Go Ask Alice (10 page)

(?)

Who the hell cares? At last the goddamned rain has stopped! The sky is as blue as it was ever meant to be, which I gather is unusual for this area. Doris and I are both going to cut out of this asinine assed place. There’s going to be a rally in Southern California. Wow! Here we come!

(?)

I’m actually and literally and completely sick to my stomach. I want to puke all over the shitty world. Most of the way down we rode with a big fat assed, baby screwing truck driver who picked us up and got his kicks by physically hurting Doris and watching her cry. When he stopped for gas we both sneaked out even though he had threatened us. Man, what a mother . . . We finally got another ride with some of our kind and while they shared their grass with us it must have been some home grown stuff, because it was so fuckin weak it could barely get us off terra firm.

(?)

The rally itself was great, acid and booze and pot as free as the air. Even now colors are still dripping down over me and the crack in the window is beautiful. This life is beautiful. It’s so goddamned beautiful I can hardly stand it. And I’m a glorious part of it! Everybody else is just taking up space. Goddamned stupid people. I’d like to shove life down all their throats and then maybe they’d understand what it’s all about.

Near the door a fat girl with long stringy blonde hair is getting to her knees on a green upon green upon purple robe. She’s got a guy with her and he has a ring in his nose and multi-colored designs on his shaven head. They keep saying “love” to each other. It’s beautiful to watch. Color intermingled with color. People intermingled with people. Color and people intercoursing together.

(?)

I don’t know what or when or where or who it is! I only know that I am now a Priestess of Satan trying to maintain after a freak-out to test how free everybody was and to take our vows.

Dear Diary,

I feel awfully bitched and pissed off at everybody. I’m really confused. I’ve been the digger here, but now when I face a girl it’s like facing a boy. I get all excited and turned-on. I want to screw with the girl, you know, and then I get all tensed-up and scared. I feel goddamned good in a way and goddamned bad in a way. I want to get married and have a family, but I’m afraid. I’d rather be liked by a
guy than a girl. I’d rather screw with a guy, but I can’t. I guess I’ve had a bit of a bummer, Sometimes I want one of the girls to kiss me. I want her to touch me, to have her sleep under me, but then I feel terrible. I get guilty and it makes me sick. Then I think of my mother. I think of screaming at her and telling her to make room for me because I’m coming home and I feel like a man. Then I get sick and I just want anybody and I should be out doing my digging. I’m really sick. I’m really way out of it.

Dear Diary,

It’s a thousand light years later, lunar time.

Everybody’s been storytelling except me. I don’t have any stories worth telling. All I can do is draw pictures of monsters and internal organs and hate.

(?)

Another day, another blow job. The fuzz has clamped down till the town is mother dry. If I don’t give Big Ass a blow he’ll cut off my supply. Hell, I’m shaking on the inside more than I’m shaking on the outside. What a bastard world without drugs! The dirty ofay who wants me to lay it on him knows my ass is dragging, but he’s doling out the only supply I know about, I’m almost ready to take on the Fat Cats, the Rich Philistines, or even the whole public for one good shot. Goddamn Big Ass makes me do it before he gives me the load. Everybody is just lying around here like they’re dead and Little Jacon is yelling, “Mama, Daddy can’t come now. He’s humping Carla.” I’ve got to get out of this shit hole.

(?)

I don’t know what the hell hour or day or even year it is, or even what town. I guess I’ve had a blackout or they’ve been passing some bad pills. The girl on the grass beside me is white-faced and Mona Lisa like and she’s preggers. I asked her what she was going to do with the baby and she just said, “It will belong to everybody. We’ll all share her.”

I wanted to go and find someone who’s holding, but the baby thing really bugged me. So I asked her for an upper and she just shook her head like a stupid, blank, and I realized that she’s completely burned out. Behind that beautiful stoned face is a big dried-up bunch of ashes and she’s lying there like a stupid dumb shit who can’t do anything.

Well, at least I’m not burned out and I’m not preg. Or maybe I am. I couldn’t take the goddamn pill even if I had it. No doper can take the pill because they don’t know what the hell day it is. So maybe I am pregnant. So what. There’s a pre-med drop out wandering around somewhere who will take care of it. Or maybe some goddamn prick would stomp on me during a freak out and I’d lose it anyway. Or maybe the son-of-a-bitch bomb will go off tomorrow. Who knows?

