Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

were tar pits, his body slick with sweat. This wasn’t cannabis sativa high, nor heroin nod-off high, nor John Lennon’s imagine-all-the-people-living-in-one-world high. This was eyeball-boiling, grind-your-teeth-to-bloody-stubs high. In short, crystal meth high.

      Sorry, I said. I gotta make my old man dinner.

      Why, I thought, why didn’t I just go to the midwestern college I’d weaseled my way into early admission, then chickened out of? A premed student I had a crush on went there. At the time school had seemed repellently conventional. Plus the education fund Mother and Daddy had—all our lives—reassured us we’d have turned out to be nonexistent. Mostly, though, I knew I’d fail in such a place, having once secured a D in art class—even, maybe not accidentally, given that Mother was a painter.

      Sam tucked his long black hair behind his ear, the smile still rigid on his face. He said, This is a cool scene. You’ll dig it. My friend used to jam with the Grateful Dead. (A claim ubiquitous among West Coast guitar players circa 1972.)

      Cars zipped by. I bent over and pretended to rummage through my big fringed purse as though I were a woman who clipped recipes. Lifting my knees to block my right hand from sight, I got a tight grip on the door handle.

      He said, This won’t be but a minute.

      We slowed down for a curve, and I scanned the empty road behind us before I hoisted the handle and hit the door.

      Nothing happened. The handle was floppy loose. It could have spun in a tractionless circle like a pinwheel, no connection to the mechanism. Now I knew why he’d been Sir Galahad with the door.

      He downshifted, and the car’s loose hull rattled around us. His solvent breath was so strong, one match and he’d belch out dragon flames. He said, It’s the truth that saves us, but some people’s truth is bitter gall. You’re a woman, Mary, with the curse of Eve on you.

      I wondered where were the ubiquitous squad cars that had plagued my friends and me. The doughnut-munching bastards.

      You wanna see my truth? Sam asked.

      I firmly doubted I had a choice. I said of course I’d be honored to see his truth, wise in the arcana as he seemed to be. Then I waited for him to raise up the hatchet or samurai sword with which he would surely split my skull to the gizzard.

      With some ceremony, Sam drew from under his shirt a suede pouch on a leather cord slung around his neck. Opening it, he drew out a thin object a few inches long and wrapped in red silk with tiny Chinese ideograms on it. On his lap, he unfolded it with one hand—a small brownish-black burnt-looking thing like an umbilicus. A root or charm, I thought.

      That’s my twin brother’s finger, he said.

      I looked at him, white stuff at the sides of his mouth, flecks of tobacco on his bottom lip. I felt my right hand on the floppy door handle.

      Sam had been on a tarmac bagging bodies unloaded from a helicopter fresh from the carnage of the Tet Offensive. He’d peeled back one tarp and looked down into his own face. Which was his brother’s, of course.

      Mary, he said, pray the Lord you never see a face like that. One half was like the inside of a roast you left outside. Just blown slap off. His ear had stayed perfect, though. I wanted something of my brother’s power. And I’d had a vision before I got shipped in-country. In a big cathedral, he was, wearing his dress blues. He was praying over my casket. That’s what was supposed to of happened. Instead, he got his face shot off.

      The wind eked in the window seals, and the car shook. What scared me most was the crying part of Sam had been cauterized already. He was a living scar.

      All my life I’d met people bearing wounds far deeper than my own. I’d thought California would change me, heal me, free me from attracting all that. And now I’d flagged it down and climbed in a car with it.

      We rounded the curve into Dana Point.

      The car lunged up to a light. It shuddered and died. I jammed my skinny arm through the window slot, slick as a length of licorice, and yanked the door open. I didn’t so much jump from the car as eject myself out on the roadside slope. The effort launched me downward, sliding. Over gravel and scrub oak, rocks scraping my shins.

      I could hear Sam crank the dead VW back up to a stunted idle, its ragged engine coughing. I scrambled up the gravel incline, losing a flip-flop in the process, hollering as if somebody at the light might take notice. I raised my head and bawled for some driver to see me, hear me.

      He was calling my name, looking like a guy ditched by his prom date—sweaty and short and like his feelings were hurt. The light changed. Horns. I sprinted across the yellow line before oncoming traffic to the other side of the road. Sam hollered over, Hey, you forgot your pocketbook.

      I was sprinting so shards of rock got embedded in one foot. Even then I was doubting my instincts. Maybe he was harmless.

      By the time the shakes hit, I was speed-walking with a single flip-flop along the road’s shoulder, a kind of inner earthquake starting in my middle—a shaking that spread outward and nearly buckled me.

      At a fish joint famous for not letting the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom. Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washing my unstable limbs with brown paper towels and pink soap as if they belonged to some patient I was paid to tend. The shaking receded like a tide.

      Sometime after that—maybe even the next day—I stopped smoking pot, stopped going to the beach. Sam had spooked from me the notion that the hippies I’d once revered were benevolent characters identifiable by roach clips and tie dye. Plus, the crash pad my friends and I had rented had gotten too raggedy for any girl to stand. The sink stayed piled with scabby dishes from when I’d cooked everybody spaghetti a month before. When you hit the light switch at night, the roaches didn’t even run anymore. Yet night after night the guys lazed around puffing weed and telling dick jokes. When they headed to the beach, I’d lose myself down the valley of a book or scribble longhand on loose pages that I stashed under my sleeping bag.

      College was the thing. I’d scammed my way into that small midwestern school too good for me, but then I’d put it on hold as too square. Now it looked like an escape from flagging down another satanic hobo, or it was suddenly an excuse to read nonstop. I longed for its library walled with books, a desk with gooseneck lamp, a bulletin board.

      Taking my collect call, Mother agreed—her life’s goal being college for perpetuity. She phoned the school’s financial officer, who promised as much in work and loans as I needed. I was sweltering inside the open accordion door of a phone booth.

      You’ve tried it your daddy’s way, Mother said.

      How is this Daddy’s way? Daddy wants me to stay home and hone my pool game.

      Yeah, but the T-shirt factory job, the whole working-class-hero pose. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet some suave intellectual. …

      I told her the phone was making my face sweat, but she’d already relaunched into her plan to auction off my unemployable ass to some husband as if I were chattel. She sketched for me an artsy, wire-rimmed guy with a wardrobe of turtlenecks, a shiny car unmarred by the blurring circle of the sanding machine. Which hunk of whimsy failed to account for the fact that I’d bolt like a startled cheetah before such a man—a beast of an unknown phylum.

      On my last day, dropping an armload of ratty cutoffs and salt-crusted bikinis into the apartment complex’s garbage cans, I spied a thrown-out notebook and nicked it for my disheveled pages—for some reason, all unlined typing paper. I used a pen to poke holes into every margin, which seemed to take a long time, hole by hole. It was dusk when the sheets slid bumpily together and the notebook’s silver claws snapped shut. There was sweat on my upper lip.

      I stepped out the sliding door into the dusty odor of eucalyptus, a light wind. Over the valley of orange tile roofs, you could catch just a gray strip of sea from there. I set out walking the hills for the last time. With my ponytailed hair and the sweater tied around my neck like a sitcom coed, I looked into any undraped picture