The End of the Dream (14 page)

Mark would be one of the few college students in America whose student loans were completely paid off by the time he graduated.

The friendship between Mark Biggins and Scott Scurlock began then at Evergreen and remained intact through the years, even though Scott was a devout “tree hugger” who deplored the clear-cut logging that was, for a time, Mark’s source of income. They played their guitars together, and they discussed literature, Scott had a remarkable library which was full of tales of adventure and derring-do. Pictures of the two friends in the early days show Mark towering over Scott as they stand in front of a tangle of trees on Scott’s Overhulse Road property. Olympia, Washington, is a small town despite being the state capital. A young woman named Ren Talbot* became acquainted with both Mark Biggins and Scott Scurlock in the mid-1980s when she was in her early twenties.

But she had no idea that they knew each other. Eventually she dated Scott, but it was Mark whom she came to admire. Ren was working down on the piers in Olympia rebuilding wooden boats when she met Mark in 1983.
 
She had grown up racing sailboats, and the job of refurbishing old Chris Crafts was a natural for her. She had dropped out of college to go skiing in Colorado, and then headed home to Olympia. She was a tall, almost skinny woman with beautiful eyes and classic cheekbones but she didn’t see herself that way. “I was this deachead hippie, with a little pixie haircut, “ she laughed, recalling those years. “Mentally I was about sixteen.” Mark Biggins was working in the warehouse right next door making tiny well-crafted cedar boxes for Eddie Bauer’s sportswear company. He noticed Ren when she rode her bike past his warehouse. He found out her name and called out to her one day as she rode by. “Come to find out, “ she remembered, “he and the guy I was seeing then a musician used to jam together. And then I met his girlfriend, Annie. I thought she was wonderful.” Ren and Annie became fast friends and they often sunbathe , talked, or went swimming together. “Mark was always logging, “ Ren said.

“I just remember that they were always struggling financially. We all were.” Ren noted that Annie drank a lot, but it was a time when almost everyone in their crowd did. They played pool and pinball and danced.

Before she met Mark and Annie and their friends, Ren had been part of what she considered a “real cool” group of “trust funders” from the East Coast, all in their twenties. “I thought they were just the cat’s meow getting $5,000 a month from their moms and daddies to live on.

“When they weren’t around, I hung out with Mark and Annie. I’m ashamed to say it, but when the trust funders’ were around, I’d act like I didn’t know Mark and Annie because Mark was exactly what I was running from. He was so much the working-class, honest John walking into the Fourth Ave with his suspenders on and his Lee’s and his If you ain’t a logger, you ain’t shit’ cap. And his Hey, darling how’s it going’?

and I think you’ve had too much to drink, and I’m gonna drive you home.

He was always taking care of people. He was too much like my dad, my uncles, and my grandad.” Ren was annoyed and embarrassed by Mark’s big brother-like protectiveness. She wanted to be one of the psychedelic, tie-dyed, hippie trust funders dancing around like flower children. She was struggling so hard to get away from the good, honest, working class and here was Mark Biggins hanging around, looking after her. She saw how much in love he was with Annie, and she with him but they were always arguing about something. Or Annie was. She would threaten to leave him often.

And Xen Annie got pregnant. She and Mark were both Catholic and Annie was anxious to be married, but Mark dragged his heels. But fatherhood changed him and Mark was thrilled when Lori* was born in 1983. Just as Steve Meyers was utterly devoted to Cara, Mark idolized Lori. Whatever his own dreams might have been before her birth, Lori now came first.

Mark and Annie were married in a modest ceremony in the Unity Church in Olympia in 1984. Their fussing and arguing continued as it had before they were married.

Even so, anyone who knew them could see that they were in love.

Every one thought of’markandannie” as a couple who would be together forever, despite all their financial troubles and their spats. In 1985, Mark was working at Hardell’s plywood plant in Olympia. He got the job through a man named Mitch Evers, * who was dating Scott’s sister, Debbie. Debbie was now attending Evergreen College. But the Bigginses’ financial situation was more desperate than anyone knew.

