Little Lori Blue

Little Lori Blue

Never felt at home

Thought she had to roam

Make her dreams come true 

It would be well over a year before we learned anything at all about what happened to her; before forensics and coincidence joined forces to end the speculation about her disappearance and to validate the upright despair that consumed her family – especially her mother.  But for her friends, those of us who had known her since high school and who had understood her insatiable craving to shine and witnessed the depths she would dive to summon awe to a glamour she did not naturally possess, there was no question that Lori would not be coming back.

“Lori was such a little scamp.”  Her mother said with a smile to no one in particular as we moved toward our table in the noisy café, bustling with the impatient rumblings of midday hunger.

Tried to touch the sky

By a desperate leap

A height she could not keep

Still she had to try

Her mother had phoned me the day before asking if we could meet for lunch.  “At a nice outdoor café.  Someplace sunny and full of light.” 

It had been more than six months since that day in late December when she watched her only daughter back her Toyota down the driveway and head toward Chicago to visit her cousin over winter break.  Six months since that phone call from her panicked niece a week later telling her that Lori had not been seen or heard from in two days.

Too close to the flame

Always getting burned

Yet she never learned

On whom is laid the blame?

Although we were more than two years out of high school by then, even at twenty-years old, few of us were prepared for the burden of convention that comes with maturity.   And for as much as some of us had been the law-breakers and the drug-takers and viewed ourselves as the exceptions to every rule we did not initiate, Lori had been so a hundred times more.

Lori and I became friends when we were both fourteen during the second semester of our Ninth grade year.  She had just been returned to her parent’s after her third attempt at running away from home.  Unlike the previous two, which took her no farther than the ladies room at the local mall, this time she left with a boy; a pimply-faced speed freak, AWOL from the Army and had hitchhiked as far as Colorado. 

She said she loved him and proudly described to me how she watched him inscribe her initials in his arm with a shaving razor and a ballpoint pen“Practically like the professionals.”

 “She was just such a little scamp”, her mother repeated, “a little daredevil and so restless. We’ll probably get a phone call from her any day telling us she’s joined the circus.  Lori always loved the circus – the clowns, you know – and it would be just like her to up and take off with some carnival.  Just like that!   That’s the kind of scamp she was, always wanting to try something new.”

When we were in high school I envied Lori’s freedom.  She had no curfew, there were no conditions or restrictions put upon the frequent visitors to her attic bedroom at all hours and there was never a shred of suspicion or alarm from her parents as we bundled our blue-jeaned, bedraggled and drug-addled bones up the stairs to see her; almost always to get high. Often her mother would offer up plates of homemade cookies from the bottom of the stairs, readily passing them into the spindly hands of whichever stringy-haired teen was straight and sober enough to retrieve them. 

“I still have this little copper relief she made for me when she was in the second grade.”  Her mother said as she looked at me across the refined chasm of table, her face blanched of all sorrow by the smile I rarely ever saw her without. 

It was not the sort of smile that conveyed a joy that was lived in.  It was the sort of smile that read “With every ounce of my being I am trying to believe what is on my face over what is in my heart.” 

It was really not a smile at all.  It was a fortress.

“Oh, it is just the sweetest little copper relief of The Big Top with a wide-mouthed clown and an animal I’ve always assumed was an elephant, but I never did ask her.” She continued.  “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings if I had guessed wrong.”

She patted the cloth napkin on her lap, tenderly smoothing the creases, flattening the edges and tugging each end gently up towards her waist as though she were tucking a small child into bed for the night.

In those years there were many of us boldly crossing that tightrope of iniquity, climbing to drug-induced heights under a canopy of unrealistic expectations that rivaled any three-ring performance.  That one of our numbers would go missing was not surprising; especially that it was Lori.

“I can’t imagine why she hasn’t called home, but I’m certain she’ll have an explanation.  She has always been so very independent.  Always.” 

I smiled but didn’t know how to respond.  What I knew of Lori, of her recklessness, her promiscuity and her lust for attention at any cost was not something I would ever share with her mother.  

With that she looked past me while the silence between us continued to expand from our respective inabilities to be truthful until it was as though a third person had joined our sorry table.

Where were all of you?

Did you not hear her call?

Did you not know we all

Could have been Loris, too?

More than a year later we would learn that Lori was dead.  She had left her cousin’s apartment alone one night to listen to a band at a local bar and never came home.

A week later a trout fisherman would discover the naked body of a young woman underneath a bridge in Sauk County, Wisconsin; her only distinguishing feature being a small mushroom tattoo on her hip.  She had most likely been suffocated, her body put into the trunk of a car then dumped under the bridge in this rural and remote location so far from the city of Chicago.

Without any immediate means of identification, she was buried in the cemetery of a nearby town.  Eventually, through dental records and detective work her identity was discovered.

It has been thirty-five years since her death but each year her parent’s still make the long drive from Kansas City to the town where she was laid to rest; the town of Baraboo, Wisconsin; formerly the winter headquarters of Ringling Brothers, and home to the Circus World Museum; a town that is also known by the name of Circus City.

