My Life Story: Puyallup
Jan. 16th, 2007 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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We moved from southern California to Washington state about 3 or 4 days before Mt. St. Helens erupted, so early May of 1980. I remember us driving by & being able to see the first smoky plumes issuing from the mountain, but it didn’t make an impression on us. We were following a friend of my dad’s, Don. We were moving to the apartment complex Don & his family lived in. We were a small caravan – Don in his pick-up truck, my parents (and sometimes myself – I switched between the Pinto & Jody’s car) in their bright green Ford Pinto & Jody in her primer-grey Chevy Vega. The one animal we took with us was Jody’s cat, Buddy (short for Budweiser) in a cat carrier on the Vega’s roof, stoned out of his mind on kitty Valium.
We arrived in Puyallup relatively late at night. I remember only vaguely re-uniting with Lani & David (Don’s kids, who were on-again, off-again truck stop friends) & meeting Joyce, Don’s wife. Don was half-Hawaiian, Joyce was full Hawaiian. Joyce was as much of a hard-assed bitch as my mother was. We did not mess with her much. That night, sleeping in one of the rooms with my parents, I remember waking up at one point & seeing what was possibly the biggest arachnid-shaped shadow cross the wall. I was also starving to death & my mother told me I was having nightmares & to go back asleep. Two or three days later, we had a massive earthquake. It didn’t phase me or my family – having just come from southern California, our reaction was to find a near-by doorway & sit tight. But then the skies turned black, and powdery ash began falling. Mount Saint Helens had exploded, taking out the small town at her foot, killing a few people, wiping out countless trees, Spirit Lake & the flooding the Toutle River. That summer was filled with dark days and earthquakes as the mountain continued to have smaller eruptions. The ash was everywhere. Rob bought a souvenir can of it here at Broadacres Swapmeet around the time we first met.
I don’t really remember much about moving in. Coming up to Washington in two small cars, we obviously didn’t bring much in the way of furniture. I remember sleeping on a mattress on the floor for about a year. We had cable-spools for tables & most of the furniture we obtained were things we got via dumpster diving or people having moving-out giveaways. The apartment complex itself was just two buildings, in sort of an upside down ‘L’ shape, with the parking lot in the middle. It was on top of a hill, with more wood-covered hillside behind it, & beyond that were condominiums with more under construction. One side had a wide field, with someone’s house out at the far side of the field & a wooded area past the field. The other side had a steep road going down to another dead-end road called Kaiser Lane or Kaiser Road, lined with houses on either side. At the foot of the apartment complex’ steep driveway was the bus stop for the school bus, and about a mile down that road was a little general store. Behind the building our apartment was in was a drainage gully filled with moss-covered trees and ferns. Under our building were the storage lockers for the tenants, which you got to from a steep concrete stairway. Our apartment faced the parking lot, and the window for my & Jody’s bedrooms faced the same way, as did the balcony. However, from the dining room window, which was huge, was the most fantastic view of Mount Rainier, with the field & woods in the foreground.
My summer was spent mostly in forging a tight friendship with David & Lani. Lani was a little older, maybe 8, & David was 10. David was a geek, only back then the word was still ‘nerd’, & he liked that I liked frogs, lizards & snakes – which were plentiful in the area. My mother, who was deathly afraid of snakes, would tolerate the odd garter snake or frog, as long as it only stayed on the balcony & was released at the end of Summer. At night, David would bring out his telescope & we'd sit & watch the stars. There were the meteor showers in August, and we'd all, kids and adults alike, sit and suffer the mosquitoes to watch them. Jody would go out foraging in the field with us sometimes. The apartments had definite unseen boundaries. The field was fine, the field was a huge playground. The hillside leading down to Kaiser Lane was a paradise of blackberries. We picked them from the middle of September til well into November, and I only fell down the hill once or twice. Of course, if you fall down a hill covered in blackberry brambles, you don’t actually fall very far – you end up trapped in the middle of them like a fly on a web, thousands of needle-sharp thorns keeping you captive until a brave soul can rescue you.
The woods behind the field were dark & foreboding. Jody would go into them & always try to bully me into crossing the border between field & pine wood, but I would panic & run, or just sit down in the tall grass & cry. Apparently behind the woods was another road leading into Puyallup proper. There was a light-filled birch wood at the corner of the field & pine wood, and that was okay unless the older kids from the condos were screwing around in it. The gully behind the apartment was sort of okay – as long as the adults didn’t catch us. It was a great gully, even though now I know it was a drainage ditch. Still, it was deep, with steep sides, and it was like a primordial rain forest. One tree I remember in particular had grown into the shape of a giraffe, with moss on its ‘back’. It was cool and shady without the ominous dark feeling of the woods beyond the field. One time Lani & I had decided to climb the hillside past the gully & ended up on the construction site, and somehow Joyce found out & screamed at both of us for days, to the point where I would have nightmares about being trapped on the construction site where a rotting Joyce would chase me in a steamroller or blood-covered bulldozer. The only time we were allowed to go to the condos past the construction site was when the school held its annual paper drive. Then we could go up there & solicit old newspapers.
