Everyone thinks Oregon is full of peace-loving hippies. Not the people I was around. They had jacked-up trucks, boosted up with big wheels, and gun racks in the back windows. There were dead deer hanging upside down from practically every carport, with blood draining into a bucket. I have never, in all the places I’ve been, been in a place more happily vicious than Oregon. I know others have had different experiences there, and I am glad for them, it just wasn’t my experience.
People had severe reactions to me there. They went out of their way to tell me I was strange and hideous. I remember encountering a mother in the Fred Meyer department store—she must have been about thirty, a grown woman—who jerked her little girl away from me when I smiled at her, calling me an ugly freak. Her daughter started to cry. I decided to go and see what it was she saw. What was it about me that was ugly? I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes looked even, my nose did, too; I couldn’t figure out what it was. I had short hair, but what was wrong with that?
One day when I was about eleven, walking down the street in Santa Clara, a suburb on the outskirts of Eugene, I heard some really awful rock music and a loud car exhaust. I knew this was a bad combination and I was proved right. “Freak!” the guy in the car yelled. I ignored him and kept walking. Next thing I knew I was hit in the head and covered with a brown liquid. Wet from my head down to my toes. The car sped off. As I wiped at my eyes I saw a giant plastic bottle of Pepsi with its top jaggedly cut off. Then I noticed the stink rising. The bottle was the driver’s chew spit. It was like the movie Carrie where she’s doused in blood, except for I was doused in nicotine and saliva mixed with some old soda. I didn’t cry, I just sighed and went home to hose myself off. The chew nicotine smell didn’t leave me for a week. Every time the air moved around me I could smell the hate.
My father was still living in Colorado at this time, and my parents decided I was to go back to Evergreen and live with him again. We kids bounced back and forth fairly often as there was no formal custody agreement. It was such a strange dichotomy. I went from Oregon, where I was relentlessly deemed hideous and ugly and freakish, to Evergreen, where I was suddenly popular and considered a beauty. This was a strange development. I looked in the mirror again and stared at the same eyes, nose, and mouth, and wondered why before when I had been in another state I’d had things thrown at me, and here I was being worshipped and anointed with instant popularity. I thought about it deeply and came to the conclusion that other human’s reactions were useless to me. Ultimately, it allowed me to cancel out what other people thought of me. Later on, when fame came, this deduction probably saved my sanity.
In the meantime, I was handed one more mind fuck on my very first night back at my father’s, when I told him what had gone on with Lawrence. He simply said to me, “Well, you made a mistake, you should have sent me a letter from your school.” The idea had never occurred to me. That effectively shut that conversation down and made the whole situation somehow my fault.
The two sides of my father became more pronounced. His light side was still magical. He made things fun simply because of how he reacted to the world. My father had a laugh that sounded like this crazed hyena and just when you thought it would stop, it would continue, and everybody else around him would start laughing, too. I can still hear it today. But at this point the dark side was starting to appear more regularly. He was getting angrier and angrier that the little girls in the family were growing up, and not so worshipful. That included his wife. He was having more flashes of rage and becoming more and more cruel. Eventually I had to go back to Oregon to my mom.
A few years later, I was attending Madison Junior High, my least favorite school in my spotty scholastic career. In eighth grade, I went to my first and only school dance. It took place in a squat brown building with bad lighting and cheap decorations. I was skirting around the edges of the room, on the sidelines of the crowd, when I heard a gravelly voice say, “Heyyyyyy. You wanna hallucinate?”
His name was Jack Fufrone Jr. I recognized him from sex-ed class, where we had just learned about fallopian tubes. He had a curly oiled mullet that was strangely mesmerizing, and one of those downy molester mustaches that young rednecks like to cultivate. It was clear my teenage drug dealer had been held back a few grades.
Fufrone Jr. tore off a tiny piece of paper and told me to put it under my tongue. I had no clue what acid was, but I was all in for adventure. He had handed me a tiny corner of a tiny square of paper. I looked at him and took the rest of the square, too. Soon music was pulsating off the rec room walls, and my ears heard every little noise. I left the dance to wander the grounds. Trees started to breathe. My soft young mind was on fire.
After the dance was over, my friend Linda took me home and dropped me on my front lawn, where I lay tripping my brains out, pine needles in my hair, staring up at the trees. My mother came out, dragged me inside, and propped me up on the couch. Furious, she began the interrogation. “So what is it? Are you stoned?” I didn’t even know what that meant. “Are you drunk? Are you high?” She kept pummeling me with questions, and I was so annoyed because I just wanted to feel the feelings that I was feeling and see what I was seeing, without this rude interference.
Since the acid had rendered me mute, I had to marshal the strength to speak. I managed to summon just two words: “Fuck” . . . “you.” It was like a silent bomb went off. I had never cursed at my mother. Major miscalculation.
By this point, there was another man in the picture, my new stepdad, Steve. He was a mean dry drunk. I remember him telling me that mosquitos never bit him because he had mean blood. He was not at all into us, my mother’s children. We could all tell he didn’t want us to exist. But we did, so there was a problem.
He was not kind to my younger brothers. Brutal. He didn’t like me, either, because I could see him for what he was, and I was always trying to alert my mother. Steve saw his opportunity to get me out of his hair, and he jumped at it. He started in that I was a drug addict, had all the earmarks of a drug addict, because I liked to wear all black and listen to the Doors. One hit of acid. One. Hit. I’m fairly sure it requires more to be an addict.
Two weeks later my mother deposited me in a drug rehab program where I was locked up, at age thirteen, my shoes taken from me to prevent my escape. I told the doctors that I had never taken drugs in my life beyond the one hit of LSD, and they told me I was in denial. Hats off to them: there was no way out of this one. My home for the foreseeable future was the top floor of Sacred Heart hospital, in miserable Eugene.
The time I spent in rehab was both entertaining and monotonous. They taught us about drugs for about four hours a day: what the street names were, what the street value was, where you could get it, what its effects were. Everything you ever wanted to know about drugs but were afraid to ask, straight from the authorities. What the fuck? Did they want repeat customers?
I was by far the youngest person there and soon became the ringleader. One time in the dining room I snorted Sweet’N Low sugar substitute to prove how tough I was and to piss off the nurses. I had never snorted anything, but I saw it in one of the hospital’s educational films. That was maybe the most painful thing I’ve ever shoved up my nose, so the joke was on me. I can honestly say that sugar substitute is a real chemical. You probably shouldn’t ingest it and certainly not snort it. The drain was vile. It tasted like rat poison. I managed to keep a poker face and refused to cry like I wanted to do. Making it seem like nothing was probably the best acting I’ve done to date. The nurses were very unhappy, but I got a cheer from my fellow rehabbers.
There was family therapy one day a week and that was a joke. Everyone in your family had to tell you about how they were affected by your drug use. It didn’t really work because I had only done one hit of acid. Mostly my brothers and sisters looked confused. My sister