Diamond in the Rough (6 page)

High school, 1971

Hey everybody in the old schoolyard,

We took it all the way and we took it hard.

By the time I started high school in Carbondale, I had transformed my image from chronic truant to hip folkie girl with guitar. Music was my identity, and it served me well. From there I could branch out. And thanks to my earlier stint as a bag lady, my skills at sneaking out of the house were well honed. Plus, I had discovered boys, oh, yes, yes, yes.

I know there has been speculation that I might be gay, but listen, it’s just not true. I liked boys, period, and still do, although sometimes I’ve wanted to be gay, believe me. The summer of my fourteenth year, I had my first big crush on an older man, fifteen, who played guitar and thought himself to be all that and a bag of chips. I thought so, too. He came to my open window in the middle of the night (they weren’t nailed shut anymore) and beckoned me come hither. I promptly crawled out the window and walked to his house with him, where I lost my virginity in the basement. Good, now
that
was done. Onward.

The next boy I liked was a dreamboat named Mick, a true bohemian and absolutely adorable. For some reason I wouldn’t go “all the way” with him. I guess I wanted to learn the finer points of sex, like foreplay. I had to ride my bike to and from his house, where I would crawl up some latticework to his bedroom window. Some of my fondest memories are those rides, before and after the clandestine thrills with Mick, in the still dark when everyone else was asleep and the streets were mine, with not a single sound except the whir of my bicycle tires.

Rollie was my first real boyfriend, my best boyfriend. I don’t know what it says about me that I chose best when I was fifteen. I guess things were inherently easier in a way, with all of us still living at home and being pretty carefree for the most part. Rollie was good stuff, a good man. He came to our high school my freshman year from Minnesota and was an army brat who hailed from too many places to count, including Australia, which gave him great mystery. He told me he cared for me the day school was out my freshman year, the same year Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died, the year the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel broke up, the year the movie
Woodstock
came out. My life changed overnight. I had a true companion. We became inseparable. We were friends and lovers. We took care of each other.

There was one particular night that Rollie had dropped me off at home when after I got into the house I went to the front-room window to watch him drive away. He must have seen me, because he backed up, sat for a moment, and pulled away again. I didn’t move. He backed up again, sat in the car, drove away. And again. Over and over. I don’t know how many times that night he did this dance with me, but I’ll never forget it.

My parents found out that Rollie and I were having sex. I guess we started that about six months into the relationship. It was a big step for us and well planned for. I got birth-control pills from the free clinic. My mother discovered them. The shit hit the fan. Rollie was summoned over, and my father had a private talk with him in his office. One of our friends came to pick him up at some point, and he was ushered out the door in tears. I’m not sure why my parents were so upset. I wasn’t going to get pregnant. And they loved Rollie.

But that’s actually very shortsighted of me. In retrospect, this certainly defines not only the core of my own disconnect with my parents but perhaps the alienation of my whole generation. I was just a little bit shy of the Age of Aquarius, but its principles seemed sound to me—all you need is love. Rollie and I had love, we were hurting no one, we were responsible. But, of course, this came smack up against the morals of my parents’ generation, which dictated that premarital sex was wrong. Isn’t it always the case? These days I’m stunned when my daughter tells me, “It’s chill, Mom,” after I hear Snoop Dogg rapping about squeezing Katy Perry’s buns. I grew up in the era of
the
generation gap. Naturally my parents were the enemy.

In addition, there was something personally askew between my parents and me. Today I can look back and understand the challenges I presented to these two very young people who were fantastically underprepared to raise a rebel, an artist, a depressive. Today I can see that so much of life is timing, that my folks and I are more alike than any of us could have imagined. Both of them are artists who chose other paths. My father also rebelled as a young man, and my mother waited until she was a grown woman and knew her enemies, which were and are the systems that threatened her rights and those of her children, of all children. It’s true that perhaps my mother has never taken a mental-health day in her life, but Dad takes Prozac and has phobias like me and my sister. Back then, though, all they could detect was nonconformity and trouble, and all I could sense was that my very self was somehow just wrong.

So they told Rollie and me that we couldn’t see each other anymore. There was not a worse thing they could have chosen to do to me. Rollie was such a balancing force in my life. He got along with Mom and Dad, so I could, too. He was a Christian Scientist, and I was a hypochondriac. He used to tell me, “Shawny, there is no spot where God is not, for God is everywhere.” And my stomachache would subside, my heart would stop racing.

I woke up the next morning, after we’d been separated, and a storm was blowing in. I’d also been grounded in order to minimize the chance of our seeing each other on the sly. My windows might just have been nailed shut again. I went out to our backyard and sat on top of the picnic table. I sat and watched the storm blow in, and I can’t explain it, but somehow I knew, deep down, that it would be all right.

I felt stripped and shaken, but I also felt the solace of what I would call the power of love. Because Rollie and I loved each other. It was no one’s to take, it couldn’t be stopped, no matter what.

Eventually my parents let Rollie back in. We promised not to have sex anymore, a promise we never intended to keep. I think everyone knew this. And from age fifteen to nineteen, I loved Rollie Carlson, and he loved me, and the world was safe and good and promising.

