Dear Feed Store Zealots,
I don’t have a mortgage. I’m still renting. I think I may always be renting. I think that may be ok. I can always paint the walls orange if I want to, and they can just paint over it and take it out of my deposit. A fountain in the yard under a beamed pool house is another matter. I remember the pool house in LA. It was right out of a magazine. Mom was like that, always making things like they were right out of a magazine.
When I turned 15 my parents threw a big party for me and my friends. We were living in a great old house in The Valley. San Fernando, that is. Yep, that’s me: an original Valley Girl and Mall Rat. The party was outside on a warm September night. Mom floated candles in little cups on the surface of the black-bottom pool, and we ate hot dogs and potato salad in the fern-draped pool house, under the 16th century carved lion’s head on the wall. It was really gorgeous, except I never did like potato salad. I don’t know what she was thinking: maybe she was dreaming of an all-American life she had seen in the movies as a kid. We never ate potato salad normally. My friends thought it was totally cool, though. They devoured the potato salad.
The candles looked like giant stars as they whirled on the currents of the pool driven by the automatic filtration system, humming in the background. There was a long table covered with food and sodas. Our favorite rock and roll on the turntable brought outside for the occasion. Boys and girls giggling under the huge sycamore, dangerously dark brick decking that changed elevations twice along the length of the pool. Paper cups and streamers, lights hung from the branches, my parents trying to stay out of the way and chaperone at the same time. I was a goddess for an evening. By Monday I was back to being my same old nerdy self: too smart for my britches, Mom used to say. I never quite figured that out. What does smart have to do with britches?
At 10:30 the boys had to go home, and we girls set sleeping bags out on the floor of the pool house. That’s another thing: the bags were those flimsy cotton jobs sold just for slumber parties. No padding. I can’t sleep on anything harder than a mattress. The night was spent tossing, once we finally did go to bed.
We had been planning on sneaking out for days before the party. What self-respecting 15 year olds wouldn’t have? The boys were staying at one of their houses nearby and we had arranged to slip out the driveway gate around midnight and rendezvous with them down the street. Problem was, the gate had been padlocked by my knowing parents from the other side. I suppose they were inside watching while we gathered at the gate and came up with plan B. How stealth can 6 teenage girls be? Especially after all that soda, and potato salad.
We decided to climb over the back yard wall, 6’ tall and made of concrete bricks. No footholds whatsoever. We managed, giving each other legs up, only to find ourselves in the neighbor’s yard, which, as it turned out, was also locked. Somewhere around 1:30 we gave up and got back to the pool house, hugely disappointed, slightly relieved. All but Cheryl Peterson. She was furious. She was the wild one in the bunch, and my mom did not like me hanging out with her at all. Mom was usually right, but that didn’t make me any happier back then than it does now.
Cheryl and I once hitched from the Valley to the Strip, yea, Sunset Strip, at midnight one summer eve. This would have been in ’69. Can you imagine? What were we thinking? We cruised awhile, avoiding cat calls and whistles. At least I was. Again, Cheryl was disappointed. At that point, I was definitely naïve and not too into ‘getting laid’. Cheryl? Well, she was always up for anything.
Cheryl and I once snuck away from a church group sleep out at San Onofre beach and snuck out to party with a Hell’s Angel bunch camping nearby. She’d met one of the guys at the beach and he had invited us. You betcha. Bowls of pills, plates of powder, dishes filled with doobies. Lots of Jack Daniels. I don’t remember how the hell we got back to the church group. I do remember being woken up just before dawn, having just gotten to sleep, as the entire camp group searched the grounds for my brother Rick, a year younger, who had disappeared sometime in the night. We found him the next morning in his sleeping bag, sound asleep on a cliff ledge about a hundred feet above the ocean. We tried to convince them that he had always been a sleep walker, but no one believed us. I think they thought he was possessed or something. We went on one other trip with the church group, but that turned out to be an utter fiasco.
That time we took a bus out to Park City, Utah for a ski trip. The first day, I slipped off the lift onto the icy run and broke my tailbone. The next morning I struggled to wake from a fever induced nightmare. I had relapsed with the Hong Kong flu and stayed in bed for the next 3 days with 105’ fever living on aspirin. They refused to send me home. I had to bus back, sleeping in the luggage rack because I was too weak to sit up. They were mad at my brother and I, I guess, because we tried to smuggle my boyfriend and his buddy into the motel. He wasn’t in the church group, but had driven his antique black volkswagon bug all the way from California with the intention of staying secretly with my brother and I.
Naturally the church kids were appalled at this plan, and poor Erik and Eddie spent 3 miserable nights in an unheated laundry room about frozen to death. They would come back early from skiing, sneak into my empty room, shower, steal snacks, and dash out before the group got back from their skiing. I can’t believe Eric even speaks to me anymore, after all I put him through.
Mom didn’t let us go on anymore church trips, which was fine, because I couldn’t stand the insipid songs and prayers anyway. I’m not Christian, either, so it really was lame to begin with. We thought the trips would be fun. I guess our idea of ‘trips’ was a bit different from theirs. No kidding.
At any rate, I am happy to be mortgage-free. A pool house would be fun, maybe not as much as when I was a teen, but then what is? I wonder what stories my sons, now adults, have from their teen age years? Matt shared one or two, but not until he was safely relocated 5,000 miles away. Danno? He’s within driving distance. He went through the DARE program, so he was sober until he turned 18. He’s been making up time. We never let them join any church groups, though. Just to be safe. I mean, what would Jesus do… at 15? What would you?
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