Thursday, November 29, 2007
Three Girls Chapter One
Three Girls In A Teepee
By
Linda Kay Silva
By
Linda Kay Silva
1977
“You have got to be out of your mind,” seventeen-year old Lauren said when the beat up hippy van with its Hemp Forever bumper sticker stopped at its final destination.
“Now girls,” Sandy said, inhaling the fresh air. “Open your minds…”
“So we can lose it, like you’ve obviously done?” This came from sixteen-year old Vicky, the middle daughter, who had not even bothered to open her eyes to see what it was Lauren was grumbling about. Vicky hadn’t opened her eyes throughout the two day trip from Davis, California to Mohawk, Oregon; so distraught was she over leaving her friends. She believed if she couldn’t see the changes, they didn’t really exist. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t curious, which she wasn’t, but it was more like denial, which in a teenager is as strong as cement. Her parents, Sandy and David had to practically tear her out of the arms of her best friend the morning they’d left.
“How bad can it be?” Sheryl, the youngest teen asked as she popped up from the far back of the van. Of the three girls, she was the only one who looked forward to the move, seeing it, as she always did, as an adventure. Ever since she was a little girl, Sheryl had wanted an adventure, and this was as good an as any. A teenager whose glass is always half full is the bane to every other downtrodden and depressed teen, including her two older sisters.
Lauren groaned. “You have to see it to believe it.” Lauren slouched back down in her seat as only teenagers can, making that sound that says everyone is stupid and boring. “Come on, V, open your eyes and see…”
“What. The. Fuck. Is. That?” Vicky cried from her place in her van. Eyes open now, they were practically bugging out of her. Her denial ran deep. This wasn’t a surprise. David and Sandy had been telling them all along what they were planning to do, so her shock was not the least bit warranted. But teenagers hear and see only what directly affects them and these girls were no exception.
“What does it look like? It’s a teepee.” Sandy kept one eye on the girls and the other on David, their stepfather. David had incredible patience with the girls except when they were critical about anything foreign. Sandy had had to explain to him on many occasions that critical is the nature of teenage girls. If they can’t bitch about something, then they will dig until they find any target. The target, in this instance, was the teepee.
“I know it’s a teepee,” Vicky said, staring out the window in disbelief. “What the hell is it doing there?”
That’s other thing about teenage girls: they are so self absorbed that if you told them as asteroid was about to hit you on the head, you’d be dead a month before they asked where you were. David and Sandy had told them about the teepee. They had explained them that they wanted a simpler life and that they bought five beautiful acres in the forests of Oregon in which to start a better life than the rat race California offered. David and Sandy had wanted off the hamster wheel, and Oregon was that stop.
“It’s our new home!” David said as the van came to a rest at the end of a gravel road. Jumping out and inhaling a deep breath, David was beaming. He loved this place.
Looking at the sour faces on the girls, Sandy chose to celebrate her new home and new life with David rather than listen to all the criticism and comments that were sure to come from the girls’ bitter mouths. Joining her husband, Sandy got out and danced with him near the deck of the teepee.
“I am not staying here,” Lauren said through grit teeth. “The second they turn their backs, I’m gone.” She exhaled loudly. “Who in the hell chooses to live in a teepee? Even the Indians don’t live in them any more!”
Vicky glared at her dancing parents, who now stood arm-in-arm at the mouth of the structure. “Don’t you dare leave me here with the Golden Child. I’ll be in jail for murder if you do.” Vicky picked up a book and flipped it over at Sheryl, hitting her in the side of the head.
“Ouch! What did you do that for?”
“For having an open mind, you twit. I can’t believe you can sit there and be happy about this.”
“Leave her alone, V. She’s retarded.”
“I am not. I just don’t see why you two have to put everything down. We’re here, so why not make the best of it?”
Lauren turned to Vicky and shook her head. “Don’t punch her.”
“But I really want to.”
“I know, but do it later. You ruin this moment for mom, and David will skin us all alive.” Lauren peered out the window at the forested area beyond the teepee and the groves of filbert trees surrounding it. “I think we passed only one car the last hour of the drive up here.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Vicky said. “This can’t be happening.”
Lauren shook her head. “Face it, V, we’ve just landed in hell. The two lunatics out there cashed in our lives and dragged us kicking and screaming to Purgatory where we’ll shrivel up like grapes in the sun. That may be their plan, who can tell? And even though Princess over there thinks it sounds like fun, I am not staying.”
Vicky stared over at Lauren knowing she meant every word. Lauren was unlike anyone Vicky had ever met. At the age of thirteen, Lauren had run away from home with her 24 year old boyfriend and stayed gone for nearly a year. It had been the most peaceful year of Vicky’s childhood, since the two of them seldom got along. In their early childhood, Lauren was always causing problems for their alcoholic father, who refused to let the kids sit on the furniture, use his stereo, or eat his food. Lauren, ever the rebel even at the tender age of six, sat, listened, and ate the forbidden items every chance she got, regardless of the beating she might receive for it. Headstrong like a Pamplona bull, Lauren refused to kowtow to anyone, including her drunken father.
“You go this time, they’ll never let you come back.”
This made Lauren laugh. “What’s there to come back to,V? A wigwam with two whackjobs passing the bong back and forth? Or maybe the backwoods experience we’re sure to enjoy here in the Hick Nation with Jethro and Bubba? Or maybe I should stay to experience the many things you can do with flannel. Thanks, but no thanks, V. I’m outta here.”
“You can’t leave me here,” Vicky said, her voice somewhere between cold and pleading. “I’ll die in this godforsaken place.”
“Won’t we all?”
“Not her.” Vicky said, kicking the sleeping bag Sheryl was in. “That nutcase will probably like it and make us both look bad for hating it. I mean it, L, if you leave me here, I will chop her to bits and feed her to the bears.”
“I don’t think there are bears here, but I could be wrong.”
“Then maybe I'll feed her to mom and David on my night to cook. I’ll say I’m fixing Golden Delight or something,”
Lauren smiled slightly. It was a rare day when she actually smiled showing teeth, and even rarer for her to laugh. Having grown up too quickly and experiencing things no teenager is really prepared to experience, Lauren McCloud was a stoic, unhappy young woman for whom cynicism and negativity were her two main spices in her life that she used with increasing regularity.
As a child, Lauren had been too precocious and rebellious for a full-time working mother and full-time drinking father to handle, and spent most of her years between six and twelve living with her grandparents. But when eighteen year old men began showing up on her grandparents’ doorstep, it was time to ship her back to the rightful owners who welcomed her with unopened arms. Her return did not go well with the other girls, who usually forgot about her unless she paid them a visit. Sheryl had once gotten herself a black eye when she introduced Lauren as her cousin who had just escaped from an insane asylum.
Lauren didn’t need an asylum; she’d always felt as if she had been raised in one.
“Oh look! There she goes now, burning her sage to cleanse the air of evil spirits.” Vicky pointed to Sandy, who was uttering something under her breath as she lit the bundled sage on fire.
“Maybe it’ll spark and burn that damn teepee to the ground,” Lauren said, leaning back in her seat and sighing. Visions of a raging forest fire loomed before her like a dream. How in the world anyone ever expected her to be a normal kid was beyond her. Her first twelve years were spent under the soused dictatorship of a man who routinely “forgot” where he parked the car after a bender. Her next six years were spent with a chanting Buddhist and a mother who belonged to a coven and spent more money a month on marijuana than she did for food.
And still, with all of that happening, it was Lauren who was force-fed Ritalin like it was candy, sent to a shrink to discuss her aggression, and then cast off to grandparents who tried their best to corral a young girl who was more wild Mustang than carnival ride pony.
Lauren could only shake her head as she watched David get into chant position while her mother walked around the teepee waving the burning sage and muttering some sort of wiccan prayer. They seemed so happy to be here. Three months ago, after returning from a retreat for Sandy’s moon lodgers, she and David announced that the family was moving. They had bought five acres and were going to build a house. Apparently, “build” meant something else in wiccan, because one didn’t really build a teepee.
So, they put David’s four bedroom three bath house in the suburbs of beautiful Davis, California for sale in order to move into some weird version of hippy paradise in the hinterlands of Oregon, a state no one ever went to or cared about. This place would never be Lauren’s idea of paradise; all this woo-woo-back-to-nature horseshit was enough to make her sick. Just when she was finally getting her life back together, they had to pull this! It was as insane as it was unfair, and had ruined all of their lives.
“Mom says to keep in mind that this is an adventure.” Sheryl perked up and stepped out of the van so she could stretch.
As adventures went, Lauren ranked this right up there with the Donner Party or maybe Amelia Earhart. This was no adventure. This was…
“What in the hell is that thing over there?” Vicky pointed to a clump of bushes and a…
“Oh my god…it’s a piece of crap trailer,” Lauren held her face in her hands and moaned. “Holy shit, girls, we’ve just become trailer trash!”
Vicky released a line of expletives that would have made a sailor proud. “No way.”
In silence, Vicky and Lauren watched as Sheryl skipped over to the trailer and opened the door to look in. Then, Sheryl went in and closed the door.
“Do you have to be so mean to her?” Lauren asked. “This is hard enough as it is.”
“Mean to who? Cindy Brady over there? I could just bash her face in.”
Before Lauren could answer, Sheryl came skipping back to the van. “I don’t think you want to hear this.”