Even though Mark worked hard at any job he could get, there were inevitable layoffs. Mark kept a journal that noted both good and bad times in his life. For some reason, he saved the crumpled, lined notebook page he had written on a particularly bleak day. Half seriously, half comically, he jotted down his troubles. Bad Luck, nothing but bad god-damn luck! Get away! Get the fuck out of my life!

Now! Got no job and no leads on any jobs. Had to borrow 170 bucks from one girl, 50 bucks from a guy and 50 bucks from another guy. The battery in my car went tits up, the tires are bad and I don’t have a spare. I need an oil change. This chick approached me in the library one day last quarter, said she didn’t have her library card and wanted to know if I’d check a book out for her with mine. I did.

Yesterday, I got a bill in the mail for that book. Applied for food stamps at the beginning of this month, got approved. Today is the 10
^th
and they’re still not here. Some screw up in the mail.

Been calling their ofxice everyday for the last week and they’re so messed up. There’s never anyone available to talk to you when you call, so they take your phone number and say they’ll call you back and never do! And that’s after you’ve been put on hold for 5 minutes. Our phone bill is due, there was a screw up there too, they tacked last month’s bill onto this month’s bill. The electric bill is due as well.

We’re almost out of food. My mother-in-law and my sister-in-law will be here tomorrow and are going to think I’m a poor provider and with good reason. I got stung on the bottom of my left foot and it swolled up so big I couldn’t wear shoes without limping. I’m out of cigarettes. My car gets about miles to the gallon. My daughter has huge fever blisters on her legs from sweat and urine being trapped in her plastic pants. My wife’s softball team won only one game all season. I went to every game but that one. They had a game tonight and now she’s out drinking with the girls and the way things are going will probably get a DWI. Go away bad luck get away, get out of my life! Now.

6/13/84 Olympia, Wa. By the time he ended that piteous recitation, ark Biggins’ sense of humor had obviously kicked in.

But it was clear that he had no talent for making money or, perhaps, for handling the money he did make. By 1985, Ren Talbot was working as a nanny for a very wealthy family. “Annie came over one day and told me, I’m going back to Forks with my daughter. Mark and I are splitting up.” Ren was shocked. She had never imagined that such a thing would really happen. When she ran into Mark, she saw he was utterly bereft.

He was sitting in an Olympia bar drinking shot after shot and crying.

He was determined, though, not to give up on his marriage. Mark commuted several days a week, almost a three-hundred-mile roundtrip, so that he could be with Annie and Lori in Forks. They were his world.

Less than a year later, Mark moved back to Forks to work at the Sunshine Shake Company. There were no teaching vacancies in Clallam County, and nobody in Forks could see the value of a degree in English literature.
 
Although he was doing his best to keep his marriage together, it was a losing battle.

Annie-had too much to drink one night and announced that she was taking Lori and moving to California to live the beach life with her sister in Oxnard. Sober the next day, she was still resolute about leaving.

Mark couldn’t make her stay. He stayed behind to work, but he was crushed, and once again full of despair. He was still a devout Catholic who didn’t believe in divorce. Four months later, he was so lonesome for Lori-that he packed up and moved to Oxnard. Annie, who had been enjoying her single life in the city near the Port Hueneme Missile Test Center, agreed to give their marriage another try. She must have known, however, that Mark had followed her to California to be with his daughter, not with her. They found a studio apartment where the rent was $600 a month, far more than they had paid in Forks.

Mark found a job buying and selling squid. It was a smelly, onerous occupation and he longed for the clean smell of sap and sawdust. It was inevitable that their reconciliation would failand it did. When Mark and Annie Biggins’ marriage completely disintegrated in late 1987, he called Scott Scurlock. Mark had been drinking and sounded almost suicidal as he told Scott his life was over, he had lost his wife and daughter. Once more, it was Scott who stepped in to help a buddy glue together the shattered pieces of his life. (After a year, Scott’s marriage to Pam was wavering too, but he was more relieved than grieving. ) Like Steve Meyers, Mark wanted to gain custody of his daughter and make a home for her, but he had no assets. He was elated when Scott offered him a job in Olympia. He told Mark he could come back to Washington and he would give him a place to live. Scott said he would pay him $1,000 a month to live on the property, work on construction, and watch the gray house whenever Scott was away. It was an offer quite similar to the one Scott made to Steve Meyers four years later, and Mark grabbed it. Why Mark Biggins didn’t find a job where he could use his college degree is an obvious question. He was back in Olympia where his degree meant something, but he didn’t look for a white-collar job. He was, perhaps, too dispirited to try. Seven Cedars was a safe hiding place, the cozy rooms high up in the treetops a perfect spot for introspection and healing. And there was marijuana and crystal meth to he had without any hassle. Mark had a weakness for addictive substances, anything to take the sharp edge off his anxiety and depression.