When I look around here at all the ass draggers, I really think that we are a bunch of gutless wonders. We get pissed off when someone tells us what to do, but we don’t know what to do unless some fat bastard tells us. Let somebody else think for us and do for us and act for us. Let them build the roads and the cars and the houses, run the lights and the gas and the water and the sewers. We’ll just sit here on our blistered tails with our minds exploding and our hands out. God, I sound like a goddamn Establish-mentarian, and I haven’t even got a pill to take the taste out of my mouth or drive the bull shit thoughts away.

When?

A raindrop just splashed on my forehead and it was like a tear from heaven. Are the clouds and the skies really weeping over me? Am I really alone in the whole wide gray world? Is it possible that even God is crying for me? Oh no no . . . no . . . I’m losing my mind. Please God, help me.

(?)

I gather from the sky that it is early morning. I’ve been reading a paper that the wind blew up beside me. It says one girl had her baby in the park, another had a miscarriage and two unidentified boys died during the night from O.D.’s. Oh, how I wish one of them had been me!

Another day

I finally talked to an old priest who really understands young people. We had an endlessly long talk about why young people leave home, then he called my Mom and Dad. While I waited for him to get the call through I looked at myself in the mirror. I can’t believe that I have changed so little. I expected to look old and hollow and gray, but I guess it’s only me on the inside that has shriveled and deteriorated. Mom answered the phone in the family room, and Dad ran upstairs to get the extension, and the three of us almost drowned out the connection. I can’t understand how they can possibly still love me and still want me but they do! They do! They do! They were glad to hear from me and to know I am all right. And there were no recriminations or scoldings or lectures or anything. It’s
strange that when something happens to me Dad always leaves everything in the whole world and comes. I think if he were a peace mission involving all humanity in all the galaxies he would leave to come to me. He loves me! He loves me! He loves me! He truly does! I just wish I could love myself. I don’t know how I can treat my family like I have. But I’m going to make it all up to them, I’m through with all the shit. I’m not even going to talk about it or write, about it or even think about it anymore. I am going to spend the rest of my entire life trying to please them.

Dear Diary,

I couldn’t sleep, so I’ve been wandering the streets. I look kind of square because I don’t want to seem weird when my parents get here. I’ve got my hair tied back in a ponytail and I traded clothes with the most conservative girl I could find, and I’m wearing an old pair of white tennies I found in the gutter. At first the kids I talked to in the coffee house seemed a little up-tight because of the way I looked, but when I told them I’d called my folks to come and get me they all seemed glad.

It seems inconceivable that all the time Chris and I were in Berkeley we didn’t find out anything about any of the kids. It was just one big tearing down everything and everybody vacuum. Tonight I learned about Mike and Marie and Heidi and Lilac and many others. I’ll probably use up the rest of the pages writing about them, but that’s good because I want to get a fresh new clean book when I get home. You, dear Diary, will be my past. Then one I will buy when we get home will be my future. So now I must hurry and write about the people I have met just this night. It simply amazes me that so many parents and kids have trouble over their hair! My parents were always bugging me about mine. They wanted me to curl it or cut it or get
it out of my eyes, or tie it back etc., etc., etc. Sometimes I think that was our biggest bone of contention. I met Mike at the coffee house, and after explaining my situation and my current curiosity about why kids run away he became very communicative and told me that
hair
had been one of his problems too. In fact his dad had become so angry that twice he had forcibly shaved his head and sideburns. Mike said his parents were taking away all his freedom and power of decision. He was becoming dehumanized, mechanized, forced into the mold of his father. He was not even allowed to decide which classes he wanted to take in school! He said he wanted art, but his parents thought only weaklings and bums were artists. Finally he ran away to preserve his personality and sanity. So I told Mike about the church and their efforts to bring about a new and human arrangement between my parents and me. I hope he goes there.

Then I talked to Alice, who I met just sitting stoned on the curb. She didn’t know whether she was running away from something or running to something, but she admitted that deep in her heart she wanted to go home.

