And sleep around is certainly what I did. And drink. And do drugs. And generally be a total misfit. When I was in the middle of ninth grade I saw a boy who was a couple years older than I standing outside after P.E. I was instantaneously in love. I mean full-on, heart brokenly, want to have his baby in love. I saw his eyelashes and it was on. The way he stood was enough to make me feel like throwing up - literally - in a good yet painful way. His eyes were like penetrating heavy weights and I was sunk to the ocean floor when he looked at me. This is exactly the way I felt at the time. That intensity of feeling. It was excruciating from the the very first moment.
So being the reckless girl I was, I walked right up to him and said something. I am not exactly sure what I said but it was something like, "I want to be with you." The emphasis on BE. And what do you think he did? Yes, he promptly escorted me right off campus and into his mom-is-not-home apartment.
At that time I had decided to try to quit drinking and doing drugs. I had a sober father, uncle and grandfather and was familiar with the signs of alcoholism and I suspected I had it. It has been a short time, 5 days, 5 weeks, something like that, that I had maintained a tentative sobriety.
He offered me a wine cooler - I remember this so clearly because wine coolers were new (to me or to the world, not sure) and I had this tiny baby moment of remembering that I was not going to drink anymore. Fuck that. It was on. All on, all the way, no looking back. And so began the onslaught of the worst emotional pain I had ever felt - which, at 14 was not a vast amount of pain. But I had had my share of familial, social and even romantic trials to know that this was not going to go well.
This boy had a girlfriend when I met him and he did not break up with her to be with me (although they did break up while I was still seeing him, things did not change in terms of my status as his official girlfriend). He dealt drugs and had a pager - (a pager that was like a mocking distant glass of water in the midst of a dry, hot desert - there was this pretense that I could get in touch with him, but he almost never called me back). He was often distant and cold and occasionally really romantic and loving. We were both from a liberal background and shared a certain jaded sensibility about the way the world worked. I saw that there was a real verbal and mental connection between us and he with me but for him, the drugs, childhood pain and teenage angst were all too powerful to allow any of that good stuff into a relationship with me. I was way more that he wanted to deal with - he had no resources to take on my level of obsession. There was no repository within him for my fantasy.
So that was how I spent my high school years. Fucked up with obsession. Trying to have real boyfriends along the way who were sweet, normal, nice guys but never really liking them all that much. Doing tons of drinking. Torturing my parents. Dressing and behaving in the most provocative, aggressive and rebellious fashion. I failed or received "D's" in all my classes. I think I took geometry twice. Eventually I had to take a remedial math class, which I failed when the teacher made a deal with me. He said, if I would quit smoking he would give me an "A". I wouldn't even have to take the final. I agreed. But of course, I had absolutely no intention of quitting smoking. A girl with some sense of self-preservation might have perhaps not smoked at school, or not told anyone that I was smoking and smoked only in private. But not me. I just went on smoking right before class, on campus and told anyone who would listen about how flagrantly I was defying my commitment. The teacher found out and I didn't care. I thought it was pretty funny actually. My complete loser-dome was amusing.
When I was 16 I sliced my wrist - I had been into cutting myself way before is was popular or even talked about. I would never have believed that this self-mutilation was anything but a maniupative tactic for being cool and edgy if I hadn't at the age of 13 been so utterly compelled by the shimmering, sharp $80 disection
I remember very little about the aftermath of the wrist-slicing except that my parents bought a horse before it was healed. The day we went to the stable and I test-rode Gear Jammer I was very self-conscious of the telltale wrist bandage and I did my best to keep my jacket sleeve low. I loved the horse and I loved riding him. Slowly my family became horse people and I ended up, over the next three years being given and purchasing with my own money, 3 more horses. Riding was the one thing that my parents and I enjoyed doing together. It was the only time when I felt successful and competent. Physical exertion coupled with the intense emotional connection between horse and rider was a powerful antidepressant (if I was in fact depressed - it didn't feel like depression, it felt like extreme confusion, arrogance and obsessive-mindedness).
When I was 16 and just eeking out a little bit of sanity now and then, my mother suggested I quit high school. She said that she was sick of getting the pre-recorded message from my school which said, "Your child has missed one or more classes. If this is an excused absence please call or send a note..." I was sick of rushing to the phone to intercept those calls myself. Her suggestion was the wisest parenting decision I think she ever made. I literally quit the next day and never came back. I was a few months shy of the completion of my junior year and easily passed my GED. I took a year off of school all together and moved back to my home city, Oakland, and in with my very laid back about my drinking and screwing around, grandmother. I worked at my families retail business, bought a truck, a new horse and had the time of my life. If I wasn't regularly drinking and driving and crashing my car and waking up in strange houses I would say that it was a healthy, growing period. I had finally managed to at least functionally get over the boyfriend who really wasn't a boyfriend and only occasionally bounced back into his life.
When I started to take classes at a junior college I soon solidly understood what it was I hated so much about high school. Not only did the teachers, in general, hate their jobs and their students but the shit they taught was often banal and utterly uninspiring. More than that though, I now realized, was the social dynamic of the staid and false culture which high school produces. Junior college, in particular, perhaps more so than a four year university, offered such a random mixture of people of all ages, races and socio-economic back grounds. It was so much more my scene since I had always been one to mix it up socially. One of the things I couldn't stand about the town my parents moved us to was the uptight and rigid ideas about class that were ever present, everywhere. I also revealed to myself that I was really smart. Getting A's was no problem for me now. And I liked shit - academic shit. My dad now became one of my most useful friends for he could write exceptionally well having taught English at UC Berkeley. I spent hours on the phone reading and rereading my papers to him as he stopped me mid-sentence and shredded my sentences until they were precise, sharp, perfect representations of my mind. We did this for years, even after I went to the East coast to attend a real university.
I remember being gleefully surprised by the type of guys who were now asking me out - grown men (young grown men) with histories and pasts and interests beyond foot ball and drinking. I encountered my first young sober person and I actually thought he was fascinating with long, long red hair and such a cool way of dressing. I hooked up with this young Spanish looking guy - from the bad part of town - who made it extremely clear from the outset that this was just sex (and I was actually fine with that - he wasn't my mentally my type, too into the gangster bullshit). He was so beautiful to behold that I drew him in class - perfectly. He really was an Adonis.
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