Of all the choices he made in his life, the decision to work full-time for Scott Scurlock may have been the most disastrous in Mark Biggins’ life, without knowing it, he had given up the reins of his own destiny.

Scott traveled a great deal during 1987 to 1990. He had circled the globe with Pam before their marriage ended. Later, he went to Florida, to Nepal, and, with Kevin, to Mexico and Nicaragua. Mark Biggins became Scott’s partner in Seven Cedars Construction, working to build the remodeled treehouse and watching over the twenty acres while Scott was away. But Mark became more than just Scott’s business partner, somehow, someway, he had lost the ability to think for himself, and Scott’s values and Scott’s needs superseded his own. On some level, Mark realized this. He was drinking a lot, although drinking didn’t make him serene or happy it made him morose and suicidal. He drank to celebrate, to have fun, to escape. He drank for the sake of drinking.

Sometimes, he charted his physiological response to alcohol back pain that he took to be evidence of kidney and liver damage, nausea and headaches.

Sometimes, with the maudlin tears of a man deep in his cups, Mark wrote letters to Lori letters he never sent begging her not to drink when she grew up. One dark night in the winter of 1987-88, he sat high up in the swaying treehouse and downed drink after drink. He believed that he was on a hinge that would end only with his death, and he felt incapable of stopping it. He wrote to Lori, a mournful dirge of a letter, My darling daughter .. .

I fear I may never see you again. I fear I may die tonight. I want you to know one thing. I love you more than life itself. I love you more than I can say. I love you more than anything on earth.. .. If I survive this night I will stop drinking and come and live with you.

Sober for the rest of my life. If I do not survive this night, I pray to God that you will understand what I am trying to say to you here. I hope that you can forgive me for not finding the strength to stop before it was too late.

You have got to believe me when I say it was not for love of youit was for lack of love for myself. It was a disease I could not overcome.

.

.. Mark prayed aloud to live, and he did, but he never really overcame his addiction to alcohol, he only tamed it slightly. He never mailed the letter to Lori Biggins, but he saved it to give to her when she was grown. In mid-1988, Mark moved into the gray house. He had a place now for Lori, and Annie let her move to Washington to live with him.

Having her with him assuaged much of the guilt he carried. She attended grade school in Olympia. In 1989, Mark met Traci Marsh. * Traci was an upbeat but nervous woman who wore no makeup and had her dark hair cut in a short shag cut. She had a wry sense of humor and she got along well with Scott and Mark’s other friends. They were a mismatched couple, though, Traci was even more interested in having enough money to live comfortably than Annie had been. But Mark didn’t care, he loved her anyway. Traci moved in with Mark and became a stepmother to Lori. They lived for awhile in the Apple Park Apartments in Olympia. Oddly, although Mark’s marriage to Annie was over for all intents and purposes in 1987, he never divorced her. Annie got along well with Traci, and the three of them “co-parented” Lori without problems, although the child lived most of the time with Mark and Traci. Traci waited tables, and Mark picked up handyman jobs. Lori was a beautiful, calm little girl who seemed perfectly adjusted to having three “parents.” Ren Talbot met Scott Scurlock about two years after she met Mark and Annie Biggins.
 
Although she wanted so much to be part of the hippie crowd, Ren was fairly naive at twenty-two. In 1985, one of her best friends lived with a man named Ewell Fletcher. * Ewell held semi-open houses at his place in Olympia. Ren had no idea that he was a drug dealer not until a long time later. It was through Ewell that she met Scott, although she didn’t realize at the time that Scott was Ewell’s source for crystal meth, she had thought he was simply one of Ewell’s huge circle of acquaintances.