Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (11 page)

One such musician was Paul. He was the father of three young girls and had a nice wife. My dad and I had been to his house several times to rehearse. On this occasion my dad was back in Homer, and Paul asked me to do the gig solo with him. I was probably fourteen. The gig was at the Gaslight Lounge, a small, dingy place, but it paid two hundred bucks, so I learned the songs—a blues set—and he played rhythm and lead. When the gig was done, we went into the small back room to get our jackets. Paul turned to hand me my coat, leaned in quickly, and tried to shove his tongue down my throat. I was afraid and frozen and quiet. I pushed him away without saying a word and walked out without my coat. He let me go. I walked down the street at 1 a.m., in broad daylight. I had never been so thankful for the midnight sun, lighting my way to our little black home with the white trim. It was freezing out, but I did not shiver. A numbness settled over me, and a fear that touched something much deeper in me. This feeling would take years to understand as well.

Around this time my mom picked up and moved to Seward. There was a fire sale of her art and antiques, everything was sold. Shane was in Switzerland on an exchange program he managed to get into, Atz Lee went back to Homer, and I stayed alone in the house across from the cemetery so I could finish out the school year at Steller. I made my own meals and got myself to school just like I had always done, but I didn’t have my favorite roommate upstairs to visit with anymore. To remedy that I would hitch rides to Seward on weekends to see her.

My school’s administration was flexible, and when I realized I was able to fulfill my credits and class duties in four days each week, I was free to commute to Seward the other three days to be with my mom. I had a
room there that I plopped my duffel down in. My mom lived upstairs in the attic, which had been converted into a living space, and she had a roommate as well. I cried a lot in this house. I was too busy surviving to cry in Anchorage, but in Seward a sadness and a fear came over me. My mom seemed sad too. She said she had developed a heart condition and had to rest a lot, and I did not see her much. I spent my time riding my bike around the idyllic town and pushing my body on runs over Resurrection Pass, a famous trail where a race was held each summer. Running had become a freedom for me. I would run as hard as I could to get beyond anxiety and to a feeling of calm. Flying across the mountaintops, down steep valleys, hearing nothing but my breath and my heartbeat. And my thoughts.

In Seward I had a lot of time on my hands, and heard through the grapevine that there was an American Indian powwow up north—a large gathering of many tribes open to anyone who wished to learn more about their culture. I had long been drawn to Native American culture, and my mom had taught me to do medicine wheels. My mom’s roommate and I hopped a train up to Denali, where the gathering was held. I had never been to Denali National Park and the sight from the train was breathtaking. I was warmly welcomed by the gathering and its organizers, who invited me to join in the opening ceremony, a talking circle. It wasn’t until this moment that it dawned on me that I was far from home, and I knew no one else there. I got incredibly shy in an instant, especially as it dawned on me that I would have to talk. A talking stick is passed around the circle, and while it is in your hand, you may say anything that is in your heart. When it was handed to me, I clammed up. I held the stick and I looked down at my lap. This was so much more personal than singing onstage. I passed the stick to the next person without saying a word.

When the circle broke, I considered grabbing my backpack and hopping right back on a train, when I was swallowed in a sudden shadow. I
looked up to see two large Ottawa Indians standing over me, blocking the sun. One of them said I needed to walk with them. So I did, a raven-haired brave on each side of a small blonde girl. They both began to chuckle. I asked what was funny and they pointed to a tattoo on one of their forearms—two dark mountain peaks with a sun rising between them. It looks like us, one said. I laughed as well. They took me to a quiet place and sat down with me and became very serious. They said Great Spirit had told them that I would need to learn to speak from my heart. I explained that I wrote a lot from my heart. They said no, that was not what they saw. There was more. They said they’d had a vision that I would speak to many people one day and that I would need to learn to
speak
truth and with honesty from my heart. I was speechless. I was completely unable to do that. I went to a mountain by myself later that day and tried to say something to the clouds but nothing came. I began to cry. I had no idea how to say anything real. My feelings were so deeply hidden inside myself that the only way I knew to express them was through the tip of a pen. I stayed at the gathering that day and practiced in the talking circles. I grew very close to my Indian uncles, as they called themselves. I was close with them and the culture for decades to come. They started me on my path and were angels in my life.

