Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (14 page)

Back home, I got to work decorating the house. I took out my drawing pad and, using my new pastels, drew solid sheets of gold and silver, then cut the paper into long, thin strips and hung them on the meager houseplant like tinsel. I drew red circles and cut them out, hung them like ornaments from the leaves that looked sturdy enough to hold them. I spent hours drawing a rather Klimt-inspired geometric pattern of black, gold, and silver, and when I finished, I carefully folded it around my colorful dress. I made a goldfish-orange-colored ribbon to tie around the package and set it under my little makeshift tree. My heart leaped with happiness each time I saw my little tree with my pretty present beneath it. On Christmas Day I made spaghetti squash with browned butter and rosemary, lit a candle, said a prayer of gratitude—thanking the universe for my health, for poetry, for school, and for my friend who let me stay in such a pretty cabin—and ate while looking out on the lake. I opened my present and danced around the living room in my new dress singing classical arias I had just learned in school and finished the evening with my favorite Christmas carol: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

•   •   •

I
T WOULD
’
VE CHANGED
my life if I’d gotten caught stealing that dress. It would’ve been horrible. I’m sure I would’ve been kicked out of school.
I didn’t assess the risks. My behavior was very compulsive. I remember once stealing some bathing suits in Michigan. Though I only really needed one bathing suit, I couldn’t decide which one I wanted, so I stole maybe four of them.

I made a few other unexpected friends who helped me, like Elena, who worked in the kitchen at Interlochen. She was a kind, elderly Hispanic woman who let me stay at her house on school breaks when I was not allowed on campus. She gave me extra food, and needed to nurture someone as much as I needed nurturing. We saw each other only in the cafeteria during school and said a quick hello, and when I stayed with her, I’d see her only in the evenings because she worked as a maid in her free time to keep the lights on. Her husband, who had Alzheimer’s, was nearly incapacitated. The first time I came to her house, it had the cluttered, musty, and slightly abandoned feel of the elderly. And a shocking surprise. Elena kept her husband locked inside a large closet during the day with food, water, and a toilet, so he couldn’t wander out of the house. Which he had done once, nearly getting hit by a car. As I got to know her better, I learned that she deeply resented having to care for him. She had been abused by him her whole marriage, and now she was a slave to changing his bedpans and working three jobs to support them both. I felt that there was a small part of her that liked to lock him up like a dog. When I stayed at her place, I watered her plants and slept in her bed, as it was the only option, and came down with a terrible case of scabies. A horrible affliction. It made me feel terrible for Elena. There are so many people living lives that nearly crush them, with no support for the physical, much less emotional, freight we all carry.

When spring break rolled around, again I didn’t have the money to go back to Alaska. This is when I concocted the brilliant idea that I would hobo by train across the country and then hitchhike through Mexico, like all parents hope their children do one day . . .

I took a Greyhound bus from school to Detroit and stayed the night in the bus station. Note I did not say “sleep” in the bus station. A chilling experience. I decided to learn guitar so I could street sing along the way and earn train fare as I went. I never played guitar as a child—my dad was the musician in our act—so before I left campus I learned four chords: A, C, G, and D. In that order. I could not play them out of order because I did not know how. I could not learn cover songs because I didn’t know any other chords and couldn’t read tab, and so I decided to just improvise songs about what I was seeing around me. I figured as long as I sang well, no one would care what I was singing about. Before I left, I saved enough money from tips at the piano bar to buy an Amtrak ticket from Detroit to Chicago, got off, and made my way to Michigan Avenue. It was my first time seeing a big city like this, or America, for that matter. Alaskan culture, especially where and how I was raised, was about as opposite from pop culture as one could get without being part of a Pygmy tribe in the rainforest. I began to make up lyrics about what I observed. Televisions could be seen in every restaurant and bar. Celebrity worship. Words began to flow off my tongue. All the poetry and prose I had written for all those years, all the books I’d read, from Plato to Bukowski to Neruda, all the bars I had sung in, the thousands of cover songs I had sung since I was five—it was like I’d been in life’s music school for a decade and for the first time I was able to combine music and words. And it felt like magic happened as I wrote my first song: I found my voice. Not my singing voice, but my voice as an artist.
People living their lives for you on TV, they say they are better for you, and you agree. She says hold my calls from behind those cold brick walls, says come here boy, there ain’t nothin’ for free.

