Coal to Diamonds (11 page)

Kathy moved to Olympia by herself, during the longest rainy season they’d ever had. The year Kathy left sunny Arkansas, the
Pacific Northwest skies dumped rain for a record-breaking ninety consecutive days.

Kathy had always been the backbone of our group. She always had a job. Because she was a practical, methodical Virgo, and because of the way she grew up, she needed to work. It preserved her sanity. Nathan, Jeri, and I, we were like, Money, who cares? We’d scrounge or go without. But that attitude made Kathy anxious. She didn’t like not knowing where her rent money was coming from, so she took control of her finances.

Kathy and I had grown close in Arkansas. I missed her humor and the special bond we shared with Jeri. Then, about six months into missing her, Nathan and Jeri left. They moved into Kathy’s teensy Evergreen dorm room. With no cash, the three of them would make a cheap pack of ramen last for days, rationing it out noodle for noodle.

In phone calls and letters, Jeri and Nathan referred to Kathy’s overcrowded dorm room as “the Nest.” Apparently, the two boys were sleeping on the floor, in a pile of dirty clothes, like birds that had scraped together a bed from the detritus of the world around them. Jeri found a job doing telemarketing and brought home a paycheck, and Nathan—I don’t know how Nathan got by. He must have been getting some help from back home.

Kathy had bought Jeri his plane ticket to Seattle. Kathy always had food, even if it was just a packet of ramen; Kathy always had the rent, even if the house was nothing but a single room stuffed with dirty clothes for sleeping on.

I was a mess without my friends. Everything I’d been staving off, all that I had survived, whatever I hadn’t been paying attention to swelled together like a wave to topple and drown me. Without my friends, I felt stuffed back into the lonely part of life, a part I’d thought was gone, but here it was again. I was way too broken to work; I couldn’t get it together. I was a senior, and school was ending soon. I would need to get my shit in order. But the more I thought about life, the more overwhelmed I felt. I was haunted
by my time at Aunt Jannie’s. With my friends gone, and so much time by myself, I felt trapped in my own head, I felt the echoes of everything I’d stuffed away. Without my friends I was shunted back to the old Arkansas, the scary, stifling, trapping place. I had a nervous breakdown.

It started at school. What would have been a sleepy morning for any teenager was—that particular morning—unusually hazy. My eyes couldn’t adjust. Light seemed brighter and my body felt like a ton of bricks. During the ride to school my head was a balloon and I still can’t remember making my way to class that day. I was sitting at my desk directly behind my best friend at school when the first bell rang and the teacher began to speak, but I couldn’t react. It was almost as if I were in a walking coma. My brain was aware and sending messages, but my limbs and mouth couldn’t receive them. I tried to reach out and get my friend’s attention, but I was paralyzed. Finally my hand made a heavy swipe and came into contact with her. Then my tunnel of vision got smaller and smaller until everything was black. The next thing I knew I was on a gurney gasping for air because I was crying so hard. Of course, because I liked music, had black hair, and was pro-choice everyone assumed I was on drugs. That assumption only fueled my anxiety. I went from school that day to the hospital, where I stayed for five days. My condition worsened and the doctors started running scans on my brain. I lost my ability to speak clearly and developed a stutter that stuck around for three months. The tests all came back negative. The doctors didn’t know what to do with me, so I was eventually prescribed antidepressants and sent home.

Some of the physical symptoms lifted over time, though the panic, the clawing fear, remained. I could speak again. Against all odds, I came to and graduated.

It was Kathy, everyone’s savior, who got me my one-way ticket to Washington State. I didn’t belong in Arkansas, none of us did, and Kathy was a worker, a doer. She’d gotten work at the A&W. Kathy said she could get me a job there too, and if I didn’t like
Olympia, if I hated it and wanted to come home to Arkansas, I could just pocket my money and buy a return ticket, which sounded like a foolproof plan. I won either way. It was a deal, so Kathy maxed out her credit card and my three best friends started the search for some hole-in-the-wall we could all afford.

It would be good to get some space between myself and Arkansas. I felt relief just imagining it. My friends’ exodus had left a hole in my heart, and I needed to fill it.