Lauren pinched the bridge of her nose. “Don’t say it.”
“It’s our bedroom.”
Lauren and Vicky both groaned in that lovely teenage way that makes it sound like someone is jamming bamboo shoots up their fingernails.
“It’s not so bad…we can…”
“We can start this fucking van and make a run for it!” Vicky announced, reaching for the car keys that were not there.
“This can not be happening.”
For a long moment they all sat and stared at the piece of crap trailer, consigned as they were, to a doom worse than death. Teenagers live in the moment and this one had just turned sour on them and was about to get worse.
“Aren’t you coming?” Sandy asked, wafting her sage near the window. Vicky wondered if she was smoking them out. “We better start unpacking before it rains.”
“Rains?” All three said in unison.
“But it’s just October.” Vicky slouched back in her seat, the getaway now just a fleeting dream.
Laughing, Sandy opened the door and retrieved her travel stash of dope. “Oh, Vick, you’re so melodramatic, it’s funny. This is Oregon. It rains all the time.
And in the blink of an eye…it did.
Sheryl October 1977
I didn’t know what their big problem was. So it was a teepee? It was really cute and way bigger than you’d think a teepee could be. There was a wood burning stove on one end, a king size bed, dressers, nightstands, and plenty of floor space. It was really cozy and homey, and as usual, mom was able to fix it up so it was very inviting. Truth was, I loved the teepee. Of course, me liking it only made them hate me more, but I didn’t care. It’s not like we were homeless or anything. The teepee was surrounded by a huge deck that had five chairs so we could sit and enjoy the quiet when it wasn’t raining, which wasn’t often. Let me tell you, it was very quiet out there. I wasn’t used to all that peacefulness and it was really disconcerting. Truth was, it was noisier at night with all the nocturnal animals creeping about than it was in the day.
The piece of crap trailer, which we all decided was the only appropriate way to refer to it, was another story all together. The three of us had to share this incredibly confined quarters, which wouldn’t have been so bad except that one of us was certifiable, and that was my scary, psycho oldest sister, Lauren who thought that the rest of the world was full of idiots and losers.
Lauren has been the bane of my and Vick’s existence our whole lives. First, she was so out of control as a kid, they had to sedate her with those anti-hyperactivity drugs, Then, when those didn’t work, they had to send her away because she was so psychotic! She was like, totally disturbed until she finally saved us all the headache and ran away. We were seriously bummed when she came back. I always tried to stay out of her way because she’s scary. Vick, however, never learned to keep her big mouth shut around Lauren, and more often than not, paid a price for it. Lauren beat the crap out of Vick more times than I have fingers, and more than half of the time, she deserved it. I mean I may think that Lauren is half a bubble off, but I’m not about to say it to her face.
Then, when nothing else worked, they sent her of to Gram and Gramp’s. I don’t know what they did to deserve that, but you wouldn’t have heard me complaining! As long as she was gone, I didn’t care where she was. Our lives were so much better without Miss Doom and Gloom around. I swear to god, she has always been like a black cloud hovering above my air space. The words happy and Lauren were never seen in the same sentence, and when she did finally come home for good, Vick and I went into mourning.
I learned a valuable lesson, though, when Lauren came back: no matter how bad a situation is…it can always get worse. And it did.
Lauren, who had started smoking at the age of eleven, came home and joined in the pot smoking festivities of mom and David. Hello? Isn’t that child abuse or neglect or something? Who smokes dope with their children? Were they insane? Vick and I voted unanimously that they were, but that didn’t stop Vick from partaking of the evil weed herself. She would have done anything to get mom’s attention, so if mom and David asked her to set her head on fire, she would have. Poor Schlub.
The happy foursome would climb up on mom and David’s bed and pass the doobie or bong around, laughing at something that wasn’t really funny, or having deep-thought moments they all believed were really philosophical.
Not me. I actually had a life, and drugs or cigarettes had no place in it, hence the Golden Girl, Princess, Cindy Brady comments they were always making about me. I think they resented me for not being the losers they were, but I didn’t care. I had sort of hoped that that behavior would change once we got to Oregon, but I must have had a contact high to think that. This was my freshman year and I wanted to be a cheerleader and an athlete. I wanted to letter in at least two sports. I was the competitor of the family, and they, being stoners, saw competition as something evil or Republican. I figured that Vick and Lauren would letter in getting laid and doing drugs. Well, Vick would letter in both after school events. Lauren gave up smoking dope a few months ago when she had some psychotic episode like a panic attack or some other attention-getting device. They should have just straight-jacketed her when she was two and saved us all the trouble. Still, I have to say that I was glad one of them stopped drugging because she used to hang out with some pretty scary creatures who rode Harleys and shot up heroine. Ick! Even after she ran away for that year, my lunatic parents still let her come home. Word on the street was her boyfriend held her by her ankle out a second story window, and that was all she wrote. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what they’re saying. I stayed away from her for three days when she got home, sure she was carrying some disease.
Anyway, at least she’s not whacked out on drugs. She’s still a black cloud in any room, but I figure after her reaction to the teepee, even the slightest wind would carry her away again.
Vick is another story all together. She is the typical middle child with all the crap that goes into the middle-child syndrome. She is resentful that Lauren gets all the attention for her bad behavior, and resentful that I get all of the attention for my good behavior. She thinks I am treated like a princess and Lauren like a patient. Why shouldn’t I be treated better than those two fruitcakes? While mom was busy trying to keep Lauren out of the booby hatch, Vick was plugging the holes in her psyche by sleeping with any boy who showed the slightest interest in her. I mean Vick would drop her pants for any guy who looked her way. Don’t ask me why, either because she’s really cute! But cuteness can only take you so far when you have zero confidence in yourself and blame everyone but the ice cream man for your woes. Vicky is also one of the funniest girls I have ever met, but she uses that humor as a weapon to keep people at bay. So, between the two of them, I’m looking pretty good!
So, again, so what if we moved and have to live in a teepee? It’s not like it’s forever. They just have no sense of adventure, no appreciation of the unknown. They don’t know how to make lemonade out of Life’s lemons, and that’s going to haunt them forever.
In the meantime, I’ll be praying that a big wind comes our way.
Vicky 1977
Cindy Brady actually liked that god damned teepee. What a total suck up she was! I remember looking out the window and seeing her bounding around like the Energizer puppy. What a boob! She should make that damn cheerleading squad. Apparently, it’s in the twerp’s DNA. God, it’s hard to believe we are even related. I wondered how many of the flannel-wearing redneck geeks would even have time to go out for cheerleading. I mean, didn’t they have goats to milk and nuts to collect? Jesus H on a raft, but Cindy was practically orgasmic over that piece of crap trailer, which only served to really piss off the psycho.
But then, just about anything would push her buttons. I swear to god, Lauren was born with a chip on her shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore, and she would chip off rocks and huck them at Sheryl and I if we ever got in her way. Golden Girl did her best to stay clear of Lauren because she didn’t want any trouble.
Any trouble? Our whole damn lives were trouble! Oh, that’s right, the Princess didn’t experience the same life Lauren and I did. No, she got good grades, had athletic talent, and wore a size zero. She ate like a truck driver most of the time, but did she gain an ounce? Of course not. Me? If I even thought about a donut, those calories would cha-ching into my vault of fat. Now, I was far from obese, mind you, but I wasn’t Twiggy, like she was. Sure, I could have stood to lose a few pounds here and there, but I wasn’t the flabster my drunk of a father thought I was. My dad, not David. David never said a mean word to me no matter what stupid thing I did. And I did some stupid things, to be sure. My real dad would call me names like fatty-boom-ba-latty, two-ton-Tony, and any other number of hurtful names. When he was feeling particularly vicious, he’d just call me Slim. So, did I have weight issues, you think? Does a camel have a hump? And did I deal with that weight issue in a positive and constructive manner? You bet! A daily dose of cross tops and black beauties sometimes washed down with vodka or whatever liquor was available kept the weight off and the buzz on. I didn’t consider all the munchy foods we ate while partying with mom and David, of course, and before long, my weight sort of crept up on me like a bad case of gas.
Did David call me names and tell me to stop eating a bag of Doritos every night? No. As weird as David was, we really loved him to death. I mean, he must have really loved Sandy because here was a divorced witch with three out-of-control bitchy teenage girls, and yet, he still hung in there. Either he really loved her, or he had simply lost too many brain cells and thought he was still in Disneyland visiting Cinderella’s wicked step-sisters. Whichever the reason, David was one of the good guys and we needed a good guy after living with the rat bastard-car-losing drunk. Even if David uprooted my life and dragged me to the flannel capital of the world, I loved him dearly. Sure, I missed my friends, as all teenagers would, and yes, I hated the entire drippy, mossy, dreary state, but I never blamed David. Oh no. This whole thing was a plan concocted by my mother and her moon lodgers one moonlit night when they were doing some sort of séance or something equally as looney. Who the hell knows? Maybe she heard voices, like the Son of Sam that whispered to her to ruin our lives.
My life was truly ruined more than the others because I had a boyfriend, Andy, who drove a red Camaro and had the coolest hair. Hell, I was even managing school, which was more than I could say for her. I don’t know what mom and David thought Lauren was doing from 8-3, but I guaran-damn-tee you, it wasn’t going to class. So, what was my reward from the Woodstock Wonders for keeping it all together? They take me a thousand miles into a state no one remembers during a fifth grade geography exam, and for what? It’s not like the sourpuss was going to suddenly perk up here in the jungle, nor was the Golden Girl smart enough to realize that we had been duped into believing that this whole move would be good for us. This move was for no one but the hippies, who wanted to live out some ludicrous dream of sitting in a forest getting high and singing give peace a chance.