I took the money I made busking to the ticket counter at the train station. I counted out crumpled dollar bills and random change and asked how far it would get me. Sometimes it was enough to get a ways down the
road. Sometimes it was just enough for a sandwich. I eventually made my way to San Diego, my first time there, and crossed the border into Tijuana. A girl, a backpack, and a guitar. And her skinning knife. I hitchhiked to Cabo, using the “large trucks only” policy I devised after hearing horror stories on the train about small cars being run off the dirt roads by larger trucks in Mexico. I made it to Cabo, where I sang on the dock to earn a ferry ride to the mainland side of Mexico. To supplement my income, I made a little sign that said, “Reflexology,” and gave foot rubs to blue hairs. Once I had ferry money and made it to the mainland, I hopped trains (the Chihuahua al Pacífico railroad) and went all throughout the Barrancas del Cobre, a beautiful and rugged time capsule where traditional Mexican natives lived in the mountains still, wearing handwoven clothes and eating corn and simple foods, tucked into the cliffs and canyons.

I met up with my mom and her roommate and we rode trains, sitting with chickens and goats in boxcars. We stayed in hostels and I sang in restaurants in exchange for food. I talked a boy into letting me ride a horse he was feeding dry corncobs to and, without a saddle, rode the animal, which was more goat than equine, through the dry, rocky mountaintops. The roommate and I took a ferry back to Cabo, stayed in La Paz, and hung out with some locals I met at the beach who were windsurfing. And finally, we made a sign that said “Norte Por Favor” (the extent of my Spanish) and stuck our thumbs out. In the name of safety we passed on anyone we didn’t feel good about (a practice I had honed in Alaska) and only accepted a ride that was going all the way to the border, so we would not be stranded in some small town in the middle of the desert. After several hours we got lucky and two nice young men said in broken English that they were going to Tijuana, and so we hopped in the cab. Between our lack of Spanish and their lack of English, we all smiled a lot and communicated the way souls do who find their lives suddenly
thrust together. They were warmhearted and generous of spirit, sharing their food and water. The drive was too long for one day, and so they pulled to the side of a dirt road at dark to sleep. They offered to let us sleep in the cab, but we opted for the empty tractor-trailer. They had hauled pinto beans, and a thin layer covered the floor. I got out my sleeping bag and was quite comfortable—like sleeping on a beanbag, with all those pintos beneath me. I left the doors to the trailer open, wrote more verses to my one song until it was too dark to see, and stared at the
estrellas
until I fell asleep.
So we pray to as many different gods as there are flowers, but we call religion our friend, we’re so worried about saving our souls, afraid that God will take his toll, that we forget to begin, but who will save your soul if you won’t save your own . . .

The next day our new friends dropped us off at the border. I crossed back into the States, all without being murdered or raped. So that was good. I busked back to Michigan, editing and refining the song I had been writing. I kept playing those same chords over and over, simply changing the melody to denote the chorus. As the pink desert of Arizona, the mountain majesty of Colorado, and the fertile goodness of the midlands dreamily floated by my train window, I sifted through thirty or so verses until I had what I felt were the best ones.

We try to hussle ’em try to bussle ’em try to cuss ’em the cops want someone to bust down on Orleans Avenue . . . some are walking some are talkin’ some are stalkin’ their kill got social security but that don’t pay your bills . . . there are addictions to feed and there are mouths to pay so we bargain with the devil say we are ok for today say but who will save your soul if you won’t save your own . . .

A less welcome gift of my trip was a bladder infection I contracted while busking my way back across the States. Too ashamed to open up to a stranger about what the heck was happening to me, I sucked it up and toughed it out for three painful days instead of asking for help. I had a
fever and curled up in my train seat, shivering and sweating it out. By the time I hit Illinois, it had passed, and I returned to the Greyhound station in Detroit feeling so grown-up and independent in one way, yet so devastatingly alone and helpless in another. I dragged myself, my sixty-pound backpack, and my guitar off the bus and hitchhiked with no success the few miles to my school, just in time to be hospitalized for the first of what would be chronic kidney infections. But I had my song. I titled it “Who Will Save Your Soul.”

I returned to school with a world of experience and a song of my own. I was hooked. Songs began to pour out of me. Emotions and anxieties finally had an even more focused outlet.

