safety of the United Auto Workers.
I fell madly in love with him. I was drawn to his quiet demeanor, the way he’d sit cross-legged on the floor at our parties, leaning forward occasionally to utter nearly inaudible comments. He liked to read, do drugs and ride motorcycles, and he turned me on to Neil Young. Our relationship encompassed all the cliches of passionate nights and dazed happiness. I was sixteen; Dean, twenty.
But we needed to score some birth control for those passionate nights. This was the early eighties, when the worst fears surrounding sexual contact could be cured with a script for penicillin. How innocently lucky we were, the last children of a halcyon era. Dean offered to buy condoms, but I felt wary: My sister was the product of a broken condom. I wanted the utter security of the Pill.
Even given their liberal views, the idea of hitting up my parents for birth control alarmed me. But one of our closest family friends, David, was an ob/gyn and my regular physician, so skulking off to the clinic my peers ducked into seemed ridiculous. While I screwed up the guts to ask my mom to make an appointment with David, Dean and I planned a trip to northern Michigan, where his family had a cabin.
My mother, of course, was no fool.
‘So I guess you’ll be needing some birth control,’ she said as we drove home from the supermarket a few weeks before the trip. I thought I was going to fall out of the Buick onto Southfield Road. ‘Uh, yeah, I will.’ Off we went to David’s office, where he gave me six months of Ortho-Novum and the freedom to fuck unfettered.
Driving back, my mother told me never to have sex in cars, as Detroit at night is not only dangerous, but often chilly. ‘Go in your bedroom and put the stereo on for privacy,’ she suggested. ‘That way, I won’t have to worry about where you are. And you won’t catch cold.’
Dean and I were together for just under a year. Initially we were happy, but our differences surfaced quickly. His family was openly anti-Semitic and they made their dislike of me plain. I didn’t allow the rush of sex and late nights of coke-fueled talk to interrupt my studies. Dean, who did differential equations on grocery lists when bored, was openly jealous. I pushed him hard to borrow money and attend a local technical college. It was none of my business, and he told me so. In truth, the college argument was indicative of deeper, irreconcilable differences. Dean came from a family that attended church on Sundays, sought other churchgoing, blue-collar people to marry and continued the tradition of large families. What I naively saw as somebody longing for more, as my parents had years earlier, was simply a boy having his wild youth before settling down to a nice housewife who would dutifully produce babies and obey the man of the house.
And then there was the cocaine. Lots of it. More than I’d ever seen. One of his brothers was a dealer, so we paid little for pure eight balls-an eighth of an ounce-folded into intricate paper squares cut from
His friends were equally amazed. I remember hanging out at the house he shared with his brothers one Wednesday night. The usual crowd was drifting around, waiting for free lines. Coke dealers always have lots of friends. Dean’s brother Trey, the dealer, arranged four neat lines on the Miller High Life mirror and shoved them across the table to where I sprawled on the couch. ‘Hey everybody! Watch this! Watch her not do it!’ The four lines sat between us, untouched, until some impatient soul reached down with a rolled bill and got high on a school night.
Our relationship ended acrimoniously. For Christmas I bought Dean a watch he’d been eyeing for months. He promptly ‘lost’ it. Whether he truly did, sold it for drugs or broke it in anger after a fight with me I cannot say. He ruefully promised to replace it ‘as soon as he had the money.’ I watched him put four or five watches up his nose before realizing cocaine meant more to him than the thirty-seven dollars I’d painfully saved from my meager school job. We broke up in an ugly, sobbing scene on New Year’s Eve, and I have not seen him since.
The breakup devastated me. I missed him so much it felt physical. I imagined him finding a skinny, narrow- hipped Catholic girl-at size twelve, I was too voluptuous for his tastes-and marrying her. Having quiet, nearsighted babies and buying his starter home on Detroit ’s east side, far from the reviled Jews and Blacks. I still think about him and wonder if he’s tamped down our relationship into something meaningless, or if he looks at his wife in the night and wonders what he missed.
A few other people wandered in and out of my family’s lives, lan, Michael’s son, was an occasional visitor, always bringing drugs, a bag of new records and an enviably sexy girlfriend. He went in for tall, collected redheads or blondes who left me quailing, so positive in my stoned stupor that I would say something stupid, I’d lapse into paranoid silence.
There were others: William, who discussed the scientific versus the aesthetic structure of the world with me on a long walk one day when I was seven; a guy lan often crashed with named Blaster; and Cecilia, who’d been gang-raped at a party while tripping on LSD. Talented, bright, charismatic, they’d arrive unexpectedly from Lan- sing or Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, illuminating the house for a few hours with laughter and talk, then disappearing just as quickly, returning in six days or four months or never again. These people were either incapable of or uninterested in ongoing friendships. It seemed to me that the more people ‘understood things,’ the less capable they were of functioning in the world, barely getting by on parental dole or dealing. William’s brilliance turned the corner to insanity; last I heard he lived in the streets. Blaster moved from place to place, dealing. Cecilia married a straight, dull fellow and had babies, lan did nothing, dropping out of college and living off Michael, collecting a string of pretty girls who eventually tired of his laziness and dumped him. My combination of good student, outstanding co-op worker of the year, and drug-user with my folks on weekends, while odd, wasn’t impossible. Why didn’t other people do it?
During my teens, I remember surveying our lives, relative to the world around us. The straight route led to financial freedom, affording me the creature comforts I wanted: books, records and nice clothing. The counterculture neglected the material things, shunning those values as ‘square,’ offering instead people who shared some of my core values about politics and drugs, people who didn’t freak out over my parents. A foot in both worlds struck me as practical and not a particularly difficult way to live. I often hid my glee in high school, the model student in the front row as the counselors raved at us about the dangers of drugs.
I spent countless hours trying to figure out people like lan, who did absolutely nothing, or Cecilia, who crossed into the straight life with nary a backward glance. Ultimately I gave up, becoming wary and distant from the parade through our home. Attachment to these people, however appealing, only meant hurt when they vanished. And, invariably, they did.
Friendless and unspeakably lonely, I despaired of finding people who shared my world view. My peers were a bunch of smart, rich kids following the party line, wearing Levi’s with the waist size blacked out, meeting their future spouses at B’nai B’rith youth group meetings, readying their applications to the University of Michigan. Their predictable behavior patterns enraged me. I had no desire to be like them. I wanted them to be like me.
When I was seventeen, my family decided to move to Los Angeles, where my father could find lucrative employment in the burgeoning defense industry. I was thrilled to leave, thinking of California ’s then-affordable state colleges and of all the hip, like-thinking people I’d befriend or date. Only my mother cried when we left Caroline behind.
My father found a job at a big defense company doing government contract work. He loathed it and everything it represented, but we had medical insurance, were able to replace the rusted-out station wagon and could even afford to go see Tom Petty at the Universal Amphitheater. A local kid sold us something we’d never heard of, ‘skunk,’ pot so powerful it left my sister giggling helplessly in the bathtub.
The move gave us an enormous culture shock. People spoke unrecognizable valley-girl English. Strip malls lined every non-residential street, each anchored by a nail salon. People were enthralled by their fingernails and their weight. The weather was the same every day: hot, dry and unbearably bright. Our first Christmas in LA. utterly unnerved me. I had taken a terrible job with an insurance company while waiting to establish residency for college. The city had overdecorated, as if compensating for the eighty-five degree heat. I remember emerging from the office building at noon. Christmas Eve, hitting that blast of dry Santa Ana heat and wanting to kill myself.