There was another girl, Leslie, who moved in. She was probably 13, and a veritable font of new dirty words. I walked around saying ‘frigging’ for a week or two before her dad finally told me it was a dirty word in disguise. She collected stamps, and I occasionally spent the night with her. Her being 13, with me being from about 7 to about 9, meant we had this kind of on-again, off-again abusive relationship, me being the recipient of her abuse. I remember staying up late enought to see 'Night Flight', a precursor to MTV. They seemed to endlessly replay the Eurythmics video for "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This", so I'd fall asleep to cows & Annie Lennox. They also played weird little shorts, like one of this woman working a cafeteria line. She asked every patron, in this weird accented monotone, 'potatahs or tomatahs?'. For some unknown reason, the woman snapped & starting flinging scoops of mashed potatoes & stewed tomatoes across the room, screaming, "potatahs! tomatahs!" Then she wound down & returned to her routine, calmly dishing out veggies to her food-splattered customers.
Another girl who lived in the apartments was not allowed to play outside much because she had brittle bone disease, and I can’t remember her name. I had seen Carrie at some point (well, Jody & Terry took me to see Carrie in the theater, much like they had taken me to see re-releases of The Omen & The Exorcist) and the girl & her mom looked so much like Sissy Spacek & Margaret White that they kind of creeped me out from time to time. I think either they moved before school started or she went to a private school. The property owners were the Foxx’s, & they owned several apartment & condo complexes in Puyallup & Sumner. There was an elderly couple who lived at the far end of Lani’s building that managed the property. They used to invite Lani & me in & the old lady had all of Shel Silverstein’s books, so we’d lay in the sunlight in her living room & read silly poetry. There were rhododendrons all over the property, and all in all, it wasn’t a bad place to live. At least, until school started.
When school started, all the different aged kids, from kindergarten to high school had to wait at the same bus stop & ride the same bus. I started out with a backpack, which was stolen, kicked into the road on numerous occasions, and finally torn to shreds by the high school kids. My mother wouldn’t get me a new one, so I somehow ended up with a knock-off Trapper Keeper – and it went the way of the backpack. At some point, I ended up having to carry everything around, where it was even more vulnerable to teen-aged paperwork predators. We were subject to verbal & physical violence every morning, rain or shine, warm or cold. The walk down the driveway was like walking up the steps to the hangman’s noose. Jody understood a little better than my mother just how bad it was, so when she could get up (or when she hadn’t been to bed yet) she would drive me & Lani to the bus stop & wait with us til the bus came, & she could usually be depended on for rides back to the top of the hill. Her Vega’s passenger-side door didn’t always close securely, and one time she went around the curve on that steep driveway & me & Lani flew out & rolled into the blackberry brambles down the hill. After that, it was strictly no kids in the front seat. One day, before some vacation, we were told to clean out our desks. I had an amazing amount of old work crammed into mine because I had no way to take it home. I wrapped it all up in this blue furry coat I wore, tied it into a bundle with the belt, and somehow managed to make it onto the bus. When I went to get off the bus, some kid towards the front of the bus pulled the belt & spilled six weeks worth of old schoolwork across the bus floor. The bus driver screamed at me as I hurriedly tried to scoop it all up & said I couldn't ride the bus again until I had some kind of book bag. My mother interrogated me as to why I had lost my backpack, my binder, and had to carry all my crap home wrapped in my coat, so I finally had to tell her that the high school students tormented the grade schoolers unmercifully. The next school day after that vacation, my mother walked me to the bus stop. I wanted to die, and in fact when one of the high schoolers said something about my bringing my mommy to protect me, I asked him to just kill me & get it over with already. At some point, my mother stopped coming to the bus stop, but all the high school kids were sent to a different stop shortly after that because a fifth grader brought a butcher knife to the bus stop & threatened one of the nastier assholes & got brutally stomped on.
