I smoked my first joint three weeks before my eleventh birthday. With my mother. My mother had smoked her first roughly three years earlier, at age thirty-four. She got high with our neighbors, Michael and Caroline, who lived two houses down from us in suburban Detroit.
Prior to meeting Michael and Caroline, my middle-class parents listened to Johnny Mathis, wore polyester pants, ate Saturday night dinners at Joe Muir’s Steakhouse, and socialized with other young Jewish couples who were beginning families and paying on starter homes. My father was a ham radio enthusiast; my mother played Mah-Jongg every Wednesday night with four other women. Bowel habits of the children dominated the conversation.
My brother’s birth in 1971 made our starter home too small. My parents selected our new house from a tract going up quickly and cheaply over empty fields. All the houses were thin-walled and leaky. During winter months we put towels on the windowsills that stuck to ice in the screen tracks.
My mother met Caroline when our schnauzer, Margo, crapped on her expensive, chemically maintained lawn. My mother apologized-Margo had an annoying tendency to bolt when let out-and they fell to conversing. During the next few weeks, whenever I couldn’t find my mother in the house, I’d stand on our driveway and look down the block. My mother would be sitting on Caroline’s porch, the two of them chatting and smoking cigarettes bought by the carton.
Then Caroline introduced Michael to my mother, my father was brought in and my family experienced a sea change. I was seven, my sister, six, my brother, three. Born in 1967, I remember vast expanses of ‘before,’ including the Vietnam War, Watergate, my mother’s bouffant hairdo and my father’s leisure suit.
Michael and Caroline were thirteen years apart in age, smoked pot and listened to music we’d never heard before. Dionne Warwick, Eydie Gorme and Johnny Mathis records were soon shelved to make space for the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. I came downstairs one morning and wandered over to the stereo, where an album lay out from the night before: Led Zeppelin IV. The gray man bent under his load of twigs looked a hell of a lot different from Dionne Warwick, insouciant in her Pucci sheath on the cover of The Windows of the World.
‘Something is very different here,’ I remember thinking. ‘Something has changed.’
Indeed. What Michael and Caroline offered my parents was a way station into something they were longing for but could not articulate. They were bored by those Joe Muir’s dinners, talk of how many bags of grass clippings each garnered from the Saturday lawn mowing and whether or not the kids shat according to Spock. Michael and Caroline read books and listened to this weird music and talked about ideas. Michael liked to cook exotic foods. He belonged to a beer club and ordered aged steaks through the mail. Issues of Gourmet began turning up in our family room.
My mother stopped using lipstick and put her frosted blue eye shadow away. She stashed her hot rollers (whose smell while heating I loved) under the bathroom sink and threw away the CFC-laden can of Aqua Net. She began wearing flat shoes. My father abandoned his hair spray, grew a full beard and mustache and allowed his thick hair to grow in. Both began wearing jeans. They dropped their straight friends swiftly and without explanation.
Yet they did not become hippies. Detroit didn’t produce hippies any more than it manufactured reliable cars. Instead, they became more open-minded, aware. They began to see societal mores as false constructs. Their relationship with Michael and Caroline deepened into an extended marriage.
Detroit wasn’t a swinging L. A. or the remote hills of Humboldt County, where open marriages and casual attitudes toward drugs were more prevalent. The Detroit I grew up in was about White Flight and ostentatious money and moving to a house in West Bloomfield with a Cadillac-always a Cadillac-in the driveway. The mothers of my peers wore gold jewelry and tight designer jeans. Black women from the inner city cleaned these women’s homes while they shopped and swapped divorce lawyers.
Although my parents never told me to be discreet, I intuited that ours was not a lifestyle discussed outside the house. I was in training for the dual life I maintain to this day. When I was younger, this meant getting a decent education and a job, limiting my drug exploits to weekends and keeping my counterculture views quiet among my peers. Neither of my parents had college degrees, and we thought that magic parchment meant financial security, infinitely more appealing than macaroni and old coats. So while I toked up with my folks on free Saturday nights, I also began accepting babysitting jobs whenever possible, spending those Friday and Saturday nights at somebody else’s kitchen table, buried in American history or Spanish verb conjugation. Sometimes I’d get home around one or two in the morning, still silently conjugating the verb ‘to be’ in Spanish, only to find my parents huddled around the table with Caroline and Michael, tapping Quaalude powder-still commercially available-into vitamin E capsules. Or they might be snorting a few lines. Pot was always around. I was frequently invited to join and just as often declined.
