Under the Influence Read Online Free PDF

stories I invented were better—larger, more interesting, more filled with deep and powerful emotion, spectacular devotion and heroic sacrifice, and the promise of great things to come—than the actual details surrounding my origins. I preferred the idea of catastrophe or devastation to the truth, which was the dullest but also the saddest of all: the simple fact that neither of my parents tookmuch of an interest in me. It was plain, early on, that I got in the way of their plans. If they had any.
    Gus and Kay (I addressed them by their first names because that’s how my mother wanted it) were young when they met—seventeen—and divorced by the time Kay turned twenty-one, when I was three years old. I retain virtually no memory of that time, just a vague image of a trailer with a fan that ran all day long but still didn’t cool things down. Or Kay dropping me off at day care for such long days that the woman who ran the center kept a box of extra clothes for me in one of the cubbies. (Much as, in later years, I kept a toothbrush in my pocket in the hope that a school friend might invite me for a sleepover. Any place was better than where I lived.)
    I remember a great many bologna sandwiches and granola bars. A Top 40 station playing seventies hits, and the television always on. Old lottery tickets piled on the counter, never the winning number. The smell of marijuana and spilled wine. Stacks of library books under the covers of my bed: the thing that saved me.
    I didn’t know Gus well enough to pick him out of a police lineup, which is where he’d been a few times in his life. He paid us a visit twice while I was young: once when I was thirteen and he newly out on parole (something to do with check fraud), and again a dozen years later, when he’d called me up out of the blue to say he’d like to get to know me. I had actually bought this line, so when he failed to show up as promised three days later, I was devastated. I allowed myself to get my hopes up and then be disappointed again the next couple of times, until it became clear he wouldn’t be stopping by after all. (Other men, yes. They came to see Kay, not me. And nobody stuck around very long.)
    If there was one thing I knew growing up, it was that I wouldn’t be like the two people responsible for my birth. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to have a good job, doing something I loved. More than anything, though, I wanted to live in a real house, with a family. When I hada child of my own—and I knew I would—I would be a different kind of mother from the one who raised me. I’d pay attention.
    As soon as I was old enough to ride a bicycle, I got myself to the library. They had these cubicles there where you could watch movies with headphones, so when I wasn’t reading, that’s what I did. As soon as we had a VCR of our own, I was always checking movies out at the library. When Kay was off drinking, or out with some man—which was often—I watched those tapes over and over, first in our mobile home and later, when we upgraded, at the apartment my mother and I rented off the highway in San Leandro. It seems obvious now that my love of movies had to do with the comfort I found immersing myself in a world and set of characters as far removed from what I knew as I could manage. Some days I’d be Candice Bergen, other days Cher. I particularly loved stories about loner girls, outsider wallflower types who catch the attention of some wonderful, kind, handsome man (rich, naturally) who sweeps them away from their dreary existence. Sometimes—if I’d been watching old movies late at night—I’d be Shirley MacLaine or Audrey Hepburn. Never myself.
    After seeing Sabrina, I concocted the story that Audrey Hepburn was my grandmother. I doubt the kids at school even knew who she was, but their mothers did. One time I told the mother of one, who had come in to volunteer in our