During one school year, they combined the second and third grade classes, and I had an overly emotional outburst about getting to be in Lani’s class with her. I embarrassed her so badly that she dropped our friendship like a hot potato. She was pretty much the only friend I had up to that point, so for the rest of my time in that school, I was an outcast. The teacher, Mrs. Fleischman, worsened it. She was another cold, hard woman, much like my mother and Joyce. She shouldn’t have been a grade-school teacher. We butted heads all through my second grade, and I used to do some stupid shit to make her angry on purpose. I opened a glue bottle & left it laying on its side in my desk. I took a pair of scissors & cut chunks out of my hair. I would just act stupid if she called on me to ask her a question, or say smart-ass things like, “you’re the teacher, why are you asking me?” A great part of my problem with school began in that classroom. We were learning phonics – when I was an ‘advanced’ reader. It did give me a later ability – I can comprehend the meaning of words I’ve never encountered because I know that the syllables are usually also the Latin-based etymology, but at 8 years old, already reading biology books and sci-fi and horror, phonics was beyond useless. I didn’t understand how to humor someone effectively, or how to ‘act as though’. One day, I started snapping pencils in half, and found myself sitting in the school counselor’s office for ‘anger issues’.
The counselor asked me what my problem was & first I complained about how mean Mrs. Fleischman was, and how Lani had abandoned me. So then, rubbing salt in Lani’s emotional trauma, she got pulled into the counselor’s office for some group hugs or some shit. That didn’t go over well on the parental frontier, so a breach opened between my mother & Joyce which spelled later trouble for Don & Jody. But it also achieved some things for me. The counselor asked me what I enjoyed doing & the first thing that always popped out of my mouth was ‘reading’, which led to what I read most… and then another battery of IQ tests came my way. Suddenly, I was pulled out of Mrs. Fleischman’s class & sent off to a completely new school. I no longer had to wait at the Bus Stop of Terror – my mother had to take me to the school because it was on the other side of town. It was a school for ‘gifted and talented children’, and the curriculum was far different than grade school. We had free reading periods. We worked on logic problems instead of math. We had a class project, called Eco Island, in which we would design a self-sustaining, free energy, ‘green’ human community on a deserted rain forest island. It was an incredible experience, and none of my later 'Gifted and Talented Programs' in the future ever came close to it. But I did get much better teachers once we moved to Sumner.
One thing that was the same for both schools – we had volcano drills. They were a lot like the earthquake drills we had in kindergarten in California. (No, they didn’t tell us to duck and cover like on Southpark, it was more along the lines of look for high ground where the lava won't get you & try to stay out of the pyroclastic flow path). I remember the year after St. Helens erupted, they had an anniversary/memorial for the folks who’d been killed. You could buy commemorative coins & t-shirts & other memorabilia. We also watched an old Disney movie called something like ‘The Birth of An Island’, which talked about how one wind-borne seed could find a tiny patch of volcanic dirt & over time, forest an island. Now, when you look at the website for Mt. St. Helens, the pocket gopher is showing to be the land’s greatest helpers by bringing fertile soil up to the surface in which new plants take hold. Elk returned soon after the blasts subsided, and the trees are slowly coming back. It’s become a living laboratory and observatory for the scientific community.
Washington is beautiful. My parents liked to fish and hike, and we spent many weekends when my dad was home just driving around, looking at things & discovering new places. We went to salmon hatcheries; window shopped in Seattle and Tacoma antique stores, & spent a lot of time at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium. They had a very cool artificial cave set up where you could observe the polar bears & seals in their pool. One time, a polar bear shattered the glass & flooded the cave with tons of seawater, distressed sea lions, and angry polar bears. We weren’t visiting at the time, but I imagine it would have been absolute chaos. They had some ornamental (is that even a word that can be applied to deer? Now that I’m looking up Asian deer on Wikipedia, they were probably Sika or Axis deer – they kept their spots into adulthood) Asian deer that fought among themselves constantly. Originally, the deer were allowed to roam freely, but they kept accosting tourists so the zoo had to fence them off where they could only accost one another. In the aquarium, in the upper decks, there were tide pools set up with octopi and stingrays & sand sharks. My mother loved the octopi & they loved her back. You weren’t allowed to stick your hand in the water like at Sea World, but that didn’t stop my mother – and if she walked by & ignored the octopi, one or two would try to climb out of their watery enclosure to get at her. The Puyallup library was another of my favorite haunts. Washington and Oregon both have fantastic libraries, the perfect places for rainy days. The one in Puyallup sat in this enormous expanse of grass that fell down to a full-blown stream behind it, not just a drainage ditch. It pooled on one side & there were water lilies that grew there. I first discovered Dracula in that library & began a long, satisfying literary love affair with vampires, ghosts, and the occult.