Sometime in my early teens, Caroline decided she didn’t want to be married to Michael anymore. I have no idea why. I’m not sure anyone did. Michael moved to New Mexico to be with his son, lan, the child of his brief first marriage. My parents were devastated, but continued their intense relationship with Caroline. Robert H. Rimmer’s The Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31 lay out in the family room. I read Rimmer’s careful analyses of extended, loving relationships and felt they made perfect sense. A group of consenting adults wanting to share lives: sex, children, home, money. Yet I compared Rimmer’s Utopian world to my parents’ lives: missing Michael, dependent on me for child care, low on cash and living in a house deteriorating under harsh midwestern winters. I resented the metal key chain that gave my neck a rash. Going off to live with a like-minded group of people who took care of each other sounded fine to me.
By high school I had my life down to a science. I attended classes in the morning, then worked in the high school’s main office during the afternoon as part of the cooperative education program. I studied madly, enrolling in advanced placement history and English, hoping my good grades would get me loans or maybe a scholarship to Wayne State University. With my paychecks, I bought corduroy pants, matching sweaters and low-heeled boots. I kept my wavy brown hair shoulder-length and clean. Years later, readingyane Eyre, I instantly identified with the protaganist’s need to deflect attention from her person, keeping her shabby but neat clothing ‘in quaker trim.’
My school job freed me from babysitting, so Saturday nights, my books neatly stacked in my dusted bedroom, I’d get high with my parents. My father had befriended some younger co-workers who were into cocaine. They’d come over with their girlfriends and assorted buddies and we’d party all night.
One buddy was a tall, shy young man named Dean. He came from a working-class Catholic family of nine brothers and sisters, many of whom worked alongside him at a Ford plant. Though he was sharply intelligent, college was never encouraged in his family.
So despite his desire to attend, he abided by his father’s wishes and followed in the family footsteps into the safety of the United Auto Workers.
I fell madly in love with him. I was drawn to his quiet demeanor, the way he’d sit cross-legged on the floor at our parties, leaning forward occasionally to utter nearly inaudible comments. He liked to read, do drugs and ride motorcycles, and he turned me on to Neil Young. Our relationship encompassed all the cliches of passionate nights and dazed happiness. I was sixteen; Dean, twenty.
But we needed to score some birth control for those passionate nights. This was the early eighties, when the worst fears surrounding sexual contact could be cured with a script for penicillin. How innocently lucky we were, the last children of a halcyon era. Dean offered to buy condoms, but I felt wary: My sister was the product of a broken condom. I wanted the utter security of the Pill.
Even given their liberal views, the idea of hitting up my parents for birth control alarmed me. But one of our closest family friends, David, was an ob/gyn and my regular physician, so skulking off to the clinic my peers ducked into seemed ridiculous. While I screwed up the guts to ask my mom to make an appointment with David, Dean and I planned a trip to northern Michigan, where his family had a cabin.
My mother, of course, was no fool.
‘So I guess you’ll be needing some birth control,’ she said as we drove home from the supermarket a few weeks before the trip. I thought I was going to fall out of the Buick onto Southfield Road. ‘Uh, yeah, I will.’ Off we went to David’s office, where he gave me six months of Ortho-Novum and the freedom to fuck unfettered.
Driving back, my mother told me never to have sex in cars, as Detroit at night is not only dangerous, but often chilly. ‘Go in your bedroom and put the stereo on for privacy,’ she suggested. ‘That way, I won’t have to worry about where you are. And you won’t catch cold.’
Dean and I were together for just under a year. Initially we were happy, but our differences surfaced quickly. His family was openly anti-Semitic and they made their dislike of me plain. I didn’t allow the rush of sex and late nights of coke-fueled talk to interrupt my studies. Dean, who did differential equations on grocery lists when bored, was openly jealous. I pushed him hard to borrow money and attend a local technical college. It was none of my business, and he told me so. In truth, the college argument was indicative of deeper, irreconcilable differences. Dean came from a family that attended church on Sundays, sought other churchgoing, blue-collar people to marry and continued the tradition of large families. What I naively saw as somebody longing for more, as my parents had years earlier, was simply a boy having his wild youth before settling down to a nice housewife who would dutifully produce babies and obey the man of the house.
And then there was the cocaine. Lots of it. More than I’d ever seen. One of his brothers was a dealer, so we paid little for pure eight balls-an eighth of an ounce-folded into intricate paper squares cut from Playboy. Dean and two of his brothers were addicted. Lines in the morning before work, lines in the bathroom, lines in the car off a hand mirror while driving. (I never understood the mechanics of that maneuver. And didn’t other drivers, specifically the police, ever notice?) While I liked cocaine, my gaze never wavered from my savior from poverty: a college education. The drug waited in my night-table drawer, tucked into my blue leather ‘concert kit’ until Friday night. ‘How can you have it in the house and not do it?’ Dean would ask. ‘When I have it, I do it until it’s gone.’