Her murder remains unsolved.

Little Lori Blue

Finally climbed too high

And Little Lori died

As Little Lori’s do

A MATTER OF LOVE AND DEATH

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up - my stomach ratcheted by the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother clutched the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

The wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw and all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I'd written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk, awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the end of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference.

All night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed applicable only to the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh .

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris was now girding his pacifist sensibilites preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent.  I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl's school -missing him - and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned; and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

Still, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters.  Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon.   It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have nothing.

Chris was learning to fly.  I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams.

Of course, there was a positive element:  We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Cognition and impetus now surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes.  I even did my homework.

I was no longer escaping today but living for my day of escape.

As I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching my room, I looked to the floor and my history book lying next to the nightstand where I'd tossed it the night before.  Even in the early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the letters that spelled out C H R I S in soft, bubble forms on the torn bookcover I'd fashioned out of a brownpaper grocery bag.

I remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily.  I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would.  I glanced at the clock.  It was nine-twenty-three and although I still needed time to finish my work, the letter could not wait.

So, I wrote.

I would always write.

I would always be there.

He would always be there.

"Suzi."

It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother - though weighted and slow - her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi." She said it again, this time with a sharp gravity - like a chisel against stone.

My parents were now sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them.

I don't know how.

I didn't know why.

The lights in my room remained off; but it seemed that the darkness clung to them as though they were holding it there - away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment.  They were crying.  My father was crying.  My father.

"Suzi.  We have something very, very bad to tell you."

"Chris has been in a car accident."

"And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it.

If there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in.

And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to?  Who am I going to love?" I wailed.

Who will love me?

In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that - there was no after that.

After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for many years.  A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting.  To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything.  It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

But Twenty-eight years ago in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child.

After a decade of forgetting, I remembered.

I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in that same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me.  His great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time.

If he has any intention of coming for this one, he will have to go through me.

And trust me, he will be in for one hell of a fight. 

WHAT I HID FOR LOVE

Landing on that one decrepit wooden step was always the risk.

One misguided footfall and my parents would awaken to derail my nocturnal plans.  Such was the downside of harnessing liberty as a teen while living in an old home on the precipice of one hundred.

It never occurred to me that I was not in every way deserving of these post-curfew flights, nor did I believe that I was doing anything wrong.  This was a matter of survival and a necessary step in eradicating the invisible and loathsome blob of animated nothing that had sought custody of my self-regard for the entirety of my nearly- fourteen years.

However, this was a new game and while it may have taken a cross-country move to improve my standing,  I now held the cards - a purgatorial flush where the presence of sin ranked equally with hope and guaranteed me a draw.  Certainly, it was a gamble but in the heat of the game I chose to ignore all threat of punishment and creep silently out of the house to meet the boy who saved me.

He was three years my senior and his early interest in me was predicated on the false belief that I was nearly sixteen.  Months later when I revealed to him my true age, it was of little consequence.  We were committed to one another with the shared and rabid impetuosity of a dark adolescence that was crumbling under its own depravity but still innocent enough to believe in the lofty pledge of true love.

It didn't take much to sweep me into blind collusion.  I had sworn off my treaty with loneliness and was done being bolstered up by the knotted veneer of being different.  The need to belong to a person or peers outside of my family was all that mattered because at that age my worth could only be measured against the fine distinction of choice.  Who would choose me? Would anyone?  Ever?

And to this end I traded my Catholic-school-girl decency and severed all ties to the worthy aim of being holy.

Sneaking out of the house became routine.  So much so that by the fall of my fifteenth year I was hospitalized for a month with Pneumonia and Mononucleosis and under some concern in the first week that I might not even survive.  

Still, no amount of self-inflicted suffering could convince me of the danger in the lifestyle I had adopted.   I had a boyfriend.  A loyal one who called me every night, loved me every weekend and took me to places with pills, pipes and powders that were so otherworldly my body could not follow.

My body had other uses.  

Within weeks after our family’s summer move from New York to Kansas City the rumors began.   In the typically defensive wake of the 1970's Midwestern clannishness, the sudden presence of a prematurely-voluptuous, blonde-haired interloper could mean only one thing:  I must be a slut.  

By the time classes began in the fall, the reputation that would follow me throughout high school was sealed and all I did to deserve it was step off a plane.  

Ironically, this unwholesome notoriety preceded even my first kiss by a good ten months.   

Yet by the advent of that kiss and after months of abiding school-hall taunting, prank phone calls and exclusion, taking that next step seemed a fait accompli, and the benefits that were proffered upon proof of loyalty trumped all hesitation.   

True love would accept nothing less.

True love demanded sacrifices. 

True love provided refuge. 

I dressed for school dances like everyone else but while my classmates whirled under colored lights to the awkward throbbing of local bands and made plans to meet for pizza after the dance, I was folded against the ignominy of sin in a fetal clump as I hid on the floor of my boyfriend’s car while he signed for a room at a crumbling truck-stop motel in a neighboring town.