Every September, there was the Puyallup Fair. The Puyallup Fair is possibly the greatest two-week fair known to mankind. It’s huge, boisterous, filled with animals and produce and lumberjack crafts. There’s a rodeo, sully races (I can’t think of the technical name for them), and carnival rides. There’s concerts, fortune tellers, mid-way games, and the food – oh my Gods. I discovered funnel cakes there. It’s like the World Fair every single year. (Hopefully, if all goes well, I’m dragging Rob up there this coming September – it’s still relatively inexpensive, too!).
The one year we got heavy snow in Puyallup was 1980. It was thick, it was cold, and being my first real encounter with it, I determined that I didn’t like it. We did get out of school for a few days. A couple of people bought sleds for their kids, and some were using plastic garbage can lids to sled down the driveway of the apartment complex. My mother, being the ingenious person she was, cut up a piece of linoleum for me. I sat at the top of the monstrous, ice-slicked hill, and had a panic attack. I was a timid girly-girl for all my playing with frogs & snakes and road-kill. I also had fits of vertigo because of not having depth perception. So dizzy and panicked, I was trying to get up off the linoleum and back away from the top of the driveway’s descent when my mother shoved me in the back. I don’t remember much about that ride. If you want a long, terrifying sled ride try it sometime – get on a piece of linoleum & slide down a decent grade. I ended up at the general store. I probably would have kept going if the general store’s parking lot wasn’t up hill. Instead I sort of shot into their automatic door. I waited around for awhile to see if my mother would come looking for me & finally called home – she told me to quit screwing around & come home, I was missing all the fun. If I’d been a braver soul, I probably would have told her, “Fuck you, mom, you sent me on the hayride from Hell, you come pick me up!”
Yeah, I’m a no-snow kind of person.
Shortly after that winter, Jody entered the Army. I know a lot of it was because of Don and some other older man Jody was seeing. Jody’s still got a thing for men who look like my dad. Big, barrel-chested, hairy, bearded mountain men. Cowboys, lumberjacks, that Kenny Rogers type of guy. I don’t know if she thinks about the connection between her favorite type of man & how they look like my dad or not. It’s kind of creepy to me, but to each their own. I’ve successfully managed to be attracted to femme-boys with smooth chests and girly hips (eventually I will get Rob to shave his moustache), and I don’t care if anyone says it’s only because I’m trying to desperately avoid men who look like my dad. Anyway, Joyce accused Jody of sleeping with Don. Jody insisted that her & Don were just friends and that she could talk to him about things she couldn’t talk to our parents about… My mother also gave her shit for the other guy she was seeing because he was much older than Jody (he looked more like Hank Williams, jr. than my dad). Jody was also some drinking problems & pot problems that were turning into legal problems, so into the Army she went. I’d get letters and care packages from her – she sent me Interview With A Vampire & a collection of books called Flower Faeries. Each book had an alphabet of plants, with an associated faery and a poem about the flower’s use or poisons or some tradition associated with the plant. I vividly remember this was where I learned about belladonna and yew, and tansies. I wish I still had those books, but like so much else from my childhood, they are long gone. Jody didn't stay long in the Army, but she also didn't stay long with us after she came back. She ended up going to California to help Terry with her second kid, Tina.
Before she went into the Army, Jody talked me into entering the woods behind the field. I was scared shitless, really. I dragged my feet, I didn’t want to look around me and I think I had my eyes shut for a good ten minutes into the walk. I finally started looking around at some point, and got lost in the majesty of the pine and cedar canopy over our heads. These were old trees, and they went up forever. The wood’s floor beneath them was covered in pine needles & ferns, along with what I think were bloodroot. There were brilliant lichens growing on fallen logs, clusters of mushrooms, and bird song and flight noises filled the air. At some point, the bird noises stopped. Jody stopped short & backed into me, which is why I stopped looking up and around & looked directly ahead of us. It was bizarre, and disturbing. To this day, I don’t know what it was or why it was there. There was a stained mattress surrounded by large jars and rain-soaked porn magazines. The jars were full of fluid and unidentifiable things floating inside them. Jody grabbed my hand & whispered, “we’re going to be walking really fast now”. Walking fast? Shit, we ran. We ran, making a wide berth around the odd tableau we had stumbled across, and kept running til we hit the road on the other side of the woods. Then we ran down the road for a while. We put a lot of space between ourselves & the stained mattress. Jody didn’t even have to tell me to stay out of the woods. I remember one time Lani & another girl were trying to get rid of me & they taunted me all the way through the field. I begged them to not go in the woods, that I would leave them alone if they didn’t go in there. Of course, they did, and I remember going back to the edge of the field, by the parking lot, only to see them run past me about twenty minutes later. None of the kids talked about whatever any of us ever found up there. It was just too wrong.