I wasn’t planning on staying in Olympia for long. I was just coming for a visit, just going to sell some hot dogs, turn around, and come right back to Arkansas, have that baby once and for all, and stay put in what I knew. I didn’t break up with Anthony because it wasn’t like I was leaving. I was just going on a little vacation to see the friends I missed so much. It was my mother, witchy and psychic, who felt my future the strongest.
You’re never coming back
, she said to me flatly. The tone of her voice wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was just flat, totally neutral. It was the facts. My mother knew how this was going to play out.
Be prepared, because you’re not coming home
. I couldn’t argue. Something in me was rising up, pulling me to another part of the country. It felt powerful and it ran through my system like a Red Bull. I was going out into my life.

High school graduation is a huge racket—both for the company selling caps and gowns and for young entrepreneurs like me. You have to buy invitations to your own goddamn graduation. Then, the idea is that you send graduation envelopes to all your long-lost relatives, and everyone sends you a little money.

When you’re like me and half the region is a relation, those dollars pile up. Suddenly I had money to take with me to Olympia. Me, who had never had anything at all. I had a pile of cash and a one-way ticket to the birthplace of Riot Grrrl, where a house full of my favorite people sat, waiting for me to join them.

The night before I left, my mother drove me to my sister’s house, and my sister and brother drove me to the airport in the morning. My mother couldn’t stand goodbyes, so she stayed behind. I took everything I owned on the plane with me. I told myself that it wasn’t because I wasn’t coming back. I had just never been on a trip before; I needed all my best stuff for Olympia! Not to mention, my drifter mentality was telling me to keep all of my
important things with me. The streets would be full of Riot Grrrls, I would make more friends, I would be with Jeri again, and Kathy, and Nathan!

I know my witchy mom cast a spell on me to get me the fuck out of Arkansas just like I know she cast a spell on me so that I wouldn’t get pregnant, try as I might with Anthony. I really believe it was my mom—trying her best to raise us right, to get us all the things she never got, those things that kids keep you from—who made all of it happen. On the way to my sister’s house, I sat in her spell that night, inside her oddly silent car.

I’d never been on a plane before that trip. Back then, people could accompany you to the gate, and my brother, sister, and Anthony took me all the way there. My brother had a card for me from my old friend Crystal. They were boyfriend-girlfriend then, and they’re still together today. The card read:
I can’t believe you’re going to Seattle!
There was a calling card tucked inside for me to make long-distance calls back to Arkansas.
I am
, I thought.
I am really, really going
.

My siblings and I have such a special love between us. We don’t tell one another that we love one another very often at all, but we always feel it. Our love is there, and it’s strong, and I could feel it when they sent me off. I knew that they had done everything they could to make sure I had all the things I wanted, including a shot at life outside Arkansas. I’ve always been different from my brothers and sisters. They figured out how to build good lives on the site of a lot of pain. They were happy to see me go not because they wouldn’t miss me, but because they always knew I would go. It was rare to leave Judsonia, and I was rare, and everything made sense. They wanted me to have the biggest life I could have.

My sister Akasha especially made sure I had everything I needed. She had had to learn about college all by herself. She got herself up every morning as a teenager and made sure we both
got our asses to school. She got absolutely straight A’s. She was a math and science genius like my two big brothers. She filled out her own financial aid forms to get herself to college. She wanted us to go to Ole Miss together. She intended for us to do that. Instead she went to community college in Beebe, Arkansas, and put me on a plane to Washington State, out into the world.

I showed up in Olympia at the very end of the 1990s, thinking that there were only fifteen punk kids in any town. I was so naïve; I thought Kill Rock Stars was a tape distro, like what Nathan was doing but cooler. I’d never actually read
Sassy
. I only got the trickle-down from other kids who could afford the magazine, so I didn’t realize how enormously the scene had blown up. I didn’t realize how conceptually unprepared I was to be in Olympia until I landed there. I really thought every punk scene was the same, and that the only difference with Olympia was there’d always be something to do. And that was true—compared to Searcy there was always something to do. It doesn’t mean it was always fun or good, but we always went, Kathy, Jeri, Nathan, and I.