Lauren was right about one thing: we had been delivered unto Hell, and nothing about it was good or fun or sensible.
When we first arrived, Cindy Brady motioned for me to put my cigarette out and come into the damned wigwam. I didn’t want to look inside that damn teepee. What was in there, anyway? Photos of Geronimo? Skinned animals? Mortar and pestle? Why didn’t they just play Half-breed by Cher to really liven up the party? The whole moment was more than I could handle. I mean, didn’t they know that we would go to our new school one day and the next day, we would be forever known as the three girls in a teepee? Yeah, that oughtta really help us fit right in. And when those hillbillies were through laughing at us and smacking their palms to their mouths to make Indian noises, we’d probably have to drag the psycho off some kid she kicked the shit out of. Yeah, we sure fit right in.
Speaking of the psycho, I had to really keep an eye out on her that first week or so, because I was sure she was going to try and ditch us. I lived in fear that she would leave me with the knucklehead, who immediately tried to separate herself from us by telling all the kids she was adopted. I could see the cut and run in Lauren’s cold blue eyes whenever she thought no one was looking. Mom and David called her eyes shark eyes because Lauren showed only one emotion from those eyes, and that was contempt. And it didn’t matter if she was at a party, or if it was Christmas, or even her own birthday. Lauren’s eyes never registered anything beyond contempt, like she was going to pull out an Uzi and go postal on everyone at any moment. She was weird, I tell you. Scary weird. There were days when she would look at me as if I had just crapped on her shoes. Cindy Brady was smart enough to stay out of her way, but I wasn’t afraid of her. Okay, maybe I was a little. What I was more afraid of was her leaving me in the town of Mohawk with two stoners and a Princess.
I may not have liked living with her, but I’d be damned if I was gonna live on Walton’s Mountain without her.
Lauren 1977
If I hadn’t thought they would have called the cops on me for stealing their van, I would have been gone the night we arrived at that ridiculous space with its teepee poking up into the sky like some upside down ice cream cone. I couldn’t believe they thought that I’d actually stay. The teepee was one thing…but the idea that I was now trailer trash was another all together, What were they thinking? Dragging three California girls to a town with a population smaller than our Davis High School marching band? I immediately felt claustrophobic with all those trees surrounding that damned teepee, it felt like being cornered by a wall of green. The moment I got out of the van, I wondered if anyone would hear me if I screamed. I felt like screaming for hours, but I think that would have given poor Sheryl a coronary. The little idiot loved it up there, but that wasn’t a surprise. The glass was always full in her myopic little world. I always envied her that. She was one of those people who saw the brighter side to Frankenstein in the movie. I think this was the reason Vick hated her guts. Vicky had no tolerance for Sheryl at all, often pointing out that as the baby in the family, life was easier for her. Maybe it was. I wasn’t one to make that call. I had managed to live through the rat bastard’s drinking episodes, managed not to kill him when he hit my mom, and suffered through my own bad choices in my impetuous youth. If Sheryl’s life was blessed, it was because she did all the things a kid is supposed to do. She didn’t smoke, drink, cut classes, egg houses, or sleep around. She was a good kid. Oh, sure, I knew she thought I was a psycho. Maybe I was. I scared her, me and my unstable life and bizarre behaviors, so who blames her for thinking I needed a padded room? As much as I wanted to insure her that I wouldn’t hurt her, I just never seemed to be able to articulate those words, so Sheryl just steered clear of me.
V was another story.
I didn’t know what the guys were like in the backwaters of Oregon, but I was pretty sure they weren’t ready for the likes of her. Vick was known at Davis as Man-Eater McCloud; a sort of black widow who devoured her boyfriends and then spit them out so she could move on to the next poor slob. She needed guys to pay attention to her, and to that end, did just about anything they wanted to get their attention. She was as loose as the cushions of a sofa, and had a reputation that got her backside on top of those cushions quite often. Of course, none of her sexual activities seemed to lessen the pain our father had caused her, and once she arrived at that point, there was no turning back. I had hoped that maybe the new town would give her a fresh start, but only time would tell. I just wanted her to be happy.
. She couldn’t seem to be happy with anybody, which was a step above me, I suppose. I couldn’t seem to be happy, period. I smoked at eleven, started drugs at twelve, had sex at thirteen, and none of it made me feel good or happy inside. Happiness was as elusive to me as the stars in the sky, only I knew what the stars looked like. I had no idea what happiness looked like. I just know that at the age of fourteen, I stopped trying to find it. I just did my life, which was going along fine until those quacks upended it by dragging us to no man’s land. My god, if I had had a gun that first night, I would have shot them in the middle of their horrendous rendition of Our House. Did they have to insert the word teepee into ever verse?
What do you think?
And then there was the piece of crap trailer. POCT. I couldn’t even imagine trying to make that place home. It wasn’t a home, for Christ’s sake, it was a piece of crap! Luckily for me, I only had another forty weeks or so before I graduated, and I knew that getting out would be my first official act of freedom.
I would have been gone that first night had I not promised David to give it a month. David never deserved any shit from me, even though I appeared intent on dishing it out. He had never been anything but kind to me. When I left home at thirteen and lived with these freaker heroin addicts for almost a year, it was David who convinced my mother to let me come home. And when my ex-biker-boyfriend came over to fetch me one night, it was David who ran him off with a baseball bat. As much as I wanted to be a better kid for David, I had never managed to make it happen. So, I have always given David a great deal of credit for stepping into a coven of four women and still be able to hold his own. He loved my mother in a way she deserved to be loved, and I had to respect him for that. After living through the mélange of crap thrown at her by our father, it was nice to see her loved well. It was even nicer to see her loved by a man who was as intelligent as he was generous. David was the kind of smart that lost you ten words into the sentence. He was a prize and my oddball, sage-burning, moon howling mother had grabbed the brass ring when she married him. So, in the end, I guess I owed it to David to give Mayberry a try, which was exactly what I did.
The funny thing about moving your family is that you never really know who will have the hardest time. I think everyone thought it would be me, but that’s not how it played out. I expected V to run screaming down the gravel road any moment. She looked like a caged animal, and easily smoked a pack of cigarettes the first hour we were there. When V gets nervous or anxious, she picks on Sheryl and says really mean things to her. I don’t know if it’s because Sheryl makes her look bad or if it’s that middle child syndrome, but V takes out all of her life’s woes on that kid. As a result, I find myself giving V a harder time than I should.
One of the reasons V is such an easy target is because she has always let men walk all over her. Always. From the time she could walk, my dad said horrible things to her, and yet, she still managed to love him. She still seemed to want his admiration or respect, and it as so obvious she wasn’t ever going to get it. The only thing any of us ever got from that prick were emotional scars. No, I take that back, we got two things from him: scars and a step-mother we called Malice.
Malice had been the straw that broke my mother’s back. She had been her best friend and had cheated with my dad. In order to escape the affair, we moved to Davis, but damned if the drunk and Malice still gave it a go. In the end, he chose Malice over my mom and so they divorced. We practically had a Happy Divorce party, but it was pretty clear the whole event wrecked Sandy. It was one thing to be cheated on, but to confide in that to your best friend who was the other actor in the affair scene, well, that pushed mom over the edge and deeper into her coven. I couldn’t even imagine that these hicks even knew how to spell coven, let alone be accepting of one. We had moved smack dab into the middle of the Christian Coalition with a Buddhist and witch who daily shared a morning wake and bake with their favorite bong. I couldn’t imagine things being any more difficult for us.
I was glad I didn’t smoke any more. It made me a little…psychotic one day and I had some sort of panic attack. I was done with it then and there. At the ripe old age of sixteen, I had peeked. My experimentation days were over. Oddly, my mom seemed disappointed, and that was when I realized my parents were more than just casual dope smokers. V got high with them every day after school, and then everyone wondered why her grades sucked. Uh…hello?
I got a clear glimpse early on of that road to nowhere. V does more than smoke dope now, and seems to be lost in a haze of booze and drugs. I didn’t have any false hopes that she would change just because we had landed in Gomer Pyle’s neighborhood. There was only one thing I knew for certain, and that was that my destiny was not in the backwoods of Oregon. In one month, I’d be headed back to California, where I was sure I’d find the right road, the right path, the right destiny for me.
November 1977
Two months had gone by and though there had been more downs than ups, Lauren had managed to stay long enough to learn to like it, Vicky had already been through several boyfriends, and true to form, Sheryl had made it on the cheerleading team. For their part, Sandy and David began work clearing the five acres so that Sandy could have a garden and they could build a greenhouse in which to grow their marijuana plants. The greenhouse was cleverly tucked away beneath some trees and behind some bushes, and contained strawberries and tomato plants as well. The ever-industrious hippy couple had also made connections with other dopers in Mohawk, and before they knew it, their parents not only had friends, but Sandy had managed to actually find a new coven.
“There she goes,” Vicky said, wiping the condensation from the trailer window as she looked out. “Wearing her Witches’ Dress for Success costume.”
“I can’t believe she found a coven out here in the sticks. I would have thought the Christian influence would have made it impossible.”
