Lit: A Memoir

I allowed as how I was.

You interested in some acid? Ken said.

When I told him I didn’t have any money, he smirked, saying, They make chicks pay for drugs in Texas?

Which seemed to have no right answer to it, like the school bully in A Portrait of the Artist who asks Stephen Dedalus, Do you kiss your mother? Any answer seems cause for a butt-whipping.

I shrugged. What do y’all do here?

He unfolded a small square of surf magazine to reveal an orange tab of LSD.

I knew right off I didn’t want it, but this boy was teen-idol darling. So I set the tab atop my tongue and faked swallowing, hoping for a weak dose.

He also invited me to a graduation party a few weeks down the line in Laguna. Soon as he’d scrawled out an address and sketched a map for me, I hightailed it back to the truck to spit the tab out and wash my mouth with water from a sand-gritty milk jug.

At dusk, we parked in an apartment lot where a hometown dope dealer had left his pink Lincoln Continental with its busted steering column. Easy knew somebody who lived there, and in the way of poor hippies, they cooked us noodles and let us use their bathroom in exchange for the free pot Doonie could lay on them. Secreted inside the freakishly fat surfboard—in a scooped-out hollow in its foam core—he’d ratholed a few fragrant bricks of pot and a baggie of questionably acquired pills. These investments—tucked away from the law under sheets of fiberglass and squeegeed over with resin—would free him from the factory jobs we’ll all eventually take.

For the first time in days, inside a rank plastic shower curtain flowering with mildew, water poured over me. And it was in the shower that the acid kicked in—not full bore, just enough to keep me holding myself very still. The suds swirled down my torso like chrysanthemums in a Japanese wood-block print. And my body seemed to smoke.

By the time I’d dressed, beers were being handed around. Black speakers thumped out music. The guys agreed I could sleep in the palatial luxury of the Lincoln, not that sleep was possible on that acid. Doonie helped me run an extension cord with a caged mechanic’s light so I could read. But with the nearby ocean buzzing like a hornets’ nest, I could only puzzle over the black letters squiggling off the edges of the white page.

At some point, a looming figure glided up to the foggy side window, and I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. It felt like a huge lump of cold clay. Someday I was gonna holler so long, glass would shatter and walls explode.

But it was just Doonie’s thin shape with black frazzled hair. His knuckles whapped the glass.

I body-blocked the heavy car door open, saying, You scared the fuck out of me.

Each word materialized between my lips like a tiny pink balloon that rose with other balloons in a birdlike drove.

Doonie had his sleeping bag over his shoulder like a corpse. He said, Sorry, man. Mind if I grab the front seat?

As I stared at him, his edges grew more solid, and when I told him to go ahead, there were no more balloons blipping from my lips. He plucked an azalea off the nearby bush, saying, Can you believe how this place even smells? I didn’t know the outside could smell like this.

I breathed in the living green of it, then asked if the others were asleep.

Yeah, Doonie said, except Dave keeps busting out hollering shit. He just sat up and said, We’re all gonna die! Like he’s in Nam or something.

Doonie looked around. Man, ain’t it the Ritz up in here? Don’t you know, those side lights used to light up like the Superdome.

I looked at the long bank of dead bulbs and felt a sinking at how dim and broken everything could get.

I told him I sometimes felt like smacking Quinn for mocking me anytime I recited poetry.

Nah, it ain’t like that, Doonie said. He just associates poems with some teacher telling him he’s a dumbass.

He put his callused feet up on the dashboard behind the steering wheel. I asked him what Quinn’s momma was like.

Doesn’t have one. I don’t know.

How do you not have a mother? I said, but somehow I knew, because mine had always lived on the brink of evaporation. (Strange, we never—not one time—talked about the doped-up or drunk-assed backgrounds some of us were fleeing.)

Doonie said, Quinn’s died or ran off or something. This is according to Dave, of course, so who knows. And get this, Dave also says Quinn brought a pistol to kill the waterbed king with. If he can’t get his old man’s money back. A no-shit gunslinger pistol like we used to shoplift from Woolco. You’d get a little plastic sheriff’s badge with it. He’s got some fantasy he’s gonna get even for his daddy.