His friends were equally amazed. I remember hanging out at the house he shared with his brothers one Wednesday night. The usual crowd was drifting around, waiting for free lines. Coke dealers always have lots of friends. Dean’s brother Trey, the dealer, arranged four neat lines on the Miller High Life mirror and shoved them across the table to where I sprawled on the couch. ‘Hey everybody! Watch this! Watch her not do it!’ The four lines sat between us, untouched, until some impatient soul reached down with a rolled bill and got high on a school night.
Our relationship ended acrimoniously. For Christmas I bought Dean a watch he’d been eyeing for months. He promptly ‘lost’ it. Whether he truly did, sold it for drugs or broke it in anger after a fight with me I cannot say. He ruefully promised to replace it ‘as soon as he had the money.’ I watched him put four or five watches up his nose before realizing cocaine meant more to him than the thirty-seven dollars I’d painfully saved from my meager school job. We broke up in an ugly, sobbing scene on New Year’s Eve, and I have not seen him since.
The breakup devastated me. I missed him so much it felt physical. I imagined him finding a skinny, narrow-hipped Catholic girl-at size twelve, I was too voluptuous for his tastes-and marrying her. Having quiet, nearsighted babies and buying his starter home on Detroit ’s east side, far from the reviled Jews and Blacks. I still think about him and wonder if he’s tamped down our relationship into something meaningless, or if he looks at his wife in the night and wonders what he missed.
A few other people wandered in and out of my family’s lives, lan, Michael’s son, was an occasional visitor, always bringing drugs, a bag of new records and an enviably sexy girlfriend. He went in for tall, collected redheads or blondes who left me quailing, so positive in my stoned stupor that I would say something stupid, I’d lapse into paranoid silence.
There were others: William, who discussed the scientific versus the aesthetic structure of the world with me on a long walk one day when I was seven; a guy lan often crashed with named Blaster; and Cecilia, who’d been gang-raped at a party while tripping on LSD. Talented, bright, charismatic, they’d arrive unexpectedly from Lan-sing or Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, illuminating the house for a few hours with laughter and talk, then disappearing just as quickly, returning in six days or four months or never again. These people were either incapable of or uninterested in ongoing friendships. It seemed to me that the more people ‘understood things,’ the less capable they were of functioning in the world, barely getting by on parental dole or dealing. William’s brilliance turned the corner to insanity; last I heard he lived in the streets. Blaster moved from place to place, dealing. Cecilia married a straight, dull fellow and had babies, lan did nothing, dropping out of college and living off Michael, collecting a string of pretty girls who eventually tired of his laziness and dumped him. My combination of good student, outstanding co-op worker of the year, and drug-user with my folks on weekends, while odd, wasn’t impossible. Why didn’t other people do it?
During my teens, I remember surveying our lives, relative to the world around us. The straight route led to financial freedom, affording me the creature comforts I wanted: books, records and nice clothing. The counterculture neglected the material things, shunning those values as ‘square,’ offering instead people who shared some of my core values about politics and drugs, people who didn’t freak out over my parents. A foot in both worlds struck me as practical and not a particularly difficult way to live. I often hid my glee in high school, the model student in the front row as the counselors raved at us about the dangers of drugs.
I spent countless hours trying to figure out people like lan, who did absolutely nothing, or Cecilia, who crossed into the straight life with nary a backward glance. Ultimately I gave up, becoming wary and distant from the parade through our home. Attachment to these people, however appealing, only meant hurt when they vanished. And, invariably, they did.
Friendless and unspeakably lonely, I despaired of finding people who shared my world view. My peers were a bunch of smart, rich kids following the party line, wearing Levi’s with the waist size blacked out, meeting their future spouses at B’nai B’rith youth group meetings, readying their applications to the University of Michigan. Their predictable behavior patterns enraged me. I had no desire to be like them. I wanted them to be like me.
When I was seventeen, my family decided to move to Los Angeles, where my father could find lucrative employment in the burgeoning defense industry. I was thrilled to leave, thinking of California ’s then-affordable state colleges and of all the hip, like-thinking people I’d befriend or date. Only my mother cried when we left Caroline behind.
My father found a job at a big defense company doing government contract work. He loathed it and everything it represented, but we had medical insurance, were able to replace the rusted-out station wagon and could even afford to go see Tom Petty at the Universal Amphitheater. A local kid sold us something we’d never heard of, ‘skunk,’ pot so powerful it left my sister giggling helplessly in the bathtub.
The move gave us an enormous culture shock. People spoke unrecognizable valley-girl English. Strip malls lined every non-residential street, each anchored by a nail salon. People were enthralled by their fingernails and their weight. The weather was the same every day: hot, dry and unbearably bright. Our first Christmas in LA. utterly unnerved me. I had taken a terrible job with an insurance company while waiting to establish residency for college. The city had overdecorated, as if compensating for the eighty-five degree heat. I remember emerging from the office building at noon. Christmas Eve, hitting that blast of dry Santa Ana heat and wanting to kill myself.
