He was exactly how he was before, a little distant and not at all hands-on. He was nice enough, but I don’t think he had any idea what to make of me. Their town house wasn’t a mansion, but to me it was. It was clean and didn’t reek of smoke.
“The first thing we’re gonna do is wash all these clothes,” Susan said, recoiling from the stale smell of smoke as she unpacked my bag. She bought me a ton of new clothes and seemed way more excited about seeing me than my dad did. I actually spent very little time with him that week, except for when he took me to see the Liberty Bell. This was back when you could still touch it, and he held me up to reach my hand to the crack in the bell. I remember it so vividly, me in my pink jacket and pigtails, touching history.
I spent the week sleeping on their living room floor, right by a floor-to-ceiling glass window and a door that led to their back patio, which was like a mini yard. The window had huge vertical blinds, and one morning at about 5 A.M. I saw a shadow go across the ceiling. I crawled over and looked through the blinds. I so wish you could have seen this: There were bunnies everywhere. There were about twenty of them, all doing mating dances, leaping into the air and darting under each other like a goddamned bunny ballet. I thought, Am I dreaming?
Dad had to see this. I ran to their bedroom and woke him and Susan, and neither of them was impressed. “Go back to bed,” my dad said.
After that week, they—and I’m sure it was just Susan—set up a schedule of visits. I’d go see them for a couple of weeks in the summer and then either around Christmas or Easter. All my birthday cards and Christmas cards came from her, with her signing his name for him. Every time I went to see them, it was like going to Narnia. Each visit started with washing my clothes. She was kind and set up art projects for us to do, but she was not pushy. She didn’t want to play Mom for the week, and I wasn’t looking for one. I wasn’t searching for anything from my dad, either. I’d stowed away in his car and he’d brought me home. I can take a hint.
No, the trips weren’t about him. This was a short period of time where I slept in a clean bed, there was food, and my asthma wasn’t acting up from my mom’s chain-smoking.
And then I’d go home.
After Dad, my mom dated this parade of horrible guys. It was like if someone mentioned a guy, her first question was “Is he a loser? Yeah? Sold.” None of them came on to me, which I know is what people assume happened to adult actresses to “damage them” as children. No, they were just losers.
When I was about eight, my mom started disappearing for days at a time, probably with one of the guys she was dating. There would be no food, and I just wasn’t sure how long I would have to ration out saltines or whatever was still there. When she was gone, I would watch TV until late. I loved late-night talk shows and the companionship of the last years of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Saturday nights were best, because I could watch Saturday Night Live. Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Kevin Nealon—they became my heroes. The humor just clicked with me, the thrill that I was sitting there alone in Baton Rouge, and in that very second, they were making these jokes live from New York. All of us sharing this moment.
When my mother came home, she never offered an explanation or an apology. I didn’t think she was capable of either. She wasn’t off on a romantic getaway. She probably just went to hang out at a car garage where some guy worked, went home with him, and then he drove her to whatever job she was doing. And then when she needed a ride to her car… rinse and repeat. She also hung out at a bar called the Gold Dust Lounge. I just wasn’t on her radar as a priority, and by the time I was eight she was used to treating me with less care than you would a dog.
There was one man, a big, heavy dude named Wade, who was so in love with her. Wade was a nice guy with a decent job, so she wasn’t interested. But she did use him. He would come over after work and bring us groceries. Wade always sat in the easy chair by the big picture window. I couldn’t understand why anyone would volunteer to be in the house. He didn’t mind the rat poop and didn’t seem disgusted by the roaches. He would ask me about school, which no one else did.
“It’s good,” I told him, meaning it. I had realized I was smart when I started finishing my work in class before everyone else. My friends complained about quizzes and I worried that I was missing something. At school I was a leader. Not in a Mean Girls kind of way, but when we played games or pretended we were wild horses galloping around, I was always the leader and no one ever questioned it. There was never anyone saying, “I’m gonna be the leader today.” It was just natural that it be me.
It was natural to me, too. I always felt like there was some kind of magic around me. Maybe you could chalk it up to my having an exceptional imagination as a kid, but not all of it. There was a vibration that people picked up on. Like the universe had a plan for me.
By the end of fourth grade, I had found my first bad boy. Damien MacMorris was in my class, and his mom, Sharon, was friends with my mom. They lived in a mobile home in a trailer park. He had dark hair and dark eyes, and he was always, always in trouble. He was my boyfriend, though we’d never kissed.
His parents were divorced, and on the last day of school, he was going to live at his dad’s. My mom and I were over at his place, and Sheila and Sharon chain-smoked in the trailer, probably talking about how men suck. I didn’t know if Damien was leaving for the summer or for good, but I had a feeling this was the last time we were going to see each other.
The trailer park had concrete pads, and the spot next to his had no mobile home on it. We were sharpening sticks and using them to draw on the cement.
“I’m gonna miss you,” I said.
He looked down and absently started singing Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name.” It was still on the radio all the time.
“Why are you singing that?” I asked.
“’Cause it reminds me of you,” Damien said. “I’ll think of you every time I hear it.”
His mom poked her head out of the door. “Your dad’s coming to get you in thirty minutes!” Sharon hollered. “Is all your stuff packed to go?”
“Yeah!” he yelled.
This horrible anxiety seized me, a feeling that I would never see him again. I dropped my stick, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him behind a tree to kiss him. My very first time. I think in my rush, I missed the target and kissed him more on the side of the lips, but it didn’t matter. It gave me the butterflies feeling of an orgasm. Like it was bad, and “What if our moms see us?”
We smiled at each other, both of us still surprised by what I’d done. I heard the wheels of a car pull up. It was his dad. Damien got in the car and I never saw him again.
I found out years later that he died—the rumor was that he was shot to death. He was bad. If you’re keeping score, yes, number one and number two are dead. Fucking black widow.
Twenty years later, I was driving when “You Give Love a Bad Name” came on the radio. I’d never really listened to the lyrics, and as I did my mind wandered back to that day when I kissed Damien. I nearly drove off the road when it got to the line, “Your very first kiss was your first kiss good-bye.” Thanks for the memory, Damien.
When Damien moved away, I moved on to kissing my next great love, Patrick Swayze. I had a poster of him in my room because I loved him so much in Dirty Dancing. I kissed a hole in that poster. That movie is still my favorite, and I can still do every dance step. I was Baby for Halloween three years in a row as a kid. The real draw was Patrick, who I knew from an interview raised horses. I remember him saying he had two Straight Egyptian purebred Arabians, and four “fun horses” in California.