The word daddy hung in the air outlined in gold. Closing my eyes, I found it in blue on my eyelids. I could feel the roots my daddy had grown in me—actual branches in my body. His was the ethos of country folk: people who kept raked dirt yards rather than grassy lawns because growing grass was too much like field work; people who kept the icebox on the porch, plugged in with an extension cord run through a window, so folks driving by would know they had one. I could feel Daddy’s roots in me, but I couldn’t fit him into any version of my life I could concoct. He’d been going away for years, out into the garage at night, down into the bottle he secreted under his truck seat.

I adapted to Daddy’s absence partly by smoking enough reefer to float me through a house where—increasingly—nobody’s path intersected with another.

Doonie’s voice jolted me back into the warm car. He said, You know what I’m gonna do?

A lot of obscene and illegal stuff, I’d wager.

He said, I’m gonna fix this Lincoln up and drive it back to Leechfield. My senior year ride. No more Mama’s Torino.

Like you will, I said.

Like I won’t.

My brain was starting to melt and soften again around an old image of Daddy from childhood. How he’d come home at dawn in his denim shirt, and I’d be the only one up, peering out the back drapes till he walked across the patio. Lots of times, he’d come in and lie on his stomach on the bare boards of our yet-to-be-carpeted floor, and I’d walk barefoot along his spine. I’d have to hold on to the bookcase to keep from sliding off the sloping muscles of his back, but I’d work my toes under his scapular bones, and he’d ask, You feel my wings growing under there, Pokey? And I’d allege that I did. He claimed it always helped him get to sleep in the daylight. It was maybe the only time I felt like a contributor to the household, somehow useful in our small economy.

In the Lincoln, the image faded inside me, and I heard myself say, What use am I now?

Doonie said, Something wrong?

What the hell was wrong? Here I was, where I’d planned to be, but it felt like … like nothing. Some black and rotting cavity of wrongness still stank somewhere inside me. I could smell it but not name it.

I lay in the dark a long time and had just about forgotten Doonie was there at all when he tossed the azalea blossom over the backseat and it fell in the middle of me, as if dropped from a cloud.

Within a week or so, the party the Ken doll had invited me to rolled around. It was my only day off from the T-shirt factory where I sewed on size labels with a bunch of Mexican ladies in their sixties. Before that, we’d starved, living on what we could fetch out of grocery store dumpsters plus some raids on local orange and avocado orchards.

Walking the canyon roads that day, I couldn’t find the posh Laguna address, so I spent hours flip-flopping up and down, getting the occasional whiff of coconut oil and chlorine, overhearing the soft Spanish spoken by some pool cleaners.

But I rounded each corner believing rescue would show up. Passing a road called Laurel Canyon, I remembered a folksinger with a record named that and near-expected her to show up with a basket of sunflowers. Or Neil Young would amble toward me in a fringed leather jacket. Or J. D. Salinger himself, who’d become my mentor and order up poems from me like so many diner pancakes. …

(What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)

At one point a town car glided up, and my heart bounded like a doe as the window silently slid down. But it was a wrinkled lady in tennis whites, asking in bad Spanish if I was Luz from the agency.

Parched, covered in dust, with blisters the size of half dollars on both feet, I finally stood on the coastal highway, having adopted the most desultory hitchhiking manner in history. Holding up a cardboard sign that read SAN CLEMENTE—where my pals had been surfing all day—I tried to look bored, like a girl who didn’t actually need a ride. I was a hitchhiker to aspire to.

Toward dusk, a black Volkswagen pulled up, its driver a tattered-looking doper with sleek raven hair and pork-chop sideburns. He jumped out and ran around to open my door, announcing that Tennessee men were bred to manners. Sam-u-el, his name was—short version Sam—a guy old enough to be sporting an incipient widow’s peak flanked by bald spots.

The car smelled like something left in an ice chest too long, and the back seat had been torn out, trash piled in. He claimed his old lady was gonna fry his ass if he didn’t get that mess cleaned up, but he’d driven down from Oregon and was wore out.

I said my fiancée was the same way, thus believing we’d entered into some chaste understanding. We pulled from the road’s shoulder, peace-sign roach clip swinging from the rearview.

He was a slow driver, puttering along at a tractor’s pace, and in that landscape, I had no reason for fear. Along the populated beach were tanned, bemuscled men; women whose hands bore diamonds the size of gumballs. I tried to roll the window down more, but it stuck about halfway. He drove on, head-banging to the backbeat of Ozzy Osborne’s Paranoid. On a steep hill, he downshifted and said, Mary, do you believe you live by what you earn?

I said sure, stunned less by the question than by the breath he’d exhaled—real snake-shit breath.