The house Kathy had scored for us was disgusting. It was disgusting before we moved in, because these carny punks who blew fire had lived there and had really let the house go to shit, the way only a true punk house can go to shit. Perhaps you’ve never heard of a carny punk before. Let me explain. It’s very much like what would happen if a crusty punk married a Ringling brother. Luckily,
I’d lived with Aunt Jannie and was used to a gnarly mess. It wasn’t a big deal. I shared a foldout couch with Jeri, in the living room, already accustomed to not having my own bedroom. Six of us lived in the place—me, Kathy, Jeri, Nathan, the drummer from Little Miss Muffet—Joey Casio—and a boy named Erin. It was only a two-bedroom house, but every bit of space was commandeered as someone’s bedroom.

We were all still underage—Kathy, the oldest, was just twenty—so we would go to the big supermarket in town, Ralph’s Thriftway, and shoplift bottles of wine. Stealing food is one thing, but the risk of getting busted grows significantly when you’re stealing heavy, cumbersome bottles of booze. The most savvy of us could walk into a Goodwill without a bag and walk out with two stolen bags completely full of pilfered goods. I’d only shoplift little things—a little food, some eyeliner, some lip gloss. But I knew people who could shoplift three or four bottles of wine at once, shoving them in a coat or dropping them in a bag. Nathan, on the other hand, was notoriously bad at it. He would get busted trying to nick a piece of gum.

The whole carny punk house was living off the food Kathy and I could take from the A&W. As promised, Kathy had gotten me a job there, and it kept us all fed for a while. We dined almost exclusively on corn dog nuggets and chicken strips dunked in radioactive yellow honey mustard sauce. Everyone was eating the skanky meat products except Joey Casio, who was vegan and hoarded green beans. It was like a backwoods Southern experience of college dorm living.

In order to get downtown, where the shows were, we had to make it down an enormous hill. We’d wear roller skates and just zoom down it, right into the heart of Olympia. Of course we fell on our asses all of the time, speeding down the steepest hill in town. Jeri and I were the least adept. We’d be drunk on wine, in our roller
skates, on our way to some show we’d heard about. At the time, in Olympia, there was this one wine called Night Train that everyone was drinking. Night Train makes Mad Dog look like Cristal. That said, it was especially easy to steal. Imagine grape bubblegum and battery acid. Now mix that with bile and you understand the flavor of my first year in Olympia. It was so gross, but it was fun too.

You couldn’t even buy alcohol where I was from—my county, White County, was dry. You had to drive an hour and a half to buy a bottle of anything. In Olympia alcohol was sold casually, and every kid was carrying a Coke bottle filled with whiskey, vodka, or rum, or all three mixed together.

The culture shock continued; Olympia had bagels! We didn’t have bagels in Arkansas. You could order vegetarian food all over town! It was so crazy to me—a place with so many vegetarians, the restaurants made special dishes for them? Being in Olympia was like going off to college. It’s where I got my education. For example, before I got to Olympia, I didn’t get the concept of touring bands, how they need money badly because they’re living on the road and gassing their vans. I thought it was just one big party. I didn’t get it, and no one made me feel that more acutely than Nathan.

I respected Nathan, and thought he was hilarious, but Nathan was also a royal pain in the ass. He was like the worst big brother and little brother combined. Too cool plus a compulsive liar. He’d accepted me into the group, but not with the warmth and depth of Kathy and Jeri. He continued to hold me at bay, like I just hadn’t totally proved myself yet, and probably never could.

Olympia was a town crawling with music. I was new to the whole punk scene, and my only previous window into music culture were the magazines—like
Rolling Stone
—that I only got my hands on once in a long while. My knowledge of Olympia’s music scene was limited, to say the least. Imagine how surprised I was to see Rachel Carns just walking down the street. At that time it was only
about five years after Kurt Cobain’s death. People weren’t fetishizing his suicide yet. I was at a party, and Tobi Vail from Bikini Kill was there. We were joking around, Jeri and Nathan and I—
This shit is grunge
, we were goofing.
Kurt Cobain is going to show up, this party is so grunge!
Tobi Vail overheard us laughing and got really upset. We couldn’t possibly be at a party with people who had
known
Kurt Cobain? But we were. With people who had known him, dated him, played music with him.