I was committed to staying in Anchorage because, for the first time in my life, school was a bright spot for me. It was the first school I had attended for more than one year. I had a teacher named Ken (all teachers went by first names there) who taught a philosophy class. Reading philosophy felt like the first breath of oxygen I’d had in a long time. I was drowning in my life, and here were these amazing minds reaching through time, speaking to me. I was severely dyslexic, and reading was very difficult for me, but I was so passionate about the ideas in these books that I finally developed a system that worked for me. First I learned to focus my eyes in a different way, so that the black type showed up, instead of all the
white negative space. I could focus like this for only a line or two, and so I would paraphrase what it said in my own words in the margins before continuing. This helped my mind internalize the ideas and I would stay up late into the night, adrenaline running through my body as I contemplated the words and teachings of everyone from Pascal to the Buddha, Thucydides and Socrates, to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.

Reading the great classics transformed my life. I went from being a scared teenager who was stealing cars with friends on lunch breaks—complete with big hair and miniskirts, flirting with the local dime-bag dealer in the hood—to feeling like a semi-self-confident and self-possessed woman who had learned she could think. My teacher saw my love of the work, and in ninth grade he offered to let me have my own group of eighth grade students. I would get the reading assignment from Ken, and then it was up to me to get ten kids through the material and ready for a large symposium where other groups would join in. It turns out my dyslexia was a blessing in disguise. The system I used to help myself read also worked well for the other students. I watched these books transform other kids as well and build their confidence, showing them they could care, and they could think. I saw their clothing and their hairstyles change, and their posture change, just like mine had. My group shone with comprehension and ownership of ideas. They were able to internalize the concepts and speak from their own lives, debating difficult material. It was good to feel proud of myself instead of scared and sad.

Ken invited me to speak with teachers at neighboring schools and to lead symposiums. It was funny to watch teachers react to a small blonde student showing up, and many were dismissive and condescending, though it was also fun to surprise them by being prepared and to shake them out of their hubris with wit and a sharply placed point.

I felt so empowered by all the ideas in the books I was reading that I
got a bit drunk on reason. It felt safe. If I applied logic and the dialectic process to my life, perhaps I could turn it around. Perhaps I could beat the fates and the stars I was born under. Even my journal writing at the time became less reflective and emotional, in favor of treatises and essays. I learned to hide in logic, and shutting my heart down felt safe.

One day my teacher wisely said to me, “Jewel, you are also deeply feeling. You might like some of the poets.” Another great change in my life. I began to read the works of Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Gioconda Belli, and eventually Charles Bukowski and Anaïs Nin, and I felt the other half of my spirit find expression. My intuitive emotional self found a voice along with my analytical self. I began to understand that my mind and my emotions could be the ladder out of my life. Reading these works and feeling the ripple effect they had on my soul and creativity made me hopeful. They made me dream. Something I had lost.

While talking with my mom in Seward, I shared that I dreaded going back to Homer to live with my dad again, as was the custom in the summer. He was building himself a house on the homestead, and he and Atz Lee were living in a makeshift cabin there. My dad had a bed in the kitchen and Atz Lee had a tiny loft, narrow as a pocket, that he could barely crawl into, no room for sitting up. There wasn’t really room for me and I didn’t want to be back in a volatile cycle with my dad. My mom, always full of surprising ideas, said, “Why don’t you move out?”

Looking back now, I realize this is absurd. Most moms would say, Honey, you can always stay with me. You should never be afraid to live with a parent. You are safe here. Instead, she suggested I move out on my own. At fifteen. And anyway, why not? It’s what I had already been doing in many ways, though I’d never paid rent or bought groceries. That part would be new. But honestly the choice was not that hard: I could live in a cabin with an asshole, or I could just live in a cabin.