“No doubt. I was really hoping Oregon was filled with June Cleavers, not Samantha Stevens.” Lauren rolled over and closed the book she had been reading. With no television access, all three of the girls were voracious readers.
“I thought so, too, until that first trip into Eugene.” Vicky drew hearts in the remaining condensation. “I thought Berkeley was filled with fruits and nuts and other non-bathers, but they look squeaky clean compared to the people we saw at that Saturday Market.”
Sheryl finished the math problem she was working on and sighed. “I think Eugene is cool. Sorta retro with all that 60’s stuff and tie dye and all. I don’t see how come you guys don’t like it. Oh, that’s right. You don’t like anything.”
Vicky and Lauren looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “It’s almost an hour away. The least they could have done is moved closer to Eugene. It has a movie theater, which is more than you can say for Mohawk. Vicky sighed. “It can’t even be called a town, really. Just a store and a gas station.”
Lauren shook her head. “It’s too hard to grow your own dope in the city. I’m sure they picked this place because it’s so off the beaten path.”
“What are you talking about?” Sheryl said. “Mom and David aren’t growing marijuana. You guys are making that up.”
“What planet have you been living on?” Vicky asked. “Did a stray pom-pom hit you in the head or something? Of course they’re growing dope.”
Since the move, Vicky had never had less patience with her younger sister, who, it turned out, seemed to be flourishing in the small high school in Mohawk. Lauren, who had had such low grade and poor attendance in Davis, had to repeat her senior year with Vicky as a classmate. This really thrilled Vicky, who hated having to share anything with Lauren.
“You know, Vick, you’re just sour because Donny Zambezi has the hots for me and not you.”
Vicky stiffened. “Donny Z can go to hell with a full can of gasoline in his lap for all I care.”
Lauren opened her book again and pretended to read. She was well aware that Vicky had rolled out the red vagina carpet for Donny, but he had rejected her outright. Instead, he just stood around cheerleading practice and stared at Sheryl like a wolf eying a helpless lamb. He wanted Sheryl in a bad way, and she knew it, but that didn’t explain why she kept him at arm’s length. Donny was a bad boy who had no business drooling over the likes of Sheryl. Vicky was more his speed, but guys like him preferred to pollute the fresh ponds instead of fish in the dirty ones. Sheryl, to her credit, dated quarterbacks and wrestling captains.
“Well, you can have him, Vick, because he gives me the serious creeps!”
Vicky glared over at Sheryl, who was busy working her math problems while pouring salt in Vicky’s wounds. You had to hand it to the girl, she was a serious juggler.
“Let it go, V,” Lauren said. “She’s pushing your buttons is all.” Lauren began reading in earnest, but kept an eye out on her middle sister. In two months, Vicky had already been through half the boys in their class, and seemed intent on getting the others before New Year. She had not made the adjustment very well, always reminding anyone who would listen that she would be returning to Davis the first chance she got.
“David’s coming,” Sheryl announced, peering out the window. It was a typical November day in Oregon: rainy and dark. Gloom and sadness seemed to drip slowly off the pine needles and land with loud thuds on the ground. None of the girls could believe how many days they had gone without seeing the sun, and it was driving them all a little stir crazy.
Usually when this happened, David would see if any of them wanted to come over to the teepee. Sometimes, he only wanted one girl in particular, and today, it was Lauren. “Can I chat with you a bit?” David asked Lauren when he stuck his head into the trailer. With a graying beard and a growing belly, he reminded the people who knew him of a balding Santa Claus.
“Sure.” Closing her book, Lauren grabbed her jacket, which was still damp from a half mile walk up the gravel road to the teepee. The bus couldn’t make it down the gravel road and turn around, so the girls had to walk rain or sun. “Try not to kill each other while I’m gone.”
“Yeah,” Sheryl chimed in. “Smoke a fatty or something Vick, but chill out. I can’t help it the guys like me better.”
Lauren closed the door and shook her head. If the three of them survived such close quarters, it would be a miracle.
As Lauren peered into the teepee, she felt the chill leave her bones. The trailer was not warm like the teepee, which had a fire going in the wood burning stove 24-7.
“Your mom tells me you really like your photo math.”
Lauren took her jacket off and set it on the coat rack as she watched David roll what he called a pinner. A pinner was an extremely thin, tightly rolled joint. David rolled pinners for the long ride in to work at the radio station where he went by the nom de plume of Brother David.
“I’m passing, if that’s what you mean.” Lauren eyed the shoe box lid containing David’s de-seeded dope.
“But you like it.”
Poor David had wanted Lauren to find something to be passionate about, but time and time again, she had had to disappoint him with the truth. “It’s okay. It’s easy.”
David licked the flap of the Zig Zag paper and carefully rolled the pinner between his thick fingers. He had been a Navy man when he was younger and had loved it. He saw much of the world from the deck of a naval vessel and often told stories about his time in Japan. Now, he was a part-time disc jockey and full-time stoner living in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Lauren always wondered why he’d left the Navy, then figured it was because he couldn’t do drugs.
“I just wanted to touch base with you, Lauren. We haven’t had a chance to talk to each other in awhile.” David flicked the Bic and lit the pinner.
Touch base. David was a hippie through and through. He was a feminist’s kind of man, always on the side of the underdog, always rooting for women. He was into the touchy-feely concepts of the age, rap sessions, the whole getting-in-touch-with-your-emotions. He was the antithesis of their father in every way. Where David was kind, the drunk was your typical mean bastard. Where David was smart and liberal, their father was a supporter of television ministries. No two men were more unalike than David and the drunk who married Malice. And though David was raising three girls who had very little love between them, he loved them nonetheless.
“I’m really glad you stayed,” David said through the haze of marijuana smoke. “It’s meant a lot to your mom and me that you’ve given this a chance.”
Lauren sat down on the floor near the fireplace. She never sat on the bed unless it was one of those dreaded “family meetings,” when all five of them had to sit on it to discuss whatever was bothering them. Prior to moving to Mohawk, the majority of those family meetings were about something Lauren had said or done. Now, they ranged from Sheryl’s new boyfriend, to what to do if the cops came in to confiscate their best plants.
“I’m just making the best of it, David. There’s really nothing else to do until school is over, so why not get through it?” The fire at her back felt good.
“So, you think you’ll stay until you graduate?” Inhale.
Lauren nodded, surprised by her own honesty. Unlike Vicky, she didn’t go around telling everyone that would be leaving soon. Also unlike Vicky, she had found something she thought she might like doing. “I think I want to go to college.”
David coughed out the smoke. “What?” Apparently, this had come as somewhat of a surprise. “Really? I didn’t even know you liked to write.”
“I don’t. I like the truth. I like reporting. I think the truth is really under rated and it would be really fun to uncover some truths for a paper.”
David inhaled again and shook his head in surprise. “Do you know where?”
“Santa Barbara. I’ve always loved UC Santa Barbara. It has a great campus, and I need to be around the sun.”
David nodded. “Your father’s in Santa Barbara.” He let it hang there, unsure of whether or not that was a good thing or a bad thing.
“I know. That’s the other reason I think UCB would work for me. I wouldn’t have to pay out-of-state tuition. He’s hinted that maybe I can come stay with him for a while.”
David’s eyebrows shot up and Lauren could tell he was really getting loaded. “You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?”
“I can’t stay here, David. I hate Oregon and all this wet drippy cold. I am a California girl through and through. I could stay here one year or eighty-one years, and I’d never get used to the weather or the way people think.”
“I see. Does your mother know these plans?”
Lauren laughed. She doubted he’d remember them if he got any more loaded. “Are you nuts? You know how she feels about him. She would slit her wrist if she thought I was leaving her to go be with him.”
David nodded and blew out more smoke. “That’s true. But she will be glad to hear you’re planning to stay through your senior year. Every morning since we got here, she wakes up expecting you to be gone.”
Lauren shook her head. “Tell her to stop worrying. I’m going to finish out my year here.”
David inhaled again. “Good. She’ll be excited to hear about your plans.”
“When? In between séances? Right after she finishes drawing pentagrams? Maybe she can squeeze me in between eye of newt and leg of toad.”
David finished his pinner and eyed her silently. “You think that’s fair?”
Lauren laughed sardonically. “Fair? Don’t even get me started about fair, David. Ripping your kids from their home in order to live in the forest in a fucking wigwam isn’t exactly fair, but I don’t think I need to go into my feelings about it. I’m here. I’m going to finish out my school year and then go home.”
“What about Vicky?”
“What about her?”
“What are her plans?”
“You’ll have to ask her. I have no idea.”
David cocked his head and studied Lauren through a thick haze of blue smoke. He did this when he was really baked and trying to find the right words to express how he was feeling.
“She’s your sister. You live practically on top of each other. How could you not know?”
Lauren’s eyes narrowed. “The better question is how is it I don’t even care? Because I don’t. My guess is she’ll go back to Davis where she thinks her life is.”
“Isn’t it?”
Lauren could tell David was too loaded now to think linearly. “That life is over, David, and the sooner she accepts that fact, the better.” Rising, Lauren warmed her butt next to the fireplace. “I know I have.”
“And you’re sure about Santa Barbara with your dad?”
Grabbing her jacket, Lauren started for the door and fresh air. “You know, David, I’m not sure of anything any more.” With that, Lauren walked out and into the cold, wet rain, wondering if she’d ever been sure of anything in her life.
