I got a call from my sister, Scarlett, “did you know mom is living in a van down by the river?”
“Yah, I just got her Christmas card”.
A photograph of her in the tent she’s living in, decorated with Christmas lights and garland, mocking the perfect family cards we all get, with the coordinating outfits in front of the Christmas tree holding their perfect baby and petting their well behaved dog. I got Scarlett’s Chris Farley joke from Saturday Night Live where Farley plays a motivational speaker that preaches to teens not use drugs or you’ll end up, “living in a van down by the river.” Ironically mom doesn’t use drugs and a van by the river would actually be better than my sister, Beth’s garage. Rivers are pretty and a van gives you mobility. Beth’s garage is filled with a family of guinea pigs and smells like a low rider. My sister Beth has been struggling with a meth addiction for the last few years. She came clean and asked for help, so mom moved into her garage to help out with her three kids.
Mom has always been low maintenance when it comes to her sleeping arrangements. When we were kids mom always sacrificed a bedroom to us girls and slept in the dining nook of our apartment’s kitchen, hanging a curtain to separate the refrigerator and her bed. My 14 year old sister, Beth, her baby and baby’s daddy lived in one bedroom. Scarlett and I shared the other bedroom along with her gutter punk friends that squatted on our floor. By day they begged for spare change on Pacific Avenue in our hometown of Santa Cruz, California. By night they were shooting up while mom slept in the kitchen. I remember us all sitting at the table eating cereal one morning, when mom asked why all the spoons were bent and burnt, naive that her daughter was a junkie.
When I turned eighteen I wanted to get out of my fucked up house, so I applied for the Coast Guards. I was rejected for a variety of reasons:
A.) I failed the ASFAB test.
B.) I was on drugs.
C.) I was over the weight limit.
I was told the military took everybody. Everybody but me. I came up with a plan B.
There was a bad flood this particular winter where roads up in the mountains of Boulder Creek had washed out leaving people trapped, once they were rescued the homes were abandoned because the homeowners lost access to their properties. As tweekers/opportunist the light bulb went off and like Lewis and Clark on crack we pioneered to find a new place to call home. I guess this is where my adult life began.
My career as a tweeker started when I met Jen at alternative high school where I was sent my junior year, after my mom’s boss kicked me out of her home we were living in. My dad took us camping once a year up at Pinecrest Lake Resort with his side of the family. It’s the one and only consistent thing we did throughout my childhood. Pinecrest is one of the few happy memories I had; we loved it so much we made up a song about it and sung it the last 45 minutes to the resort. Swimming in the lake, campfire stories with my uncles where we would shout as loud as we could, “Elmer!” The legend goes: a boy named Elmer way back when got lost so everyone in camp yelled his name until he was found, it became a nightly tradition that we absolutely loved. I still yell Elmer when I’m alone in the middle of nowhere. A week later dad drove us back home, only this year we returned to an empty apartment.
Mom and Ms. Reese pulled up in an U-Haul and notified us that we had moved. Mom has never been good with her finances. She was arrested once for writing a check to an account that had been closed in order to buy groceries. The judge ordered her to attend bad check writing classes, the store owners, an Asian family took matters into their own hands, where humiliation was the worst form of punishment. My lab partner at school, asked if my mom’s name was Joan, yes how’d you know that?
“There’s a big blown up poster of your mom’s check that they spray painted “THIEF” across.”
Mom explained that the IRS began to garnish her wages due to the fact that both my parents claimed all three of us kids, and now they want their money back. Ms. Reese, my mom’s boss was aware of the situation, and insisted on taking us in. She was recently divorced with two pre-teen kids that we went to school with. Of course the rumors started that my mom and Ms.Reese were lesbian lovers. Shortly after we moved in I found out I was pregnant at age 16. Ms. Reese thought I was a bad influence on her children, so I was sent to live with my dad. He enrolled me in alternative high school after I had my abortion.
I had a clean slate where nobody knew my mom was a lesbian thief or that I was knocked up. My first day of class this anorexic, fast talking, butt rock chick introduced herself then asked to bum a smoke, we bonded over a Newport and she asked if I had a car. “Yeah, I babysat three kids all summer to save up enough for this piece of shit.”
“Can you give me a ride to work?” she asked, “I’ll kick you down a line.”
A line of what I wondered, but of course I said, “Sure!” I was never one to say no to anyone and desperate to meet a friend at my new school, it seemed like a good idea. “Where do you work?” I asked
“Redwood Video Store,” she failed to mention it was located 45 minutes up in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
We got to this little town in the middle of nowhere, where Jen knew everyone. She chopped up the yellow rock on a Grateful Dead CD and handed me a short straw. Having no experience with this drug I didn’t know not to exhale, I blew my line all over her chest; she took the straw and began sniffing up her sweater. “Have you ever snorted crank before?”
“No,” I admitted, as she split up the remaining line into two.
“Inhale! Or I’ll beat your ass girl!” Frustrated she did her line and got out of the car.
“Do you want to hang out?” She asked.
“Now that I’m high I may as well,” I thought, I’m not gonna go hang out with my dad.
This became my new after school hangout, after work we would go to her boyfriend’s trailer where we would drink ice beer and tweek on anything we could take apart. The next year my mom paid off the “Man” and we got our own apartment which was crowed with people and drama, so after the storm hit that’s when we came up with plan B to relocate.