I think Jody’s problems with Don & Joyce were what prompted my parents to move from Puyallup to Sumner. We lost the view of Mt. Rainier, the field and the woods behind it. We gained a railroad track, a swimming pool, and my mother started showing signs that she was sick.
We arrived in Puyallup relatively late at night. I remember only vaguely re-uniting with Lani & David (Don’s kids, who were on-again, off-again truck stop friends) & meeting Joyce, Don’s wife. Don was half-Hawaiian, Joyce was full Hawaiian. Joyce was as much of a hard-assed bitch as my mother was. We did not mess with her much. That night, sleeping in one of the rooms with my parents, I remember waking up at one point & seeing what was possibly the biggest arachnid-shaped shadow cross the wall. I was also starving to death & my mother told me I was having nightmares & to go back asleep. Two or three days later, we had a massive earthquake. It didn’t phase me or my family – having just come from southern California, our reaction was to find a near-by doorway & sit tight. But then the skies turned black, and powdery ash began falling. Mount Saint Helens had exploded, taking out the small town at her foot, killing a few people, wiping out countless trees, Spirit Lake & the flooding the Toutle River. That summer was filled with dark days and earthquakes as the mountain continued to have smaller eruptions. The ash was everywhere. Rob bought a souvenir can of it here at Broadacres Swapmeet around the time we first met.
I don’t really remember much about moving in. Coming up to Washington in two small cars, we obviously didn’t bring much in the way of furniture. I remember sleeping on a mattress on the floor for about a year. We had cable-spools for tables & most of the furniture we obtained were things we got via dumpster diving or people having moving-out giveaways. The apartment complex itself was just two buildings, in sort of an upside down ‘L’ shape, with the parking lot in the middle. It was on top of a hill, with more wood-covered hillside behind it, & beyond that were condominiums with more under construction. One side had a wide field, with someone’s house out at the far side of the field & a wooded area past the field. The other side had a steep road going down to another dead-end road called Kaiser Lane or Kaiser Road, lined with houses on either side. At the foot of the apartment complex’ steep driveway was the bus stop for the school bus, and about a mile down that road was a little general store. Behind the building our apartment was in was a drainage gully filled with moss-covered trees and ferns. Under our building were the storage lockers for the tenants, which you got to from a steep concrete stairway. Our apartment faced the parking lot, and the window for my & Jody’s bedrooms faced the same way, as did the balcony. However, from the dining room window, which was huge, was the most fantastic view of Mount Rainier, with the field & woods in the foreground.
My summer was spent mostly in forging a tight friendship with David & Lani. Lani was a little older, maybe 8, & David was 10. David was a geek, only back then the word was still ‘nerd’, & he liked that I liked frogs, lizards & snakes – which were plentiful in the area. My mother, who was deathly afraid of snakes, would tolerate the odd garter snake or frog, as long as it only stayed on the balcony & was released at the end of Summer. At night, David would bring out his telescope & we'd sit & watch the stars. There were the meteor showers in August, and we'd all, kids and adults alike, sit and suffer the mosquitoes to watch them. Jody would go out foraging in the field with us sometimes. The apartments had definite unseen boundaries. The field was fine, the field was a huge playground. The hillside leading down to Kaiser Lane was a paradise of blackberries. We picked them from the middle of September til well into November, and I only fell down the hill once or twice. Of course, if you fall down a hill covered in blackberry brambles, you don’t actually fall very far – you end up trapped in the middle of them like a fly on a web, thousands of needle-sharp thorns keeping you captive until a brave soul can rescue you.
The woods behind the field were dark & foreboding. Jody would go into them & always try to bully me into crossing the border between field & pine wood, but I would panic & run, or just sit down in the tall grass & cry. Apparently behind the woods was another road leading into Puyallup proper. There was a light-filled birch wood at the corner of the field & pine wood, and that was okay unless the older kids from the condos were screwing around in it. The gully behind the apartment was sort of okay – as long as the adults didn’t catch us. It was a great gully, even though now I know it was a drainage ditch. Still, it was deep, with steep sides, and it was like a primordial rain forest. One tree I remember in particular had grown into the shape of a giraffe, with moss on its ‘back’. It was cool and shady without the ominous dark feeling of the woods beyond the field. One time Lani & I had decided to climb the hillside past the gully & ended up on the construction site, and somehow Joyce found out & screamed at both of us for days, to the point where I would have nightmares about being trapped on the construction site where a rotting Joyce would chase me in a steamroller or blood-covered bulldozer. The only time we were allowed to go to the condos past the construction site was when the school held its annual paper drive. Then we could go up there & solicit old newspapers.