“You have got to be out of your mind,” seventeen-year old Lauren said when the beat up hippy van with its Hemp Forever bumper sticker stopped at its final destination.
“Now girls,” Sandy said, inhaling the fresh air. “Open your minds…”
“So we can lose it, like you’ve obviously done?” This came from sixteen-year old Vicky, the middle daughter, who had not even bothered to open her eyes to see what it was Lauren was grumbling about. Vicky hadn’t opened her eyes throughout the two day trip from Davis, California to Mohawk, Oregon; so distraught was she over leaving her friends. She believed if she couldn’t see the changes, they didn’t really exist. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t curious, which she wasn’t, but it was more like denial, which in a teenager is as strong as cement. Her parents, Sandy and David had to practically tear her out of the arms of her best friend the morning they’d left.
“How bad can it be?” Sheryl, the youngest teen asked as she popped up from the far back of the van. Of the three girls, she was the only one who looked forward to the move, seeing it, as she always did, as an adventure. Ever since she was a little girl, Sheryl had wanted an adventure, and this was as good an as any. A teenager whose glass is always half full is the bane to every other downtrodden and depressed teen, including her two older sisters.
Lauren groaned. “You have to see it to believe it.” Lauren slouched back down in her seat as only teenagers can, making that sound that says everyone is stupid and boring. “Come on, V, open your eyes and see…”
“What. The. Fuck. Is. That?” Vicky cried from her place in her van. Eyes open now, they were practically bugging out of her. Her denial ran deep. This wasn’t a surprise. David and Sandy had been telling them all along what they were planning to do, so her shock was not the least bit warranted. But teenagers hear and see only what directly affects them and these girls were no exception.
“What does it look like? It’s a teepee.” Sandy kept one eye on the girls and the other on David, their stepfather. David had incredible patience with the girls except when they were critical about anything foreign. Sandy had had to explain to him on many occasions that critical is the nature of teenage girls. If they can’t bitch about something, then they will dig until they find any target. The target, in this instance, was the teepee.
“I know it’s a teepee,” Vicky said, staring out the window in disbelief. “What the hell is it doing there?”
That’s other thing about teenage girls: they are so self absorbed that if you told them as asteroid was about to hit you on the head, you’d be dead a month before they asked where you were. David and Sandy had told them about the teepee. They had explained them that they wanted a simpler life and that they bought five beautiful acres in the forests of Oregon in which to start a better life than the rat race California offered. David and Sandy had wanted off the hamster wheel, and Oregon was that stop.
“It’s our new home!” David said as the van came to a rest at the end of a gravel road. Jumping out and inhaling a deep breath, David was beaming. He loved this place.
Looking at the sour faces on the girls, Sandy chose to celebrate her new home and new life with David rather than listen to all the criticism and comments that were sure to come from the girls’ bitter mouths. Joining her husband, Sandy got out and danced with him near the deck of the teepee.
“I am not staying here,” Lauren said through grit teeth. “The second they turn their backs, I’m gone.” She exhaled loudly. “Who in the hell chooses to live in a teepee? Even the Indians don’t live in them any more!”
Vicky glared at her dancing parents, who now stood arm-in-arm at the mouth of the structure. “Don’t you dare leave me here with the Golden Child. I’ll be in jail for murder if you do.” Vicky picked up a book and flipped it over at Sheryl, hitting her in the side of the head.
“Ouch! What did you do that for?”
“For having an open mind, you twit. I can’t believe you can sit there and be happy about this.”
“Leave her alone, V. She’s retarded.”
“I am not. I just don’t see why you two have to put everything down. We’re here, so why not make the best of it?”
Lauren turned to Vicky and shook her head. “Don’t punch her.”
“But I really want to.”
“I know, but do it later. You ruin this moment for mom, and David will skin us all alive.” Lauren peered out the window at the forested area beyond the teepee and the groves of filbert trees surrounding it. “I think we passed only one car the last hour of the drive up here.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Vicky said. “This can’t be happening.”
Lauren shook her head. “Face it, V, we’ve just landed in hell. The two lunatics out there cashed in our lives and dragged us kicking and screaming to Purgatory where we’ll shrivel up like grapes in the sun. That may be their plan, who can tell? And even though Princess over there thinks it sounds like fun, I am not staying.”
Vicky stared over at Lauren knowing she meant every word. Lauren was unlike anyone Vicky had ever met. At the age of thirteen, Lauren had run away from home with her 24 year old boyfriend and stayed gone for nearly a year. It had been the most peaceful year of Vicky’s childhood, since the two of them seldom got along. In their early childhood, Lauren was always causing problems for their alcoholic father, who refused to let the kids sit on the furniture, use his stereo, or eat his food. Lauren, ever the rebel even at the tender age of six, sat, listened, and ate the forbidden items every chance she got, regardless of the beating she might receive for it. Headstrong like a Pamplona bull, Lauren refused to kowtow to anyone, including her drunken father.
“You go this time, they’ll never let you come back.”
This made Lauren laugh. “What’s there to come back to,V? A wigwam with two whackjobs passing the bong back and forth? Or maybe the backwoods experience we’re sure to enjoy here in the Hick Nation with Jethro and Bubba? Or maybe I should stay to experience the many things you can do with flannel. Thanks, but no thanks, V. I’m outta here.”
“You can’t leave me here,” Vicky said, her voice somewhere between cold and pleading. “I’ll die in this godforsaken place.”
“Won’t we all?”
“Not her.” Vicky said, kicking the sleeping bag Sheryl was in. “That nutcase will probably like it and make us both look bad for hating it. I mean it, L, if you leave me here, I will chop her to bits and feed her to the bears.”
“I don’t think there are bears here, but I could be wrong.”
“Then maybe I'll feed her to mom and David on my night to cook. I’ll say I’m fixing Golden Delight or something,”
Lauren smiled slightly. It was a rare day when she actually smiled showing teeth, and even rarer for her to laugh. Having grown up too quickly and experiencing things no teenager is really prepared to experience, Lauren McCloud was a stoic, unhappy young woman for whom cynicism and negativity were her two main spices in her life that she used with increasing regularity.
As a child, Lauren had been too precocious and rebellious for a full-time working mother and full-time drinking father to handle, and spent most of her years between six and twelve living with her grandparents. But when eighteen year old men began showing up on her grandparents’ doorstep, it was time to ship her back to the rightful owners who welcomed her with unopened arms. Her return did not go well with the other girls, who usually forgot about her unless she paid them a visit. Sheryl had once gotten herself a black eye when she introduced Lauren as her cousin who had just escaped from an insane asylum.
Lauren didn’t need an asylum; she’d always felt as if she had been raised in one.
“Oh look! There she goes now, burning her sage to cleanse the air of evil spirits.” Vicky pointed to Sandy, who was uttering something under her breath as she lit the bundled sage on fire.
“Maybe it’ll spark and burn that damn teepee to the ground,” Lauren said, leaning back in her seat and sighing. Visions of a raging forest fire loomed before her like a dream. How in the world anyone ever expected her to be a normal kid was beyond her. Her first twelve years were spent under the soused dictatorship of a man who routinely “forgot” where he parked the car after a bender. Her next six years were spent with a chanting Buddhist and a mother who belonged to a coven and spent more money a month on marijuana than she did for food.
And still, with all of that happening, it was Lauren who was force-fed Ritalin like it was candy, sent to a shrink to discuss her aggression, and then cast off to grandparents who tried their best to corral a young girl who was more wild Mustang than carnival ride pony.
Lauren could only shake her head as she watched David get into chant position while her mother walked around the teepee waving the burning sage and muttering some sort of wiccan prayer. They seemed so happy to be here. Three months ago, after returning from a retreat for Sandy’s moon lodgers, she and David announced that the family was moving. They had bought five acres and were going to build a house. Apparently, “build” meant something else in wiccan, because one didn’t really build a teepee.
So, they put David’s four bedroom three bath house in the suburbs of beautiful Davis, California for sale in order to move into some weird version of hippy paradise in the hinterlands of Oregon, a state no one ever went to or cared about. This place would never be Lauren’s idea of paradise; all this woo-woo-back-to-nature horseshit was enough to make her sick. Just when she was finally getting her life back together, they had to pull this! It was as insane as it was unfair, and had ruined all of their lives.
“Mom says to keep in mind that this is an adventure.” Sheryl perked up and stepped out of the van so she could stretch.
As adventures went, Lauren ranked this right up there with the Donner Party or maybe Amelia Earhart. This was no adventure. This was…
“What in the hell is that thing over there?” Vicky pointed to a clump of bushes and a…
“Oh my god…it’s a piece of crap trailer,” Lauren held her face in her hands and moaned. “Holy shit, girls, we’ve just become trailer trash!”
Vicky released a line of expletives that would have made a sailor proud. “No way.”
In silence, Vicky and Lauren watched as Sheryl skipped over to the trailer and opened the door to look in. Then, Sheryl went in and closed the door.
“Do you have to be so mean to her?” Lauren asked. “This is hard enough as it is.”
“Mean to who? Cindy Brady over there? I could just bash her face in.”
Before Lauren could answer, Sheryl came skipping back to the van. “I don’t think you want to hear this.”
Lauren pinched the bridge of her nose. “Don’t say it.”
“It’s our bedroom.”
