High On Arrival Read Online Free PDF Page A

have hoped for a reconciliation—another reconciliation, those doomed reconciliations that were par for the course for my dad and his lovers.
    It was the early sixties, when being a single mom with two kids wasn’t exactly socially accepted, on top of everything else that made it difficult. So my mom left her job at the Pentagon, where she was assistant to Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense, probably still vying for the marriage she expected and couldn’t imagine life without. She followed my dad—her first love, the man who broke her heart by rote, but most of all by throwing her under the bus for a sixteen-year-old when she had two small children—she followed him across the country.
    In Virginia, my father had paid sporadic child support and sometimes dinner was ketchup and saltines. In Los Angeles, nothing changed. Dad bought us a condo but soon stopped making the payments. An eviction notice appeared on the front door and my mother sued my father for back alimony and won.
    For all his irresponsibility, Mom never stopped loving Dad. She wasn’t built that way. But when Lenny, the guy who drove us to Summerhill in his Cadillac, came along, I’m sure she welcomed the notion of a financially stable, traditional man who would support her and take care of her.
    Jeffrey and I were excited about Lenny too. Mom had been a serial dater and we liked the idea of her in a stable relationship. When they got married—I was nine or ten—Jeffrey and I cooked them a celebratory wedding dinner. We decorated the table with cake toppers and baby’s breath from a craft store down the street and made an elaborate fondue dinner. We had high hopes. But Lenny was bad news. He married my mother and proceeded to beat the crap out of her on a regular basis.
    My brother had been causing trouble for a while, but when Mom got married Jeffrey got worse. He enraged Lenny, who turned scary, looming, loud. Our family was emotional—I’ve always been one to wail at the drop of a hat. Even a McDonald’s commercial can make me tear up. But Lenny’s emotions were big and violent. He was angry in a way that was completely foreign to me. He was the antithesis of everything we knew.
    Finally, Lenny and my mom sent Jeffrey away to the Bar 717 Ranch, a “clean up your act” school for kids in a national forest near Hayfork, in Northern California. It was one of those places where delinquent kids mucked out horse stalls in order to learn how to obey their parents. Dad taught us to question authority and Mom sent Jeffrey to a school for kids with authority problems. No wonder we were fucked up.
    I could barely stand the thought of a day in that condo without my big brother. He and I had matching blankets with flowered patterns on them. Mine was reddish pink and his was blue. When Jeffrey left I got his blanket out of his room and slept with it every night. I’d hold the blanket and keen, Jeffrey, Jeffrey.
    After a year at school Jeffrey came home, but not much had changed. My mother held our household together as best she could. She made cookies at Christmas, we decorated the tree every year, we watched the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. But she was still reeling from my hurricane father, who was riding in limos and living in mansions and married to one woman, then the next, and her despair must have numbed her to Lenny’s battery. He broke her mastoid bone. He broke her wrist. When she and I did a teens-and-their-mothers shoot for the magazine Tiger Beat, she hid the broken wrist and wore makeup to disguise two black eyes.
    Mom was our structure and stability. When we lost faith in her, Jeffrey and I ran wild. We drank, smoked pot, dropped acid, stayed up late, went to parties, cut school. In front of our condo were beautiful olive trees that dropped purple-brown olives. When I came home from school my mother would say, “Your eyes are red.” I’d say, “I know. I’m so allergic to those olive trees,” but I’m pretty