My depression deepened into a constant that varied only in intensity. I remember finishing Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins during my sophomore year. It was the final day before the month-long holiday break, and the campus was deserted, smelling (finally) of winter and dry leaves. An empty month lay ahead. Even the book, with its fascinating characters who led full, exciting lives, was finished. I dropped it reluctantly in the library return slot and thought again about suicide.
At twenty-two I had a nervous breakdown. I was doing well in school, but it wasn’t enough to pull me up from the emptiness of my personal life. I ceased functioning at home, crying constantly and sleeping as much as possible. I became obsessed with my weight and the most efficient way to commit suicide.
Fortunately, I was still living with my parents. My sister had moved in with a boyfriend. My brother, who was fourteen when we arrived, had made the best adjustment, getting his GED, a good job and a nice car in short order. He was busy playing in bands and going out to Hollywood clubs with his many friends. So my parents, who weren’t meeting scads of people themselves, had plenty of time to babysit me. For the next two years, I lived in a bizarre netherworld, finishing my B. A. and falling apart. For a while I was incapable of going to the supermarket alone. I’d stand there, bewildered: What did we need? Why was I there? If I stayed in my bedroom with the stereo on for more than a half hour, my mother pounded on the door until I came out. She walked dozens of miles with me around our subdivision as I ranted about ending my life.
I visited a therapist in a tony office on Ventura Boulevard. The color of her suit matched her shoes and fingernails. She told me I was an intellectual snob and needed to go Jewish folk dancing, where I would meet nice boys. ‘Call me,’ she offered while ushering me out, ‘if you feel suicidal over the weekend.’
‘You,’ I thought, ‘are the last person I’d call.’
Eventually the worst of it lifted. I graduated with honors. My brother moved out to pursue his nocturnal music career. I remained in our large house. I paid my parents a little rent and continued to help around the house.
At twenty-five I met my husband through a personals ad I placed in an alternative newspaper. I was meeting no men, the ad was free, I had nothing to lose. I received hundreds of responses, finally hitting on the line ‘looks and money not important’ to winnow out callers boasting of ‘industry’ jobs, yachts and horse ranches. John’s voice message only said: ‘Call me and we’ll savage the right.’
We met for coffee and nursed cappuccinos for three hours. We met at Venice Beach and strolled the boardwalk, poking into bookstores and head shops. I told my mother, ‘We get along.’
‘You’re going to marry him,’ she said.
It would be disingenuous to close with counterculture girl met counterculture boy, had counterculture wedding (the groom wore shoulder-length hair and a Jerry Garcia tie; the bride didn’t have a manicure) and lived happily ever after. We each continue to act in two worlds. John is an environmental engineer with an inter-national company that drug tests its employees. His gorgeous long hair rests in an envelope in his desk drawer.
John has a rare chromosomal aberration called Becker Muscular Dystrophy. It is a slow wasting of the leg and hip muscles, sometimes compounded by pulmonary and cardiac complications. Recent medical research has prolonged the lives of those afflicted, but we live with the knowledge that we may not grow old together.
He was diagnosed at sixteen and promptly decided to live as he wished and fight like hell. His attitude gives mine ballast. Unlike me, John had many friends when we met, some close. I had long before internalized the idea that the only relationships worth pursuing were of the Caroline and Michael variety. I learned from John that an acquaintance based on a few shared interests can be rewarding, and that such relationships don’t represent the surrender of core values. Instead, they are companionship, a shared glass of wine or a hit, a pleasant evening, a party to attend. I learned not to expect an intense communion at every encounter.
In fact, I stopped looking for it. I now have a few friends. None are remotely like the relationships I witnessed growing up. I am still lonely, though less so, and prone to bouts of depression. I suspect I always shall be. But knowing my happy marriage may not last forces me to attend to the present.
I am now thirty-one years old and hold to my early pursuit of a foot in each world. To an extent, I feel alienated by each; I’d no sooner vote for Elizabeth Dole than I’d live without running water. This lands me in a gray place, going into the straight world for my paycheck, then veering toward the counterculture for a reaffirma-tion of my values.
My parents, now in their late fifties, continue their coun-tercultural ways, fond as ever of lava lamps and always the oldest attendees at rock concerts. After an earthquake damaged their home, they moved to the Southwest, to a blindingly bright white house that deflects the desert sun. Surrounding them are young Mormon couples who make their anti-Semitism plain. Membership in the homeowners’ association is mandatory.
So my parents move quietly, pulling the drapes before switching on the lava lamps, keeping bottles of air freshener on the coffee table in case a neighbor knocks. They have made a few acquaintances, all younger. They do not know where Michael and Caroline are; at times, my mother insists they are dead.
For all intents and purposes, they are. But a breeze continues to blow through the window that they opened.