Lauren and Vicky both groaned in that lovely teenage way that makes it sound like someone is jamming bamboo shoots up their fingernails.
“It’s not so bad…we can…”
“We can start this fucking van and make a run for it!” Vicky announced, reaching for the car keys that were not there.
“This can not be happening.”
For a long moment they all sat and stared at the piece of crap trailer, consigned as they were, to a doom worse than death. Teenagers live in the moment and this one had just turned sour on them and was about to get worse.
“Aren’t you coming?” Sandy asked, wafting her sage near the window. Vicky wondered if she was smoking them out. “We better start unpacking before it rains.”
“Rains?” All three said in unison.
“But it’s just October.” Vicky slouched back in her seat, the getaway now just a fleeting dream.
Laughing, Sandy opened the door and retrieved her travel stash of dope. “Oh, Vick, you’re so melodramatic, it’s funny. This is Oregon. It rains all the time.
And in the blink of an eye…it did.
Sheryl October 1977
I didn’t know what their big problem was. So it was a teepee? It was really cute and way bigger than you’d think a teepee could be. There was a wood burning stove on one end, a king size bed, dressers, nightstands, and plenty of floor space. It was really cozy and homey, and as usual, mom was able to fix it up so it was very inviting. Truth was, I loved the teepee. Of course, me liking it only made them hate me more, but I didn’t care. It’s not like we were homeless or anything. The teepee was surrounded by a huge deck that had five chairs so we could sit and enjoy the quiet when it wasn’t raining, which wasn’t often. Let me tell you, it was very quiet out there. I wasn’t used to all that peacefulness and it was really disconcerting. Truth was, it was noisier at night with all the nocturnal animals creeping about than it was in the day.
The piece of crap trailer, which we all decided was the only appropriate way to refer to it, was another story all together. The three of us had to share this incredibly confined quarters, which wouldn’t have been so bad except that one of us was certifiable, and that was my scary, psycho oldest sister, Lauren who thought that the rest of the world was full of idiots and losers.
Lauren has been the bane of my and Vick’s existence our whole lives. First, she was so out of control as a kid, they had to sedate her with those anti-hyperactivity drugs, Then, when those didn’t work, they had to send her away because she was so psychotic! She was like, totally disturbed until she finally saved us all the headache and ran away. We were seriously bummed when she came back. I always tried to stay out of her way because she’s scary. Vick, however, never learned to keep her big mouth shut around Lauren, and more often than not, paid a price for it. Lauren beat the crap out of Vick more times than I have fingers, and more than half of the time, she deserved it. I mean I may think that Lauren is half a bubble off, but I’m not about to say it to her face.
Then, when nothing else worked, they sent her of to Gram and Gramp’s. I don’t know what they did to deserve that, but you wouldn’t have heard me complaining! As long as she was gone, I didn’t care where she was. Our lives were so much better without Miss Doom and Gloom around. I swear to god, she has always been like a black cloud hovering above my air space. The words happy and Lauren were never seen in the same sentence, and when she did finally come home for good, Vick and I went into mourning.
I learned a valuable lesson, though, when Lauren came back: no matter how bad a situation is…it can always get worse. And it did.
Lauren, who had started smoking at the age of eleven, came home and joined in the pot smoking festivities of mom and David. Hello? Isn’t that child abuse or neglect or something? Who smokes dope with their children? Were they insane? Vick and I voted unanimously that they were, but that didn’t stop Vick from partaking of the evil weed herself. She would have done anything to get mom’s attention, so if mom and David asked her to set her head on fire, she would have. Poor Schlub.
The happy foursome would climb up on mom and David’s bed and pass the doobie or bong around, laughing at something that wasn’t really funny, or having deep-thought moments they all believed were really philosophical.
Not me. I actually had a life, and drugs or cigarettes had no place in it, hence the Golden Girl, Princess, Cindy Brady comments they were always making about me. I think they resented me for not being the losers they were, but I didn’t care. I had sort of hoped that that behavior would change once we got to Oregon, but I must have had a contact high to think that. This was my freshman year and I wanted to be a cheerleader and an athlete. I wanted to letter in at least two sports. I was the competitor of the family, and they, being stoners, saw competition as something evil or Republican. I figured that Vick and Lauren would letter in getting laid and doing drugs. Well, Vick would letter in both after school events. Lauren gave up smoking dope a few months ago when she had some psychotic episode like a panic attack or some other attention-getting device. They should have just straight-jacketed her when she was two and saved us all the trouble. Still, I have to say that I was glad one of them stopped drugging because she used to hang out with some pretty scary creatures who rode Harleys and shot up heroine. Ick! Even after she ran away for that year, my lunatic parents still let her come home. Word on the street was her boyfriend held her by her ankle out a second story window, and that was all she wrote. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what they’re saying. I stayed away from her for three days when she got home, sure she was carrying some disease.
Anyway, at least she’s not whacked out on drugs. She’s still a black cloud in any room, but I figure after her reaction to the teepee, even the slightest wind would carry her away again.
Vick is another story all together. She is the typical middle child with all the crap that goes into the middle-child syndrome. She is resentful that Lauren gets all the attention for her bad behavior, and resentful that I get all of the attention for my good behavior. She thinks I am treated like a princess and Lauren like a patient. Why shouldn’t I be treated better than those two fruitcakes? While mom was busy trying to keep Lauren out of the booby hatch, Vick was plugging the holes in her psyche by sleeping with any boy who showed the slightest interest in her. I mean Vick would drop her pants for any guy who looked her way. Don’t ask me why, either because she’s really cute! But cuteness can only take you so far when you have zero confidence in yourself and blame everyone but the ice cream man for your woes. Vicky is also one of the funniest girls I have ever met, but she uses that humor as a weapon to keep people at bay. So, between the two of them, I’m looking pretty good!
So, again, so what if we moved and have to live in a teepee? It’s not like it’s forever. They just have no sense of adventure, no appreciation of the unknown. They don’t know how to make lemonade out of Life’s lemons, and that’s going to haunt them forever.
In the meantime, I’ll be praying that a big wind comes our way.
Vicky 1977
Cindy Brady actually liked that god damned teepee. What a total suck up she was! I remember looking out the window and seeing her bounding around like the Energizer puppy. What a boob! She should make that damn cheerleading squad. Apparently, it’s in the twerp’s DNA. God, it’s hard to believe we are even related. I wondered how many of the flannel-wearing redneck geeks would even have time to go out for cheerleading. I mean, didn’t they have goats to milk and nuts to collect? Jesus H on a raft, but Cindy was practically orgasmic over that piece of crap trailer, which only served to really piss off the psycho.
But then, just about anything would push her buttons. I swear to god, Lauren was born with a chip on her shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore, and she would chip off rocks and huck them at Sheryl and I if we ever got in her way. Golden Girl did her best to stay clear of Lauren because she didn’t want any trouble.
Any trouble? Our whole damn lives were trouble! Oh, that’s right, the Princess didn’t experience the same life Lauren and I did. No, she got good grades, had athletic talent, and wore a size zero. She ate like a truck driver most of the time, but did she gain an ounce? Of course not. Me? If I even thought about a donut, those calories would cha-ching into my vault of fat. Now, I was far from obese, mind you, but I wasn’t Twiggy, like she was. Sure, I could have stood to lose a few pounds here and there, but I wasn’t the flabster my drunk of a father thought I was. My dad, not David. David never said a mean word to me no matter what stupid thing I did. And I did some stupid things, to be sure. My real dad would call me names like fatty-boom-ba-latty, two-ton-Tony, and any other number of hurtful names. When he was feeling particularly vicious, he’d just call me Slim. So, did I have weight issues, you think? Does a camel have a hump? And did I deal with that weight issue in a positive and constructive manner? You bet! A daily dose of cross tops and black beauties sometimes washed down with vodka or whatever liquor was available kept the weight off and the buzz on. I didn’t consider all the munchy foods we ate while partying with mom and David, of course, and before long, my weight sort of crept up on me like a bad case of gas.
Did David call me names and tell me to stop eating a bag of Doritos every night? No. As weird as David was, we really loved him to death. I mean, he must have really loved Sandy because here was a divorced witch with three out-of-control bitchy teenage girls, and yet, he still hung in there. Either he really loved her, or he had simply lost too many brain cells and thought he was still in Disneyland visiting Cinderella’s wicked step-sisters. Whichever the reason, David was one of the good guys and we needed a good guy after living with the rat bastard-car-losing drunk. Even if David uprooted my life and dragged me to the flannel capital of the world, I loved him dearly. Sure, I missed my friends, as all teenagers would, and yes, I hated the entire drippy, mossy, dreary state, but I never blamed David. Oh no. This whole thing was a plan concocted by my mother and her moon lodgers one moonlit night when they were doing some sort of séance or something equally as looney. Who the hell knows? Maybe she heard voices, like the Son of Sam that whispered to her to ruin our lives.
My life was truly ruined more than the others because I had a boyfriend, Andy, who drove a red Camaro and had the coolest hair. Hell, I was even managing school, which was more than I could say for her. I don’t know what mom and David thought Lauren was doing from 8-3, but I guaran-damn-tee you, it wasn’t going to class. So, what was my reward from the Woodstock Wonders for keeping it all together? They take me a thousand miles into a state no one remembers during a fifth grade geography exam, and for what? It’s not like the sourpuss was going to suddenly perk up here in the jungle, nor was the Golden Girl smart enough to realize that we had been duped into believing that this whole move would be good for us. This move was for no one but the hippies, who wanted to live out some ludicrous dream of sitting in a forest getting high and singing give peace a chance.