There was another girl, Leslie, who moved in. She was probably 13, and a veritable font of new dirty words. I walked around saying ‘frigging’ for a week or two before her dad finally told me it was a dirty word in disguise. She collected stamps, and I occasionally spent the night with her. Her being 13, with me being from about 7 to about 9, meant we had this kind of on-again, off-again abusive relationship, me being the recipient of her abuse. I remember staying up late enought to see 'Night Flight', a precursor to MTV. They seemed to endlessly replay the Eurythmics video for "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This", so I'd fall asleep to cows & Annie Lennox. They also played weird little shorts, like one of this woman working a cafeteria line. She asked every patron, in this weird accented monotone, 'potatahs or tomatahs?'. For some unknown reason, the woman snapped & starting flinging scoops of mashed potatoes & stewed tomatoes across the room, screaming, "potatahs! tomatahs!" Then she wound down & returned to her routine, calmly dishing out veggies to her food-splattered customers.
Another girl who lived in the apartments was not allowed to play outside much because she had brittle bone disease, and I can’t remember her name. I had seen Carrie at some point (well, Jody & Terry took me to see Carrie in the theater, much like they had taken me to see re-releases of The Omen & The Exorcist) and the girl & her mom looked so much like Sissy Spacek & Margaret White that they kind of creeped me out from time to time. I think either they moved before school started or she went to a private school. The property owners were the Foxx’s, & they owned several apartment & condo complexes in Puyallup & Sumner. There was an elderly couple who lived at the far end of Lani’s building that managed the property. They used to invite Lani & me in & the old lady had all of Shel Silverstein’s books, so we’d lay in the sunlight in her living room & read silly poetry. There were rhododendrons all over the property, and all in all, it wasn’t a bad place to live. At least, until school started.
When school started, all the different aged kids, from kindergarten to high school had to wait at the same bus stop & ride the same bus. I started out with a backpack, which was stolen, kicked into the road on numerous occasions, and finally torn to shreds by the high school kids. My mother wouldn’t get me a new one, so I somehow ended up with a knock-off Trapper Keeper – and it went the way of the backpack. At some point, I ended up having to carry everything around, where it was even more vulnerable to teen-aged paperwork predators. We were subject to verbal & physical violence every morning, rain or shine, warm or cold. The walk down the driveway was like walking up the steps to the hangman’s noose. Jody understood a little better than my mother just how bad it was, so when she could get up (or when she hadn’t been to bed yet) she would drive me & Lani to the bus stop & wait with us til the bus came, & she could usually be depended on for rides back to the top of the hill. Her Vega’s passenger-side door didn’t always close securely, and one time she went around the curve on that steep driveway & me & Lani flew out & rolled into the blackberry brambles down the hill. After that, it was strictly no kids in the front seat. One day, before some vacation, we were told to clean out our desks. I had an amazing amount of old work crammed into mine because I had no way to take it home. I wrapped it all up in this blue furry coat I wore, tied it into a bundle with the belt, and somehow managed to make it onto the bus. When I went to get off the bus, some kid towards the front of the bus pulled the belt & spilled six weeks worth of old schoolwork across the bus floor. The bus driver screamed at me as I hurriedly tried to scoop it all up & said I couldn't ride the bus again until I had some kind of book bag. My mother interrogated me as to why I had lost my backpack, my binder, and had to carry all my crap home wrapped in my coat, so I finally had to tell her that the high school students tormented the grade schoolers unmercifully. The next school day after that vacation, my mother walked me to the bus stop. I wanted to die, and in fact when one of the high schoolers said something about my bringing my mommy to protect me, I asked him to just kill me & get it over with already. At some point, my mother stopped coming to the bus stop, but all the high school kids were sent to a different stop shortly after that because a fifth grader brought a butcher knife to the bus stop & threatened one of the nastier assholes & got brutally stomped on.