We paraded up the washed out road, a U-Haul, motor home, 4×4 truck and my piece of shit packed with more shit tied to the roofs. We came to a washed out section of the road and had to hike by foot until we stumbled on two men with a campfire. They were camping out and suggested some property on the other side of the river, where a home was partially finished and the owner had gone to jail on some kind of insurance scam. The challenging part was that the bridge had washed out. We threw down a log and hiked up to the house armed with tweeker tools in hand. A maglight, which doubles as a weapon, a chainsaw, which doubles as a weapon and a siphoning tube, which doubles as a weapon. We were in tweeker heaven, just to clarify a tweeker is a person who uses methamphetamines, which is characteristic of taking things apart and inventing a new hybrid use. One of the tweekers remodeled the kitchen where he built cabinets designed for us to wash the dishes, put them in the cupboard wet then, flick a switch that activated a blow-dryer which had the dishes dry in minutes. Obsessing on details like scrubbing the carpet where the cat pissed for six hours and paranoia, which lead to booby traps and security cameras. We danced around like we won the tweeker lottery; we were a new tweeker family in a new tweeker home. We built a tweeker bridge and made a trail for the 4×4 used as a shuttle system to my car, which was used to go into town because my car was the only one with legal plates. Just when our tweeker oasis couldn’t get any better we discovered what we called the “magic bus.”
The previous owner lived in this bus as he was building the house; he worked at the dump and would bring home anything salvageable, with the dream of having the world’s biggest yard sale and making a load of cash. This was tweeker orgasm time, we furnished the entire house, from the curtains to the dishes; we spent hours every day digging around the bus.
Tweeker paradise wouldn’t last forever. The tweeker I called my boyfriend and I had an ugly tweeker break-up where the final straw was him pushing me down into a puddle of mud then shoving the mud into my mouth, yelling all kinds of abusive bullshit another characteristic of a tweeker is an explosive violent temper. I packed up my shit and headed back to my moms. I was walking down Pacific Avenue contemplating painting myself silver and standing like a statue for money, when I saw a flyer looking for people to work at a summer camp. I called the number and they told me to come up for the orientation the following week. I arrived an out of place tweeker surrounded by college sorority kids. I escaped to the designated smoking porch to light up a Newport. A guy walked up and asked for a light. He looked at my lighter and asked if I was a tweeker.
“How’d you know, I mean, why would you ask that?” I blushed.
“Your smoking Newports and your lighter has been drawn on for hours, you can’t bullshit a bullshiter.” He introduced himself as Jack, a guy from Washington that was looking to escape his own tweeker lifestyle.
After a week of training and flirting with Jack we went on a group camping trip to the coast with the fraternity brothers. I got so drunk I passed out and awoke in my own urine. I snuck away to clean myself up while the group was still asleep. I hiked to a cove and undressed. I bathed myself in the freezing pacific and washed my only change of clothes. I sunbathed nude while my clothes were drying, Jack walked up a few hours later,
“I’ve been searching everywhere for you. I thought I lost my new girlfriend.”
“So now I’m your girlfriend?” I wanted to make sure I heard correctly.
We made love for the first time on the beach, and I was falling in love.
The next weekend off Jack and I plus one angry hippy and our Swedish lifeguard set out for an adventure in the city. We got to San Francisco around 10pm in my piece of shit car. We hit Haight/Ashbury Street and walked into a bar with a band playing. We did shots of Jaggier Meister and ran to the bathroom to puke up my nineteen-year-old lungs. I’m gone for three minutes and return to Jack on stage hugging the band after their set. “Do you know those guy?” I ask.
“No, I just wanted to let them know that I thought they fuckin rocked!” He said, “Look they signed their set list for me.”
I couldn’t hold his poser behavior against him; he didn’t know any better growing up in Port Orchard, a stick in Washington. He had a lot to learn, and I had a lot to teach, like we don’t use the “N” word in this house, and we need to have that White Arian Youth tattooed on your arm covered up immediately. People at camp confronted me about Jack being racist. No, no he just doesn’t know any better, he’s really very loving, which brings me to Rule #1: We don’ t bring home hitch hikers.
I got home from work to find some random guy on my couch, “who’s this?” I ask.
“Jeff, he’s hitch hiking, but with it raining I offered a warm place for the night.”
I turned to Jeff and asked, “Where should I tell my family to look for our bodies?”
We closed the bar on Haight/Ashberry then did some paper rock scissors as to who was going to drive back to camp. The Swedish lifeguard lost, and had to drive us back in my piece of shit car. At the bottom of the mountain up to camp we were pulled over by the police. The Swedish lifeguard was about to experience the American jail system. When the officer asked Jack for his ID, Jack replied, “Suck my dick.” The officer didn’t like that and tossed Jack in the wagon with the lifeguard. The hippy and I cooperated and were let go but my piece of shit car was impounded and we were three miles at the bottom of the mountain in the middle of the night. The hippy asked how much money I had on me, fuck my wallet was still in the car.
“Well I don’t know how you’re getting home, but I’m getting a cab…later.”
That fucking hippy bailed out on me. I had no choice but to hike up the mountain, a half-hour later of blindly walking up the darkest road I’ve ever not seen, the cab passed me. Determined to survive our first date I continued up the hill, later the cab came back down the hill, pulled up next to me where I began to chant “please don’t kill me”, when I see that it’s actually Doug, Jack’s brother who had come to my rescue.
Three months later Jack and I were window shopping in the mall. We joked outside a jewelry store about getting married, and got sucked in, before you know it a wheeling dealing salesman is running a credit check. He puts down the telephone and says congratulations… you’re approved! Jack got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. Had our credit been denied, we may have never gotten married, a year later we promised till death do us part.
from my book: Scars of Paris available at Borders and Barnes & Nobles