Lauren was right about one thing: we had been delivered unto Hell, and nothing about it was good or fun or sensible.
When we first arrived, Cindy Brady motioned for me to put my cigarette out and come into the damned wigwam. I didn’t want to look inside that damn teepee. What was in there, anyway? Photos of Geronimo? Skinned animals? Mortar and pestle? Why didn’t they just play Half-breed by Cher to really liven up the party? The whole moment was more than I could handle. I mean, didn’t they know that we would go to our new school one day and the next day, we would be forever known as the three girls in a teepee? Yeah, that oughtta really help us fit right in. And when those hillbillies were through laughing at us and smacking their palms to their mouths to make Indian noises, we’d probably have to drag the psycho off some kid she kicked the shit out of. Yeah, we sure fit right in.
Speaking of the psycho, I had to really keep an eye out on her that first week or so, because I was sure she was going to try and ditch us. I lived in fear that she would leave me with the knucklehead, who immediately tried to separate herself from us by telling all the kids she was adopted. I could see the cut and run in Lauren’s cold blue eyes whenever she thought no one was looking. Mom and David called her eyes shark eyes because Lauren showed only one emotion from those eyes, and that was contempt. And it didn’t matter if she was at a party, or if it was Christmas, or even her own birthday. Lauren’s eyes never registered anything beyond contempt, like she was going to pull out an Uzi and go postal on everyone at any moment. She was weird, I tell you. Scary weird. There were days when she would look at me as if I had just crapped on her shoes. Cindy Brady was smart enough to stay out of her way, but I wasn’t afraid of her. Okay, maybe I was a little. What I was more afraid of was her leaving me in the town of Mohawk with two stoners and a Princess.
I may not have liked living with her, but I’d be damned if I was gonna live on Walton’s Mountain without her.
Lauren 1977
If I hadn’t thought they would have called the cops on me for stealing their van, I would have been gone the night we arrived at that ridiculous space with its teepee poking up into the sky like some upside down ice cream cone. I couldn’t believe they thought that I’d actually stay. The teepee was one thing…but the idea that I was now trailer trash was another all together, What were they thinking? Dragging three California girls to a town with a population smaller than our Davis High School marching band? I immediately felt claustrophobic with all those trees surrounding that damned teepee, it felt like being cornered by a wall of green. The moment I got out of the van, I wondered if anyone would hear me if I screamed. I felt like screaming for hours, but I think that would have given poor Sheryl a coronary. The little idiot loved it up there, but that wasn’t a surprise. The glass was always full in her myopic little world. I always envied her that. She was one of those people who saw the brighter side to Frankenstein in the movie. I think this was the reason Vick hated her guts. Vicky had no tolerance for Sheryl at all, often pointing out that as the baby in the family, life was easier for her. Maybe it was. I wasn’t one to make that call. I had managed to live through the rat bastard’s drinking episodes, managed not to kill him when he hit my mom, and suffered through my own bad choices in my impetuous youth. If Sheryl’s life was blessed, it was because she did all the things a kid is supposed to do. She didn’t smoke, drink, cut classes, egg houses, or sleep around. She was a good kid. Oh, sure, I knew she thought I was a psycho. Maybe I was. I scared her, me and my unstable life and bizarre behaviors, so who blames her for thinking I needed a padded room? As much as I wanted to insure her that I wouldn’t hurt her, I just never seemed to be able to articulate those words, so Sheryl just steered clear of me.
V was another story.
I didn’t know what the guys were like in the backwaters of Oregon, but I was pretty sure they weren’t ready for the likes of her. Vick was known at Davis as Man-Eater McCloud; a sort of black widow who devoured her boyfriends and then spit them out so she could move on to the next poor slob. She needed guys to pay attention to her, and to that end, did just about anything they wanted to get their attention. She was as loose as the cushions of a sofa, and had a reputation that got her backside on top of those cushions quite often. Of course, none of her sexual activities seemed to lessen the pain our father had caused her, and once she arrived at that point, there was no turning back. I had hoped that maybe the new town would give her a fresh start, but only time would tell. I just wanted her to be happy.
. She couldn’t seem to be happy with anybody, which was a step above me, I suppose. I couldn’t seem to be happy, period. I smoked at eleven, started drugs at twelve, had sex at thirteen, and none of it made me feel good or happy inside. Happiness was as elusive to me as the stars in the sky, only I knew what the stars looked like. I had no idea what happiness looked like. I just know that at the age of fourteen, I stopped trying to find it. I just did my life, which was going along fine until those quacks upended it by dragging us to no man’s land. My god, if I had had a gun that first night, I would have shot them in the middle of their horrendous rendition of Our House. Did they have to insert the word teepee into ever verse?
What do you think?
And then there was the piece of crap trailer. POCT. I couldn’t even imagine trying to make that place home. It wasn’t a home, for Christ’s sake, it was a piece of crap! Luckily for me, I only had another forty weeks or so before I graduated, and I knew that getting out would be my first official act of freedom.
I would have been gone that first night had I not promised David to give it a month. David never deserved any shit from me, even though I appeared intent on dishing it out. He had never been anything but kind to me. When I left home at thirteen and lived with these freaker heroin addicts for almost a year, it was David who convinced my mother to let me come home. And when my ex-biker-boyfriend came over to fetch me one night, it was David who ran him off with a baseball bat. As much as I wanted to be a better kid for David, I had never managed to make it happen. So, I have always given David a great deal of credit for stepping into a coven of four women and still be able to hold his own. He loved my mother in a way she deserved to be loved, and I had to respect him for that. After living through the mélange of crap thrown at her by our father, it was nice to see her loved well. It was even nicer to see her loved by a man who was as intelligent as he was generous. David was the kind of smart that lost you ten words into the sentence. He was a prize and my oddball, sage-burning, moon howling mother had grabbed the brass ring when she married him. So, in the end, I guess I owed it to David to give Mayberry a try, which was exactly what I did.
The funny thing about moving your family is that you never really know who will have the hardest time. I think everyone thought it would be me, but that’s not how it played out. I expected V to run screaming down the gravel road any moment. She looked like a caged animal, and easily smoked a pack of cigarettes the first hour we were there. When V gets nervous or anxious, she picks on Sheryl and says really mean things to her. I don’t know if it’s because Sheryl makes her look bad or if it’s that middle child syndrome, but V takes out all of her life’s woes on that kid. As a result, I find myself giving V a harder time than I should.
One of the reasons V is such an easy target is because she has always let men walk all over her. Always. From the time she could walk, my dad said horrible things to her, and yet, she still managed to love him. She still seemed to want his admiration or respect, and it as so obvious she wasn’t ever going to get it. The only thing any of us ever got from that prick were emotional scars. No, I take that back, we got two things from him: scars and a step-mother we called Malice.
Malice had been the straw that broke my mother’s back. She had been her best friend and had cheated with my dad. In order to escape the affair, we moved to Davis, but damned if the drunk and Malice still gave it a go. In the end, he chose Malice over my mom and so they divorced. We practically had a Happy Divorce party, but it was pretty clear the whole event wrecked Sandy. It was one thing to be cheated on, but to confide in that to your best friend who was the other actor in the affair scene, well, that pushed mom over the edge and deeper into her coven. I couldn’t even imagine that these hicks even knew how to spell coven, let alone be accepting of one. We had moved smack dab into the middle of the Christian Coalition with a Buddhist and witch who daily shared a morning wake and bake with their favorite bong. I couldn’t imagine things being any more difficult for us.
I was glad I didn’t smoke any more. It made me a little…psychotic one day and I had some sort of panic attack. I was done with it then and there. At the ripe old age of sixteen, I had peeked. My experimentation days were over. Oddly, my mom seemed disappointed, and that was when I realized my parents were more than just casual dope smokers. V got high with them every day after school, and then everyone wondered why her grades sucked. Uh…hello?
I got a clear glimpse early on of that road to nowhere. V does more than smoke dope now, and seems to be lost in a haze of booze and drugs. I didn’t have any false hopes that she would change just because we had landed in Gomer Pyle’s neighborhood. There was only one thing I knew for certain, and that was that my destiny was not in the backwoods of Oregon. In one month, I’d be headed back to California, where I was sure I’d find the right road, the right path, the right destiny for me.
November 1977
Two months had gone by and though there had been more downs than ups, Lauren had managed to stay long enough to learn to like it, Vicky had already been through several boyfriends, and true to form, Sheryl had made it on the cheerleading team. For their part, Sandy and David began work clearing the five acres so that Sandy could have a garden and they could build a greenhouse in which to grow their marijuana plants. The greenhouse was cleverly tucked away beneath some trees and behind some bushes, and contained strawberries and tomato plants as well. The ever-industrious hippy couple had also made connections with other dopers in Mohawk, and before they knew it, their parents not only had friends, but Sandy had managed to actually find a new coven.
“There she goes,” Vicky said, wiping the condensation from the trailer window as she looked out. “Wearing her Witches’ Dress for Success costume.”
“I can’t believe she found a coven out here in the sticks. I would have thought the Christian influence would have made it impossible.”