During one school year, they combined the second and third grade classes, and I had an overly emotional outburst about getting to be in Lani’s class with her. I embarrassed her so badly that she dropped our friendship like a hot potato. She was pretty much the only friend I had up to that point, so for the rest of my time in that school, I was an outcast. The teacher, Mrs. Fleischman, worsened it. She was another cold, hard woman, much like my mother and Joyce. She shouldn’t have been a grade-school teacher. We butted heads all through my second grade, and I used to do some stupid shit to make her angry on purpose. I opened a glue bottle & left it laying on its side in my desk. I took a pair of scissors & cut chunks out of my hair. I would just act stupid if she called on me to ask her a question, or say smart-ass things like, “you’re the teacher, why are you asking me?” A great part of my problem with school began in that classroom. We were learning phonics – when I was an ‘advanced’ reader. It did give me a later ability – I can comprehend the meaning of words I’ve never encountered because I know that the syllables are usually also the Latin-based etymology, but at 8 years old, already reading biology books and sci-fi and horror, phonics was beyond useless. I didn’t understand how to humor someone effectively, or how to ‘act as though’. One day, I started snapping pencils in half, and found myself sitting in the school counselor’s office for ‘anger issues’.
The counselor asked me what my problem was & first I complained about how mean Mrs. Fleischman was, and how Lani had abandoned me. So then, rubbing salt in Lani’s emotional trauma, she got pulled into the counselor’s office for some group hugs or some shit. That didn’t go over well on the parental frontier, so a breach opened between my mother & Joyce which spelled later trouble for Don & Jody. But it also achieved some things for me. The counselor asked me what I enjoyed doing & the first thing that always popped out of my mouth was ‘reading’, which led to what I read most… and then another battery of IQ tests came my way. Suddenly, I was pulled out of Mrs. Fleischman’s class & sent off to a completely new school. I no longer had to wait at the Bus Stop of Terror – my mother had to take me to the school because it was on the other side of town. It was a school for ‘gifted and talented children’, and the curriculum was far different than grade school. We had free reading periods. We worked on logic problems instead of math. We had a class project, called Eco Island, in which we would design a self-sustaining, free energy, ‘green’ human community on a deserted rain forest island. It was an incredible experience, and none of my later 'Gifted and Talented Programs' in the future ever came close to it. But I did get much better teachers once we moved to Sumner.
One thing that was the same for both schools – we had volcano drills. They were a lot like the earthquake drills we had in kindergarten in California. (No, they didn’t tell us to duck and cover like on Southpark, it was more along the lines of look for high ground where the lava won't get you & try to stay out of the pyroclastic flow path). I remember the year after St. Helens erupted, they had an anniversary/memorial for the folks who’d been killed. You could buy commemorative coins & t-shirts & other memorabilia. We also watched an old Disney movie called something like ‘The Birth of An Island’, which talked about how one wind-borne seed could find a tiny patch of volcanic dirt & over time, forest an island. Now, when you look at the website for Mt. St. Helens, the pocket gopher is showing to be the land’s greatest helpers by bringing fertile soil up to the surface in which new plants take hold. Elk returned soon after the blasts subsided, and the trees are slowly coming back. It’s become a living laboratory and observatory for the scientific community.
Washington is beautiful. My parents liked to fish and hike, and we spent many weekends when my dad was home just driving around, looking at things & discovering new places. We went to salmon hatcheries; window shopped in Seattle and Tacoma antique stores, & spent a lot of time at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium. They had a very cool artificial cave set up where you could observe the polar bears & seals in their pool. One time, a polar bear shattered the glass & flooded the cave with tons of seawater, distressed sea lions, and angry polar bears. We weren’t visiting at the time, but I imagine it would have been absolute chaos. They had some ornamental (is that even a word that can be applied to deer? Now that I’m looking up Asian deer on Wikipedia, they were probably Sika or Axis deer – they kept their spots into adulthood) Asian deer that fought among themselves constantly. Originally, the deer were allowed to roam freely, but they kept accosting tourists so the zoo had to fence them off where they could only accost one another. In the aquarium, in the upper decks, there were tide pools set up with octopi and stingrays & sand sharks. My mother loved the octopi & they loved her back. You weren’t allowed to stick your hand in the water like at Sea World, but that didn’t stop my mother – and if she walked by & ignored the octopi, one or two would try to climb out of their watery enclosure to get at her. The Puyallup library was another of my favorite haunts. Washington and Oregon both have fantastic libraries, the perfect places for rainy days. The one in Puyallup sat in this enormous expanse of grass that fell down to a full-blown stream behind it, not just a drainage ditch. It pooled on one side & there were water lilies that grew there. I first discovered Dracula in that library & began a long, satisfying literary love affair with vampires, ghosts, and the occult.
Every September, there was the Puyallup Fair. The Puyallup Fair is possibly the greatest two-week fair known to mankind. It’s huge, boisterous, filled with animals and produce and lumberjack crafts. There’s a rodeo, sully races (I can’t think of the technical name for them), and carnival rides. There’s concerts, fortune tellers, mid-way games, and the food – oh my Gods. I discovered funnel cakes there. It’s like the World Fair every single year. (Hopefully, if all goes well, I’m dragging Rob up there this coming September – it’s still relatively inexpensive, too!).