The others I talked to, the ones who had homes, all seemed to want to go back, but felt they couldn’t because that would mean giving up their identity. It made me think about the hundreds of thousands of kids who have run away and are wandering around all over the place. Where do they come from? Where do they even manage to crash for the night? Most of them don’t have any money and don’t have anywhere to go.

I think I’ll go into child guidance when I get out of school. Or maybe I should become a psychologist. At least I’d be able to understand where kids are at and maybe that would help compensate for what I’ve done to my family and myself. Perhaps it was even right for me to go through
all this suffering so that I could be more understanding and tolerant of the rest of humanity.

Oh dear wonderful, trusting, friendly Diary, that’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll spend the rest of my life helping people who are just like me! I feel so good and happy. I finally have something to do for the rest of my life. Wow! I’m through with drugs too. I’ve used the hard stuff only a few times and I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it. The uppers or the downers. I’m through with the whole mess, Absolutely and completely and forever, really I am.

Later

I have just read the stuff I wrote in the last few weeks and I am being drowned in my own tears, suffocated, submerged, inundated, overpowered. They are a lie! A bitter, evil cursed lie! I could never have written things like that! I could never have done things like that! It was another person, someone else! It must have been! It had to be! Someone evil and foul and degenerate wrote in my book, took over my life. Yes, they did, they did! But even as I write I know I am telling even a bigger lie! Or am I? Has my mind been damaged? Was it really just a nightmare and it seems real? I think I’ve mixed up things which are true and things which are not. All of it couldn’t be true. I must be insane.

I have lamented until I am dehydrated, but calling myself a wretched fool, a beggarly, worthless, miserable, paltry, mean, pitiful, unfortunate, woebegone, tormented, afflicted, shabby, disreputable, deplorable human being isn’t going to help me either. I have two choices; I must either commit suicide or try to rectify my life by helping others. That is the path I must take, for I cannot bring further disgrace and suffering upon my family. There is
nothing more to say, dear Diary, except I love you, and I love life and I love God. Oh I do. I really do.

DIARY NUMBER TWO

April 6

What a wonderful time to start a new diary and a new life. It is spring. I am home again with my family. Gran and Gramps will be here for another reunion with the prodigal daughter. Tim and Alexandria are just themselves, and nothing could be better! I don’t remember who wrote “God is in His Heaven and all’s right with the world,” but that is exactly the way I feel.

Any one who has desperately needed to come home knows what a tremendous feeling it is to be lying in his own bed! My pillow! My mattress! My old silver hand mirror. It all seems so permanent, so old and new at the same time. But I wonder if I will ever feel completely new again. Or will I spend the rest of my life feeling like a walking disease? ? ? ?

When I go into counseling I’m really going to try to make kids see that getting into drugs simply isn’t worth the bull shit! Sure, it’s great and groovie going on trips, I will never be able to say it isn’t. It’s exciting and colorful and dangerous, but it isn’t worth it! It simply isn’t worth it! Every day for the rest of my life I shall dread weakening again and becoming something I simply do not want to be! I’ll have to fight it every day of my life and I hope God will help me. I hope I haven’t ruined everyone’s life by coming home. I hope Tim and Alex wouldn’t be better off if I’d stayed away.

April 7

Today Tim and I took a long walk through the park. I talked to him honestly about drugs, after all he’s thirteen and knows kids who use pot at school. Of course I didn’t tell him the details about my past, but we did discuss the important things in life like religion and God and our parents and the future and the war and all the things that kids talk about when they’re stoned. It was different and really beautiful. Tim has such a clear, decent honorable outlook on life. I’m glad he’s my brother. I’m. proud he’s my brother! I’m grateful that he will be seen with me. I’m sure it’s embarrassing to him, because everyone knows I was busted and that I ran away. Boy, have I ever messed up my life! Tim and I can communicate and he says he can pretty well bridge the gap with Mom and Dad. He is very tolerant about their position as parents and tries to see things from their point of view. He is really a very special person. I wonder how much of his mature outlook I am responsible for? I know he must have done a lot of thinking while I was missing and Mom and Dad were losing their minds with worry and fear and anxiety. Crap, what an idiot I have been.