“No doubt. I was really hoping Oregon was filled with June Cleavers, not Samantha Stevens.” Lauren rolled over and closed the book she had been reading. With no television access, all three of the girls were voracious readers.
“I thought so, too, until that first trip into Eugene.” Vicky drew hearts in the remaining condensation. “I thought Berkeley was filled with fruits and nuts and other non-bathers, but they look squeaky clean compared to the people we saw at that Saturday Market.”
Sheryl finished the math problem she was working on and sighed. “I think Eugene is cool. Sorta retro with all that 60’s stuff and tie dye and all. I don’t see how come you guys don’t like it. Oh, that’s right. You don’t like anything.”
Vicky and Lauren looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “It’s almost an hour away. The least they could have done is moved closer to Eugene. It has a movie theater, which is more than you can say for Mohawk. Vicky sighed. “It can’t even be called a town, really. Just a store and a gas station.”
Lauren shook her head. “It’s too hard to grow your own dope in the city. I’m sure they picked this place because it’s so off the beaten path.”
“What are you talking about?” Sheryl said. “Mom and David aren’t growing marijuana. You guys are making that up.”
“What planet have you been living on?” Vicky asked. “Did a stray pom-pom hit you in the head or something? Of course they’re growing dope.”
Since the move, Vicky had never had less patience with her younger sister, who, it turned out, seemed to be flourishing in the small high school in Mohawk. Lauren, who had had such low grade and poor attendance in Davis, had to repeat her senior year with Vicky as a classmate. This really thrilled Vicky, who hated having to share anything with Lauren.
“You know, Vick, you’re just sour because Donny Zambezi has the hots for me and not you.”
Vicky stiffened. “Donny Z can go to hell with a full can of gasoline in his lap for all I care.”
Lauren opened her book again and pretended to read. She was well aware that Vicky had rolled out the red vagina carpet for Donny, but he had rejected her outright. Instead, he just stood around cheerleading practice and stared at Sheryl like a wolf eying a helpless lamb. He wanted Sheryl in a bad way, and she knew it, but that didn’t explain why she kept him at arm’s length. Donny was a bad boy who had no business drooling over the likes of Sheryl. Vicky was more his speed, but guys like him preferred to pollute the fresh ponds instead of fish in the dirty ones. Sheryl, to her credit, dated quarterbacks and wrestling captains.
“Well, you can have him, Vick, because he gives me the serious creeps!”
Vicky glared over at Sheryl, who was busy working her math problems while pouring salt in Vicky’s wounds. You had to hand it to the girl, she was a serious juggler.
“Let it go, V,” Lauren said. “She’s pushing your buttons is all.” Lauren began reading in earnest, but kept an eye out on her middle sister. In two months, Vicky had already been through half the boys in their class, and seemed intent on getting the others before New Year. She had not made the adjustment very well, always reminding anyone who would listen that she would be returning to Davis the first chance she got.
“David’s coming,” Sheryl announced, peering out the window. It was a typical November day in Oregon: rainy and dark. Gloom and sadness seemed to drip slowly off the pine needles and land with loud thuds on the ground. None of the girls could believe how many days they had gone without seeing the sun, and it was driving them all a little stir crazy.
Usually when this happened, David would see if any of them wanted to come over to the teepee. Sometimes, he only wanted one girl in particular, and today, it was Lauren. “Can I chat with you a bit?” David asked Lauren when he stuck his head into the trailer. With a graying beard and a growing belly, he reminded the people who knew him of a balding Santa Claus.
“Sure.” Closing her book, Lauren grabbed her jacket, which was still damp from a half mile walk up the gravel road to the teepee. The bus couldn’t make it down the gravel road and turn around, so the girls had to walk rain or sun. “Try not to kill each other while I’m gone.”
“Yeah,” Sheryl chimed in. “Smoke a fatty or something Vick, but chill out. I can’t help it the guys like me better.”
Lauren closed the door and shook her head. If the three of them survived such close quarters, it would be a miracle.
As Lauren peered into the teepee, she felt the chill leave her bones. The trailer was not warm like the teepee, which had a fire going in the wood burning stove 24-7.
“Your mom tells me you really like your photo math.”
Lauren took her jacket off and set it on the coat rack as she watched David roll what he called a pinner. A pinner was an extremely thin, tightly rolled joint. David rolled pinners for the long ride in to work at the radio station where he went by the nom de plume of Brother David.
“I’m passing, if that’s what you mean.” Lauren eyed the shoe box lid containing David’s de-seeded dope.
“But you like it.”
Poor David had wanted Lauren to find something to be passionate about, but time and time again, she had had to disappoint him with the truth. “It’s okay. It’s easy.”
David licked the flap of the Zig Zag paper and carefully rolled the pinner between his thick fingers. He had been a Navy man when he was younger and had loved it. He saw much of the world from the deck of a naval vessel and often told stories about his time in Japan. Now, he was a part-time disc jockey and full-time stoner living in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Lauren always wondered why he’d left the Navy, then figured it was because he couldn’t do drugs.
“I just wanted to touch base with you, Lauren. We haven’t had a chance to talk to each other in awhile.” David flicked the Bic and lit the pinner.
Touch base. David was a hippie through and through. He was a feminist’s kind of man, always on the side of the underdog, always rooting for women. He was into the touchy-feely concepts of the age, rap sessions, the whole getting-in-touch-with-your-emotions. He was the antithesis of their father in every way. Where David was kind, the drunk was your typical mean bastard. Where David was smart and liberal, their father was a supporter of television ministries. No two men were more unalike than David and the drunk who married Malice. And though David was raising three girls who had very little love between them, he loved them nonetheless.
“I’m really glad you stayed,” David said through the haze of marijuana smoke. “It’s meant a lot to your mom and me that you’ve given this a chance.”
Lauren sat down on the floor near the fireplace. She never sat on the bed unless it was one of those dreaded “family meetings,” when all five of them had to sit on it to discuss whatever was bothering them. Prior to moving to Mohawk, the majority of those family meetings were about something Lauren had said or done. Now, they ranged from Sheryl’s new boyfriend, to what to do if the cops came in to confiscate their best plants.
“I’m just making the best of it, David. There’s really nothing else to do until school is over, so why not get through it?” The fire at her back felt good.
“So, you think you’ll stay until you graduate?” Inhale.
Lauren nodded, surprised by her own honesty. Unlike Vicky, she didn’t go around telling everyone that would be leaving soon. Also unlike Vicky, she had found something she thought she might like doing. “I think I want to go to college.”
David coughed out the smoke. “What?” Apparently, this had come as somewhat of a surprise. “Really? I didn’t even know you liked to write.”
“I don’t. I like the truth. I like reporting. I think the truth is really under rated and it would be really fun to uncover some truths for a paper.”
David inhaled again and shook his head in surprise. “Do you know where?”
“Santa Barbara. I’ve always loved UC Santa Barbara. It has a great campus, and I need to be around the sun.”
David nodded. “Your father’s in Santa Barbara.” He let it hang there, unsure of whether or not that was a good thing or a bad thing.
“I know. That’s the other reason I think UCB would work for me. I wouldn’t have to pay out-of-state tuition. He’s hinted that maybe I can come stay with him for a while.”
David’s eyebrows shot up and Lauren could tell he was really getting loaded. “You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?”
“I can’t stay here, David. I hate Oregon and all this wet drippy cold. I am a California girl through and through. I could stay here one year or eighty-one years, and I’d never get used to the weather or the way people think.”
“I see. Does your mother know these plans?”
Lauren laughed. She doubted he’d remember them if he got any more loaded. “Are you nuts? You know how she feels about him. She would slit her wrist if she thought I was leaving her to go be with him.”
David nodded and blew out more smoke. “That’s true. But she will be glad to hear you’re planning to stay through your senior year. Every morning since we got here, she wakes up expecting you to be gone.”
Lauren shook her head. “Tell her to stop worrying. I’m going to finish out my year here.”
David inhaled again. “Good. She’ll be excited to hear about your plans.”
“When? In between séances? Right after she finishes drawing pentagrams? Maybe she can squeeze me in between eye of newt and leg of toad.”
David finished his pinner and eyed her silently. “You think that’s fair?”
Lauren laughed sardonically. “Fair? Don’t even get me started about fair, David. Ripping your kids from their home in order to live in the forest in a fucking wigwam isn’t exactly fair, but I don’t think I need to go into my feelings about it. I’m here. I’m going to finish out my school year and then go home.”
“What about Vicky?”
“What about her?”
“What are her plans?”
“You’ll have to ask her. I have no idea.”
David cocked his head and studied Lauren through a thick haze of blue smoke. He did this when he was really baked and trying to find the right words to express how he was feeling.
“She’s your sister. You live practically on top of each other. How could you not know?”
Lauren’s eyes narrowed. “The better question is how is it I don’t even care? Because I don’t. My guess is she’ll go back to Davis where she thinks her life is.”
“Isn’t it?”
Lauren could tell David was too loaded now to think linearly. “That life is over, David, and the sooner she accepts that fact, the better.” Rising, Lauren warmed her butt next to the fireplace. “I know I have.”
“And you’re sure about Santa Barbara with your dad?”
Grabbing her jacket, Lauren started for the door and fresh air. “You know, David, I’m not sure of anything any more.” With that, Lauren walked out and into the cold, wet rain, wondering if she’d ever been sure of anything in her life.
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