I did some asking around and found out my uncle’s cabin down the
road from my dad’s place was vacant. I made a deal with him for four hundred dollars a month, and when I went to find my box of cash for rent, it was gone. I searched the house frantically. I asked my mom if she had seen it. “Maybe some movers took it when I was selling all the antiques,” she offered. It didn’t seem a likely scenario. In the meantime, I went about gigging, babysitting, driving tractors, and cutting hay to earn the first month’s rent. I was relying heavily on the fact that a steady, if small, stream of cash would come in from doing shows with my dad.

ten

a sea change

I
didn’t have much to move in with, other than a few cups and dishes my dad gave me from his storage shed, as I had been living out of a duffel bag for years. I was so proud when I moved into my little cabin. It was a tiny one-room box with an outhouse in the backyard. A kitchen counter with no sink. No plumbing. No refrigerator other than an icebox outside, a wooden box lined with foam insulation. You could put a chunk of ice in there and keep milk cold for a few days. There was a single bare bulb that hung from a wire in the middle of the room. A bed on posts, so you could store things underneath, a plank of plywood on two sawhorses for a table, and a window looking out at the trees. There was enough grazing around the cabin to stake a horse out on, which was a lucky thing, because I would need to ride my horse to work, as I was too young to have a driver’s license.

Work was in town, about fifteen miles away, so I rode my horse two hours by beach if the tide was low. I would stake him out in a field at my aunt Sunny’s, who lived near town, hitchhike the last three miles, then
ride home, thankful again for the long hours of daylight. Horses lack headlights. Sometimes I could be seen on the weekend at the McDonalds’s drive-thru, my horse in line with all the other cars. He would stick his head in the window as if ordering his own fries.

Other times I’d hitchhike, though it could be hard to get a ride home late, as few people go that far out of town after 7 p.m. or so. Sometimes I’d be stuck, unable to catch a ride, and stayed in town with a friend for a few days. I always carried a backpack with some extra clothes.

I returned home once, after being gone like this for several days, to find the plastic tub of dishes I’d forgotten about had grown a mountain of mold on them. I was thoroughly disgusted. I had run out of the house late one morning, intending to do the dishes when I got back that night. No such luck. Days had passed before I got home and I was now staring down a nasty chore. Not only did I have to contend with the mess, but I had to run to the creek and get water, fill up the five-gallon jug, wrestle it back to the cabin, and heat it up on a camping propane burner. Dishes were a real sore spot for me. I can’t tell you how many fights took place over washing dishes. My dad yelling that I wasn’t doing it good enough, me rewashing them, failing inspection again. Redoing them again. This went on so long once that I was grounded until I’d cleaned the house with a toothbrush. I hated dirty dishes. I hated the sight of them. Then it dawned on me. There was no more Dad. No one could make me do them. I was an independent woman, and my own boss. I grabbed a shovel from a neighbor, went outside, dug a hole, and buried those dishes. A perfect fifteen-year-old’s solution to a problem.

The next day I bought paper plates. They were also a good fire starter for the wood-burning stove. Another solid solution, I thought to myself. Plus, fewer dishes meant more time for writing and reading after work. It was time to take everything I had been theorizing and philosophizing about and see if I could apply it to my life. It was time to work on an
internal ladder that might get me out of where I was. Could I use my reason and my mind to change my internal landscape enough to climb out of what seemed like a predetermined cycle and beat the odds? Nature versus nurture. I had to try. I knew I didn’t want to be a human full of holes. I wanted to be a whole human.

The first summer on my own was a great summer. I turned sixteen and eventually got my license, though I still had no car to drive, which meant I hitchhiked a lot. I was headed into town for work, and an older guy, maybe in his twenties, picked me up around Fritz Creek. He introduced himself as Lee. I said, “I’m Jewel Kilcher.” I didn’t know it at the time, but he was a friend of my cousin Dylan, who had told him that I was a singer. About a week earlier, Lee had been working on a fishing boat and overheard some of the crew talking about this blonde Kilcher kid, Dylan’s cousin. So when he realized who he had picked up, Lee wanted to warn me to be careful hitchhiking. He started out by saying, “You know, you’re a very pretty girl, you should not be hitchhiking.” I said, “Thanks, I’m pretty careful.” This didn’t seem to satisfy him, so he said it again, “You are pretty. You shouldn’t just hitchhike around.” “Got it, thanks,” I said curtly. “I mean, you could get raped out here.” He said it again, and I got the creeps. I pulled a four-inch skinning knife from my boot and swiftly stuck the tip neatly under his chin while he drove, and said, “Are you gonna fuck with me?” I don’t know what I was expecting, but his response caught me off guard. He laughed. Hard. I could tell in an instant that I had misread him. He was a nice guy who was genuinely concerned for my safety. As I slipped the knife back in my boot, he added, “That was so
hot
!” Ah. And he was gay. We were destined to be best friends.