Me and Rollie, prom night, 1972

There was a custom at Carbondale Community High School whereby a junior or senior girl would be paired with a freshman girl to mentor her for her first year. The older girls were called Big Sisters. Mine turned out to be Anna Baker, the real big sister of one of my best friends, Mandy. Anna was the stuff of prom queen and bohemia combined. She knew how to traverse both realms, was a total stunner, and for this we all looked up to her. Tall, tan, a body to die for, and a personality to match—irreverent, supremely confident, bigger than life, really. I was hers. The first thing she did, being a woman of solid priorities, was teach me how to smoke opium. I already knew how to smoke cigarettes, so this was not a leap. We sat on the shag rug in her parents’ living room with her connection, Leah, whose dad traveled to Indonesia a lot, and I got high. I never did figure out if Leah’s dad actually brought the opium over—it seemed logical and certainly exotic—or if it was the more likely scenario in which Leah herself procured it from someone in the rich 1970 drug land of our large university town. Either way it was fine stuff.

The Baker girls were also revered for their talent for high drama. We all participated in Speech Team, where one could compete by reading prose or acting out a scene in a play either solo or with partners. I myself did prose as well as a duet acting stint from Carson McCullers’s
The Member of the Wedding,
in which I played Frankie. Mandy tried her hand, with much success, in a scene as both Stella Kowalski and Blanche DuBois from
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Her final lines, and I can vividly remember her impassioned and desperate delivery at age fifteen: “I let the place go!
I
let the place go? Where were
you
? In bed with your—Polack!” She won every time. Naturally this kind of thing leaked over into our everyday lives, and Mandy was quite proud when, after being picked up late by her gentleman caller, Scott, she coolly responded to his acknowledgment of his tardiness by snipping, “You are very observative.”

Mandy wasn’t the only one who was challenged grammatically. Our friend Liz, upon going on one of her first dates ever, was sure to tell the waiter she didn’t want “scrotums” on her salad, when obviously she meant to say croutons. Liz was another one who could seamlessly ride the line between cheerleader and bad girl, even if being bad meant nothing more than sneaking cigarettes behind the back of her protective older brother, Steve. Only Liz could pull off smoking with elegance, though. She was the most feminine of all of us, petite and blond and buxom. It took her an hour to do her makeup and hair, which was naturally curly at a time when straight hair was the way to go. I was the total opposite of Liz, and this attracted us to each other. I didn’t wear makeup at all and wouldn’t have been a cheerleader if you’d paid me. Whereas Liz was prim and well mannered, I veered toward the crude and obscene. I farted and burped freely, talked about sex explicitly, and generally delighted in grossing her out. She disapproved but really couldn’t tear herself away.

Jane was more on my level. We had a certain lack of sophistication. It was Jane and I who gave pet names to all our friends’ breasts. Liz was “Modest Mounds” for obvious reasons. Mandy was “Baby Nips,” Jane was “Smashed Bananas,” I was “Airplane Nose,” and our Vietnamese pal, Pat, was “The Good Earth.” Jane had delightful sayings like “Oh, balls!” and “You ain’t a-woofin’, honey!” and called everyone “doll.” She suffered no fools. Jane and I also had the corner on musical obsession. She didn’t play an instrument—that role was reserved for Joanne and me—but Janey and I swooned over our idols, something Joanne was far too cool to do. It was Jane and I who took on the arduous task of recording our own James Taylor interview. We got out a cassette player and would record a question: “James, we heard that you woke up in the night screaming....” Then we would cue up his response from one of his albums, and this particular answer was James singing “just a bad dream …” from “Blues Is Just a Bad Dream” on his first record. This was vinyl, remember, so it required a fair bit of work to drop the needle in the exact right place. Another one of our questions was, “James”—we loved this, just saying his name—“James, what are the lyrics to your new song?” We delighted in our clever answer, from the very end of “Blossom”: “La laaa la la la la laaa la la la la la la, la la la LA LA LA.”

On New Year’s Eve, the older Bakers always went out, leaving us to fend for ourselves in that fabulous house. My folks were teetotalers, while the Bakers showcased a complete liquor cabinet and had their five-o’clock highballs every evening. Mandy’s aforementioned Scott came over one New Year’s Eve, having been drinking before he got there and with plans to go on drinking after he left. Before he left, though, he needed to puke in the downstairs bathroom, and I guess he wasn’t particularly neat about it. This was news to us when Dennis, Mandy’s father, got home in his cups and used the bathroom. His wife, Donna, was in tow, her wig turned halfway around her head, giving her a sort of Liberace–meets–Louise Jefferson effect. After seeing the mess downstairs, Dennis interrogated Mandy, who could think on her feet and blamed the dog. Dennis paused as we all held our breaths and finally said, “Mandy? Mandy? Did you give that dog scotch? You know he was raised on gin.” God bless Dennis. He got sober the same year I did—1983.

With my guitar on one side of me and Rollie and my good friends on the other, I coasted through high school. These were some of the most wonderful, grounded times of my whole life. I made decent enough grades to get by, although I recall precious little of what I learned in school, save for how to write a check and how to type. From Larry English I learned the words “twat” and “snatch.” From Todd Stephens I found out what a great friend a guy can be. Oh, and I remember learning about tectonic plates and that flushing the toilet wastes water. Overall, life was simple and full. After I graduated from CCHS, though, things weren’t so clear anymore.