then went on with her day.

A few years later, I
wrote a letter to the American Medical Association and never received a response. I even went back into the doctor’s office by myself after I could drive, to try to complain. At that point, they told me he no longer worked there. You would think he got in trouble- but guess what he does now? He has his own practice in Encino. He is an infertility doctor. He probably suggests he screw people’s wives to see if there are any problems.

Needless to say, I was pretty unhappy with my life and health problems there in 1989. I didn’t know how to deal with my pain and my anger. I started hurting myself: beating myself in the face, hitting myself with things, and sometimes asking other people to hurt me. I know now that self-injury is a coping mechanism, but back then, I just felt so
grotesque
inside that I felt I deserved abuse. I had a lot of self-hatred. Guys picked me up and tossed me across the room like a lifeless corpse and I hit the ground in pain, but I was somehow relieved. Other times I tried to strangle myself, but I couldn’t do it. I was too chicken to actually kill myself, but I had no desire to continue my life, so I lived as if I were not alive. I lost all hope for myself. I never thought of the future; I didn’t think I would make it that far. I never, ever considered that I would live to be in my thirties. I thought I would die either that year or within the next few years and I didn’t care; it didn’t scare me. I did not fear death for the first time. I even prayed for death sometimes. I cried and I begged God to please,
please
kill me. I just wanted to die.

Too many things had happened at once. We left our childhood home very abruptly, my father was a drug addict and was no longer a part of our family; I had been date raped, videotaped, blackmailed, contracted a painful venereal disease, was bulimic, suicidal and failing school. I was in a lot of trouble and couldn’t seem to get it under control by myself. I knew I got myself into each mess. I knew I chose to dress and behave the way I did. I knew I had no one to blame but myself.

I stayed at my grandmother’s house with my mother and sister for another three years, but we all avoided each other and were not a family. My mother and I especially hated each other. No one should treat a parent the way I treated her. I was really horrible toward her, but it was because I was hurt inside. She told me that the only reason I was still living with her was because I was a minor and it was the law. As soon as I turned eighteen, I would be toast. Instead of telling her it hurt me that she seemed to have given up on me, I decided to be a raging bitch to her instead. My sister and I did not really get along too well either, but I don’t remember hating her; I remember there were good times and bad. I don’t recall ever consoling her through her own troubles though; I was too selfish. We all handled it in our own way. My mom shut down. I acted out and was wild, vocal, and angry. My sister escaped to the homes of her friends, who had more normal lives.

My sister says:

“I remember hearing
Mom locked in the bedroom, screaming at the top of her lungs. Just screaming and screaming. I thought she was going to kill herself. You don’t scream like that unless you want to die. I tried to knock on the door and help her but it was locked. She told me later she
was
going to kill herself. She had a lot on her plate at that time, and I wasn’t on that plate. She stopped raising me.”

My dad became a transient, living off other people’s generosity. He wasn’t cut out to be a father, the head of a family. He wasn’t cut out to follow the rules. Maybe he was cut out to, but refused to- I never really found out. Just like his hippie days before we were born, he ‘lived off the land,’ his favorite thing to do. He was always running from the law, the IRS- the government in general (oh- and the Hell’s Angels were also after him for some reason). He felt a horrible guilt for not being a father to us, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t make it up to us.

***

One thing that I did not like about living in Canoga Park was that I had to wake up at 4 a.m. to go to school back in our old neighborhood. I was given the option to transfer somewhere closer to my grandmother's house, but I chose to finish out my high school years at the school I was already attending. I didn't want to start over somewhere else. I had just gotten used to my school's layout and felt I was dealing with the kids' reaction of me better than I had when I first got there. I didn’t want to have that nightmare all over again with a new set of kids.

My mother made an arrangement with our f
ormer neighbors, the Lauderdales, who agreed to take me in three hours before school started each day. I slept in a leather chair in their dark, heavily draped, tobacco-scented living room for two hours. Then, at 7 a.m., they woke me as they left the house to go to their jobs and I walked to school and spent another hour hanging out with the smokers at The Wall before school started. I didn’t mind the mornings though. The bad part was
after
school, when I had to take public transportation home. It took me an hour. I got on the RTD bus and took it down one of the big main streets. Then I had to wait twenty minutes or so for the next bus, which took me to a street that was a block from my grandmother’s house.

Waiting for the public bus to arrive was sheer misery, especially when it was either ninety degrees outside and I was dripping sweat in the direct sun
, or it was freezing and I didn’t have warm enough clothes.  There was always some crazy, fat man in a stained shirt yelling at an imaginary person, or guys who looked like serial killers rubbing their dicks against me when the bus was crowded and we had to stand. That was the worst. I had to shove several men for doing that. I was about to write that it was scary, but I was pretty tough- it didn’t scare me. If I would have had a knife on me I would have sunk it into one of them with no problem at all. I remember always being starving and having to sit on a bus bench in front of a Subway sandwich shop, where I could smell fresh bread baking (no matter that their bread always smells better than it actually tastes, just like movie theater popcorn). It was torturous. I wanted to hold up the store and steal a tray of the bread and then eat it right there at the bus stop like a ravenous maniac.

The second I got home, I dropped my books and went straight to the kitchen to make myself my favorite dish: Rice-A-Roni, either chicken or beef flavor. The sodium content was in the quadruple digits, but who cared? That shit was delicious. Sometimes I watched
Married…with Children
on TV later in the evening, but the hit shows of the time didn’t really interest me:
21 Jump Street, The Tracy Ullman Show, It’s Gary Shandling’s Show, COPS.
I recall going to see
the movie
Heathers
with Karen, but other than that, I didn’t do much. I spent most of my time listening to music, and not the popular music of the day, which would have been Al B. Sure, Paula Abdul’s
Forever Your Girl
album, Milli Vanilli, Bobby Brown or New Kids on the Block. I did like Nenah Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance,” but that was about it. I could barely stomach the rock bands of the time, like the Bulletboys, Warrant, and Winger. I mostly listened to my Faster Pussycat and L.A. Guns tapes.

Faster Pussycat, who I had been introduced to through
The Metal Years
, wore lots of scarves, and a little makeup and hair spray. Despite the fact that they were uglier than a monkey’s asshole, their songs were catchy and upbeat and I thought they were putting me in a better mood. L.A. Guns were pretty hard looking; they wore black leather pants and had black hair, black eyeliner and lots of tattoos. They were not cutesy. I felt they most represented me. I found their look attractive and their music was my favorite. I could listen to it for hours and hours without getting tired of it.