Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger.

      My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison.

      That’s me, I said. Miss California.

      Quinn himself was no Adonis. We called him Quinn the Eskimo, since he’d just moved to Leechfield from the Alaskan oil fields where his daddy had worked. Blond as Jean Harlow, pimply, he was also skinny enough to crash a junior high dance. His sole source of pride was the obvious lie that his old man had invented the water bed, then tragically had his patent pinched by some California engineer. From the time we’d hit the state line, he’d been going into phone booths to skim directories for the guy’s name.

      Doonie tucked his board under his arm, saying, Y’all little bitches stand here and fight it out. I’m gonna carve those waves up like your mama’s Christmas turkey.

      Then they were running down the immaculate white sand with their boards—Doonie and Dave, Quinn and Easy and the quiet Forsythe.

      But by Orange County standards, the surf sucked. I overheard the California guys bitching about it as breaking in water too shallow: Not worth wasting the wax on, dude. They stood in small bands along the beach, tanned and bleached and orthodontured. And Lord, were they fetching, those boys. I spotted no stitches on anybody, no keloid scars from boiling water. They’d suffered no car wrecks in which an ancient axle had snapped. Nobody was missing any obvious teeth, either.

      In the ocean, long waves came with open-fanged mouths, drooling where the spray blew back only to bite down on my pals, who’d thrown themselves onto their homemade boards and were digging in.

      From the beach, it was a bitch to witness—not just the ass-whipping the sea was delivering but the massive cheer of my friends taking it, the small and concentrated energy of repeatedly hurling themselves at impenetrable force.

      Mocking their inadequacy against those waves, one guy walking past said to his small-boned girlfriend, This is why they send the white trash to Vietnam.

      At some point, a guy as wasp-waisted as a Ken doll, with stomach muscles you could have bounced a quarter off, strolled over to where I sat. The sun shone through his long dark hair, making a halo around him. Maybe he’d seen our license plates, for he said to me, You Texan?

      I allowed as how I was.

      You interested in some acid? Ken said.

      When I told him I didn’t have any money, he smirked, saying, They make chicks pay for drugs in Texas?

      Which seemed to have no right answer to it, like the school bully in A Portrait of the Artist who asks Stephen Dedalus, Do you kiss your mother? Any answer seems cause for a butt-whipping.

      I shrugged. What do y’all do here?

      He unfolded a small square of surf magazine to reveal an orange tab of LSD.

      I knew right off I didn’t want it, but this boy was teen-idol darling. So I set the tab atop my tongue and faked swallowing, hoping for a weak dose.

      He also invited me to a graduation party a few weeks down the line in Laguna. Soon as he’d scrawled out an address and sketched a map for me, I hightailed it back to the truck to spit the tab out and wash my mouth with water from a sand-gritty milk jug.

      At dusk, we parked in an apartment lot where a hometown dope dealer had left his pink Lincoln Continental with its busted steering column. Easy knew somebody who lived there, and in the way of poor hippies, they cooked us noodles and let us use their bathroom in exchange for the free pot Doonie could lay on them. Secreted inside the freakishly fat surfboard—in a scooped-out hollow in its foam core—he’d ratholed a few fragrant bricks of pot and a baggie of questionably acquired pills. These investments—tucked away from the law under sheets of fiberglass and squeegeed over with resin—would free him from the factory jobs we’ll all eventually take.

      For the first time in days, inside a rank plastic shower curtain flowering with mildew, water poured over me. And it was in the shower that the acid kicked in—not full bore, just enough to keep me holding myself very still. The suds swirled down my torso like chrysanthemums in a Japanese wood-block print. And my body seemed to smoke.

      By the time I’d dressed, beers were being handed around. Black speakers thumped out music. The guys agreed I could sleep in the palatial luxury of the Lincoln, not that sleep was possible on that acid. Doonie helped me run an extension cord with a caged mechanic’s light so I could read. But with the nearby ocean buzzing like a hornets’ nest, I could only puzzle over the black letters squiggling off the edges of the white page.

      At some point, a looming figure glided up to the foggy side window, and I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. It felt like a huge lump of cold clay. Someday I was gonna holler so long, glass would shatter and walls explode.

      But it was just Doonie’s thin shape with black frazzled hair. His knuckles whapped the glass.

      I body-blocked the heavy car door open, saying, You scared the fuck out of me.

      Each word materialized between my lips like a tiny pink balloon that rose with other balloons in a birdlike drove.

      Doonie had his sleeping bag over his shoulder like a corpse. He said, Sorry, man. Mind if I grab the front seat?

      As I stared at him, his edges grew more solid, and when I told him to go ahead, there were no more balloons blipping from my lips. He plucked an azalea off the nearby bush, saying, Can you believe how this place even smells? I didn’t know the outside could smell like this.

      I breathed in the living green of it, then asked if the others were asleep.

      Yeah, Doonie said, except Dave keeps busting out hollering shit. He just sat up and said, We’re all gonna die! Like he’s in Nam or something.

      Doonie looked around. Man, ain’t it the Ritz up in here? Don’t you know, those side lights used to light up like the Superdome.

      I looked at the long bank of dead bulbs and felt a sinking at how dim and broken everything could get.

      I told him I sometimes felt like smacking Quinn for mocking me anytime I recited poetry.

      Nah, it ain’t like that, Doonie said. He just associates poems with some teacher telling him he’s a dumbass.

      He put his callused feet up on the dashboard behind the steering wheel. I asked him what Quinn’s momma was like.

      Doesn’t have one. I don’t know.

      How do you not have a mother? I said, but somehow I knew, because mine had always lived on the brink of evaporation. (Strange, we never—not one time—talked about the doped-up or drunk-assed backgrounds some of us were fleeing.)

      Doonie said, Quinn’s died or ran off or something. This is according to Dave, of course, so who knows. And get this, Dave also says Quinn brought a pistol to kill the waterbed king with. If he can’t get his old man’s money back. A no-shit gunslinger pistol like we used to shoplift from Woolco. You’d get a little plastic sheriff’s badge with it. He’s got some fantasy he’s gonna get even for his daddy.

      The word daddy hung in the air outlined in gold. Closing my eyes, I found it in blue on my eyelids. I could feel the roots my daddy had grown in me—actual branches in my body. His was the ethos of country folk: people who kept raked dirt yards rather than grassy lawns because growing grass was too much like field work; people who kept the icebox on the porch, plugged in with an extension cord run through a window, so folks driving by would know they had one. I could feel Daddy’s roots in me, but I couldn’t fit him into any version of my life I could concoct. He’d been going away for years, out into the garage at night, down into the bottle he secreted under his truck seat.

      I adapted to Daddy’s absence partly by smoking enough reefer to float me through a house where—increasingly—nobody’s path intersected with another.