Now, in addition to the entertainment value, getting high became a necessity providing a buffer against the fear, guilt and shame.  So did the treats:  the promise of a burger and a movie, candy, Crackerjacks, or novelty toys purchased at 7-Eleven on the way to the motel.  

These became my rewards for a loyalty well-proven.  But until that last gasp of evening when they were mine, I was a quivering, disembodied hull pining over a Disney-colored innocence that would never exist for me again.

Those were the early years.  The tip of the iceberg, as they say.  Declivity would soon become my specialty.  Fortunately, so would survival.

Of course, I grew up and I moved on, but the tendency to see myself merely as one whose every favorable gain comes at the feet of deplorable compromise is hard to shake even after time and the wisdom of age have softened the memories.

I thought I had long ago put the worst of these to rest, but when my son was arrested for the last time and sent to prison, the purveyors of my darkest recollections put on quite a spread; a banquet of remorseful expurgation in my honor  - an invitation that in all good conscience I could not refuse.

Now, as I again taste the bitter morsels of these ancient misdeeds with a clean and healthy palette, I search for forgiveness – and for the wisdom that can only be earned by candid appraisal.

So don’t mind me.

I’m just pushing through it like everyone else.

In the end it will all be for good.

It has to be.

I will not accept anything less. 

Uploading My Offline Self - The Hard Truth

In a few days I hope to receive the first of the journals that my son is writing while incarcerated.  We have conceived of and taken on a project that we hope will reach and benefit a much larger audience than just the two of us as we each write candidly about our drug abuse and specifically about our addictive natures and how they have irreparably altered our respective sane destinies.  This is my first public admission. It has perhaps been the most difficult step I have ever taken. 

It wasn't the first time I had tried it or the last time I would regret it.  But early in the winter of 1969 it became clear that regret would be taking a backseat to risk if I were to ever make it out of my teens alive.

So when my boyfriend slipped that frail needle into the raised blue arc of my fourteen-year-old veins, I smiled with compliant trust and a virginal anticipation endemic only to children and the clinically lost.

At that fledgling age redundancy is unknowable and ignorance, unimaginable.  That any of us survived the repeated missteps of our youth at all is ample evidence of divine intervention.

Initially, you might assume that my addiction began right there; as a rebellious, self-loathing newcomer to autonomy caught in the volley between conscience and need.  I was, after all, an impetuous, distractible, second-rate firstborn whose choices swayed decidedly to the far left of consequence with a desire for external validation so insidious it was an addiction in and of itself.

But that would be a false assumption.

Addiction is not seeded in desire or in its object but in their respective abuse, and I cannot remember a point in my life when the abuse of both has not been my reality.

The object of my desire has always been more accurately, an objective: escape; but until the winter that followed our family's relocation from New York to Kansas City, all means to that end had been ostensibly innocent, organic and internal.

Previously, escape had been facilitated by the vagrant chords of music and song that drowsed endlessly through my head from infancy.  Music that would later speak directly to me throughout my childhood compelling me to rock back and forth on the floor or on the edge of my bed for hours as I ruminated over which of the four Beatles I would marry or how to best get the attention of the boy down the street.

The further away in thought I could get from the clumsy, unexceptional, pudding-faced, non-entity whose spirit felt trapped by circumstance and cursed by a conscious awareness of soul and self, the more graced I became with a forbearance to take her sad visage into the following day.

But the radical shifting that occurs in both personal and family dynamics after a long-distance move provides unusual opportunities for reinvention, and I took advantage of all that were available to me.

The non-entity was vanquished and in her place came the maddening rebel whose lack of respect for her host purged the odds of all restraints.  There was little I would not do for attention or liberation from the cloddy and cumbersome introvert shackled to my past even if that entailed censoring my conscience as I navigated my present.

And so at fourteen years old I began an intimate and dependent relationship with hallucinogens, amphetamines, barbiturates and heroin that lasted well into my twenties.

Unfortunately,  it is not over.

That deadly barge of desire and myopic obsession for quick passage to Anywhere But Here still yearns to sail every single waking moment of my life, and although I have not yielded to its darkest cravings since the birth of my first child twenty-eight years ago;  I have only to think of that child - now a man - to understand that the worst part of any addiction is that we never self-destruct before taking hostages.

Every single person who has ever loved us is an innocent victim of our deliberate indifference.  I know this because as my son now suffers the retributive justice of succumbing to these same ruinous impulses from his small cell in a state prison,  neither can I see any further than the mortar and brick that close him in.

If anyone doubts the genetic probability that constitutional discontent can be transferred from parent to child, think again.

It is from guilt, shame, separation and grief that I write and for liberation from the malignant assumption that it may never be any better than this that I long.

Words have become my current addiction.

Blogging, my rig.

Divine intervention may still be my best hope.

In the meantime, I write.