The one year we got heavy snow in Puyallup was 1980. It was thick, it was cold, and being my first real encounter with it, I determined that I didn’t like it. We did get out of school for a few days. A couple of people bought sleds for their kids, and some were using plastic garbage can lids to sled down the driveway of the apartment complex. My mother, being the ingenious person she was, cut up a piece of linoleum for me. I sat at the top of the monstrous, ice-slicked hill, and had a panic attack. I was a timid girly-girl for all my playing with frogs & snakes and road-kill. I also had fits of vertigo because of not having depth perception. So dizzy and panicked, I was trying to get up off the linoleum and back away from the top of the driveway’s descent when my mother shoved me in the back. I don’t remember much about that ride. If you want a long, terrifying sled ride try it sometime – get on a piece of linoleum & slide down a decent grade. I ended up at the general store. I probably would have kept going if the general store’s parking lot wasn’t up hill. Instead I sort of shot into their automatic door. I waited around for awhile to see if my mother would come looking for me & finally called home – she told me to quit screwing around & come home, I was missing all the fun. If I’d been a braver soul, I probably would have told her, “Fuck you, mom, you sent me on the hayride from Hell, you come pick me up!”
Yeah, I’m a no-snow kind of person.
Shortly after that winter, Jody entered the Army. I know a lot of it was because of Don and some other older man Jody was seeing. Jody’s still got a thing for men who look like my dad. Big, barrel-chested, hairy, bearded mountain men. Cowboys, lumberjacks, that Kenny Rogers type of guy. I don’t know if she thinks about the connection between her favorite type of man & how they look like my dad or not. It’s kind of creepy to me, but to each their own. I’ve successfully managed to be attracted to femme-boys with smooth chests and girly hips (eventually I will get Rob to shave his moustache), and I don’t care if anyone says it’s only because I’m trying to desperately avoid men who look like my dad. Anyway, Joyce accused Jody of sleeping with Don. Jody insisted that her & Don were just friends and that she could talk to him about things she couldn’t talk to our parents about… My mother also gave her shit for the other guy she was seeing because he was much older than Jody (he looked more like Hank Williams, jr. than my dad). Jody was also some drinking problems & pot problems that were turning into legal problems, so into the Army she went. I’d get letters and care packages from her – she sent me Interview With A Vampire & a collection of books called Flower Faeries. Each book had an alphabet of plants, with an associated faery and a poem about the flower’s use or poisons or some tradition associated with the plant. I vividly remember this was where I learned about belladonna and yew, and tansies. I wish I still had those books, but like so much else from my childhood, they are long gone. Jody didn't stay long in the Army, but she also didn't stay long with us after she came back. She ended up going to California to help Terry with her second kid, Tina.
Before she went into the Army, Jody talked me into entering the woods behind the field. I was scared shitless, really. I dragged my feet, I didn’t want to look around me and I think I had my eyes shut for a good ten minutes into the walk. I finally started looking around at some point, and got lost in the majesty of the pine and cedar canopy over our heads. These were old trees, and they went up forever. The wood’s floor beneath them was covered in pine needles & ferns, along with what I think were bloodroot. There were brilliant lichens growing on fallen logs, clusters of mushrooms, and bird song and flight noises filled the air. At some point, the bird noises stopped. Jody stopped short & backed into me, which is why I stopped looking up and around & looked directly ahead of us. It was bizarre, and disturbing. To this day, I don’t know what it was or why it was there. There was a stained mattress surrounded by large jars and rain-soaked porn magazines. The jars were full of fluid and unidentifiable things floating inside them. Jody grabbed my hand & whispered, “we’re going to be walking really fast now”. Walking fast? Shit, we ran. We ran, making a wide berth around the odd tableau we had stumbled across, and kept running til we hit the road on the other side of the woods. Then we ran down the road for a while. We put a lot of space between ourselves & the stained mattress. Jody didn’t even have to tell me to stay out of the woods. I remember one time Lani & another girl were trying to get rid of me & they taunted me all the way through the field. I begged them to not go in the woods, that I would leave them alone if they didn’t go in there. Of course, they did, and I remember going back to the edge of the field, by the parking lot, only to see them run past me about twenty minutes later. None of the kids talked about whatever any of us ever found up there. It was just too wrong.
I think Jody’s problems with Don & Joyce were what prompted my parents to move from Puyallup to Sumner. We lost the view of Mt. Rainier, the field and the woods behind it. We gained a railroad track, a swimming pool, and my mother started showing signs that she was sick.