I began writing myself lullabies at night, when terrors came over me as I lay down to sleep. I wrote “Raven” when I was about sixteen, to soothe myself. Writing music carried the freight for me. It relieved the pressure and let me see my own inner workings plainly. Writing songs offered different tools like melody and tone to convey and release emotion, unlike journal writing. It takes seeing a thing first to be able to change it. Our unexamined feelings swim like restless schools of fish inside us; they stir up and muddy the waters. Self-examination organizes our moodiness, and helps us identify the stimulus that caused those feelings, and calms the water. Had I never become a professional writer, I would still write every day for the same reasons I began to: as Socrates suggested, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I knew that because I had come from living it.

There were, however, unhealthy ways I coped as well. My compulsive eating was becoming more difficult to ignore. Control is a central theme for anyone who steals or has an eating disorder. I felt helpless and out of control, and I cracked under the pressure in heartbreakingly human ways. I tried to comfort myself with food and tried to take control by stealing. They both gave me a sense of power, the illusion of providing for
myself. I tried not to turn a blind eye on my actions. I kept writing. On paper, I saw myself commit crimes, binge eat, and run to my dorm room midday to break down and cry. I also saw myself write songs, go to work, sing and make money, I saw myself thrive in art. I tried to be honest about it all, if only on paper. Good and bad. I knew it was imperative to be honest with myself, even about my tremendous flaws, so I wouldn’t lose track of myself entirely. I couldn’t be perfect, and the only shot I had at ever getting better was being realistic about where I really was. In many ways I was in trouble, and in many ways I was doing well. Both were true and I had to accept that until I could grow differently. I continued to work hard at school, and prepared to graduate a year early because I didn’t think I could get the funds together for another year at Interlochen and going back to regular school didn’t sound fun. With all my academics out of the way, I was going to wrap up and head back to Homer with no real plan for the future, when I was informed that the school was prepared to offer me a full scholarship to return. I couldn’t believe it. I explained that I was done with my academics, though, and that if I came back, I wanted to study only art—and they said that would be fine. I was instantly energized with a sense of excitement that propelled me into a happy and productive summer back in
Homer.

thirteen

internal permission

I
returned to my hometown and drifted between my aunt Mossy’s place and my dad’s cabin-in-process. All I remember is writing a lot. And gardening and hauling water up and down the hill on the homestead. I slept in the unfinished basement while Dad and Atz Lee stayed in the small outdoor shed. I helped my aunt with horse pack trips in the mountains and I stayed by myself a lot at her remote cabin at the head of the bay and wrote and read. I hung with Lee and his friends, who read and traveled and were trying to figure things out, like I was. I was glad to be away from the drama of high school girls and boys. I could relax a little around my Alaskan friends, who were self-sufficient and engaged in the adventure of life. I wrote “Little Sister,” “Can’t Take My Soul,” “Billy,” “Money,” and many songs that summer and played them for the group that hung at Aunt Mossy’s farm.

Mairiis (Mossy) was my dad’s eldest sister. She was part surrogate mother, part boss, part pixie. I’d worked at her bed-and-breakfast and taken tourists on pack trips from about fifth grade onward. Being her
helper was pretty fun. She was chipper and upbeat, always a song on her lips, a spry woman of infinite energy that was at odds with her years. She is to this day the embodiment of the Alaskan can-do pioneer woman. Every bit my grandmother’s daughter. She built her own houses and shod her own horses. There were always campers in tents in the fields (at five bucks a night), tourists in the B&B, and long-term renters in tiny cabins along the long dirt road. I changed sheets, saddled horses, and packed saddlebags. Her farm was called Seaside Farm and it was closer to town than the homestead, though still pristine and lovely. The barnyard was a happy place teeming with baby colts and fillies, calves, goslings, and one bunny named Caramel. There were no other bunnies, so Caramel was raised with the chickens. The chickens loved that bunny, and Caramel grew up as one of them. She would sit on their nests and hatch eggs for them. She would line nests with her soft fur, and hop around herding up baby chicks as they wandered this way and that. She even ate like a chicken, stabbing her head forward and sort of pecking at feed and grass. This delighted me to no end as a child—an orphan bunny who found love with a different tribe. It also made me think—what if I were a bunny being raised by chickens? How would I ever know my true nature?