parents

I woke up next to Lila in her sunny room in her family's ranch style house in the hills above "the valley," on yet another sunny day in L.A. No parents around, no breakfast being cooked, no one getting ready for work. Oh, there was her cute brother, but he was just a blur, a whir of hormones passing by on his way out. The scent of Chanel #5 wafted in the warming morning air, as the perpetual L.A. bouquet garni of anise, sage, mustard plant and smog drifted in through cream-colored plantation shutters. 

The slow morning was the result of a long night spent in a white bread restaurant club so mismatched to my sensibilities that it felt like an uncomfortable research project, rather than the kind of fun I would have in the comfort of dirty rock clubs, jazz clubs and dive bars where I felt more at home. At that time, I was trying on lifestyles, and for this one I wore new and shiny clothes meant for chicks with acrylic nails and gold jewelry, when I was more of a thrift store girl - dresses or pants, girlie or tomboy - but not shiny and new. 

The feeling of talking with the Encino jock crowd was that of receding into the rafters while my avatar held a drink and laughed or nodded, pretending to hear the words that these guys spit out hard over the bad blaring music and noise. And still today, I can say that as a young girl, I had reason to feel safer in a dive bar than in that suburban meat market, as they called it back then. 

I was 14 years old, and two years prior I had changed school districts to start Junior High School. I can remember what a rude awakening this entry into pre-teen was. I remember the time, the day, the moment, in my baby-blue saddleback pants, strolling across the main courtyard with my stringy dark blonde hair blowing in the hot LA breeze over my peach and blue disco blouse. The moment when I first noticed a girl at Junior High looking at me. It was no longer about how fast, limber, smart, or musical I was, how much fun I could have or how adept I was at getting away from everyone to be alone. It was now about how I looked. How we looked. 

This was a mandate from an invisible hand somewhere, and my whole body said, "No." Not that I escaped the long, confusing saga that is teenage, but I pushed instinctively against this notion. And at this moment, I became smaller and began to recede into my own thoughts despite this instinct. The effect was vertiginous, panning out and zooming in at the same time as in Psycho or Vertigo. 

I had walked across the courtyard thinking ‘maybe I’ll do okay in this new school’ and by the time I reached the gym, I had rescinded the promise inferred but never offered. I went inside and stayed there. Eventually, I would however, have an epiphany on the same asphalt courtyard a few months later: everyone is just afraid. I will be the first one to smile and say hello when I walk into the room. That would change everything... and it did. But that was a future moment. 

For now, rejecting this quiet tyranny was a point of connection for Lila and me, though our nature and circumstances were so different. She was the most wanted girl in school. She could get any guy to give her his lunch money just by asking. And so she did - but only once that I recall. Maybe it was like a superpower she was aware of but wasn't that excited about - anyone given a gun will try it at some point. 

Overall, she seemed uninterested in school, and more focused on evenings out, with men twice her age. I loved school, and if anything I felt a deep sense of self-betrayal anytime I went along to get along, and cut school. The two of us fell together in seeking comfort and escape. We wore sloppy sweats and school-issue gym clothes to school and didn't brush our hair. We ate with the low-income lunch ticket crowd in the ‘other’ cafeteria in our crappy sweats, to get away. We played ugly, the way some kids would do by playing out their monster side: growling and snarling and forcing toy creatures to fight each other to exhaustion.  

Our friends began to wonder.  We had no explanation because we didn’t fully understand what we were feeling or how to handle ourselves. We were simply acting out our horror at the false notions of what girlhood, womanhood, and femininity were about, by redecorating our spirits through breakfast burritos, dirty sweats, foul language and isolation.  It was beautiful: it just didn’t look pretty.

Lila's relationship to her parents seemed defined in large part by their particular kind of absence. This was the case with many of my friends growing up. The Schulz-ian household in which parents are reduced to unintelligible warbling sounds in the background - still affecting, but one world removed. Each family seemed to suffer from a different form of absence. Lila’s family suffered the absence of the celebrity father who was a director, and a mom traveling for film work.

As for my family, we suffered from a form of absence involving two generations of men who were known in their fields of entertainment. It gave them a sense of entitlement the size of England and left the family in the dust. Insulated from the effects of their own bad behavior, exempt from outward consequence, they played in the vast leeway given to them, like kids in a sandbox. Any vague sense of guilt they may have felt, was plowed under by their ongoing parade of fun, in which they alternately seemed unfettered and uneasy, as we paid for their happiness with ours. Garbage. All I wanted was the truth. But truth was a casualty of family myth-making – and blind spots. 

You can know for sure there’s trouble if kids feel uncomfortable staying with other families. That’s how it was with me. Staying with a family that was intact was the worst. Overwhelming, claustrophobic -- all that attention and inquiry. Oddly, it would leave me feeling internally defensive of my family, because that’s all I knew, and though home is not always safe, it’s familiar, and that counts for a lot. Lucky for me there were plenty of un-intact families like Lila's, lots of soft, blurry places to land.

And so, we woke up that morning, put beer and eggs in our hair, walked out into the morning sun and laid out topless by the pool to recover. Beer and eggs. Morning and night, running together as they so often did - runny, hard, hungry and thirsty, in the endless summer heat.