Her father was drunk again. He pulled her out of bed, took off his belt and began beating her in an uncontrollable frenzy. He whipped her and whipped her while her terrified sister and little brothers huddled close to their screaming mother.
This was to be the end of it. She was seventeen. It was enough already. She quietly dressed for school a few hours later, the welts still stinging on her back and thighs. She packed a few things in the carpet bag she used to carry her books. She ordered the milquetoast neighborhood boy who, hoping for a chance, picked her up everyday, “Drive! Just drive!” He protested, but did as she said. Later, he would narc her out.
Her parents were too deviled by their previous night’s drink to be aware of her plan. She was running away. She planned to hide out on the West Side at Mother’s house until she figured out her future. Where would she go? How would she finish high school? What about college?
Mother was the small hard working black lady who let all the kids hang out at her house where they would be off the streets and safe under her protection. She was the feisty sort who could handle a house full of teens. She understood that teenagers needed to blow off some steam.
They brought over their 45’s to play on the small record player. In Mother’s living room, they learned and mastered all the latest dances. Mother was outraged when she saw the welts on Kristie’s back and buttocks. “Your father is a monster! That’s child abuse!” she proclaimed. “You can stay here until we get this thing sorted out.”
She gave Kristie the back bedroom to use as her own. She called it “The Hell Room” since it was filled with stacks of musty boxes filled with old sewing projects and keepsakes, along with anything else she didn’t have an exact place for. A double bed was pushed up against one corner. “You can stay here, keep quiet, and read or watch TV while I’m at work,” she instructed.
Mother caught the bus every week day to Palm Springs where she worked as a maid for the Richie Riches. It was a hard job, but it enabled her to make enough to care for her beloved son, PK, and keep the house her deceased husband left to them.
The cops came to the door a few days later looking for Kristie, but Mother knew her rights and besides, the West Side was not a place where you talked to the “po-po” willingly.
“I don’t know where that girl is,” Mother lied to the officers, “But you know her folks beat her, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she has run away.”
She paused for a minute and then added, “Why don’t you look in San Francisco? Isn’t that where they all go?” She was trying to throw them off the scent.
Kristie stayed cloistered in Mother’s care for two weeks until RJ was called in to run interference. RJ was known to be her father’s lover. She had had a few non- discretionary talks with Kristie about how much she loved her father’s big uncut dick. These people all around her were a bunch of pervs and hypocrites as far as Kristie was concerned.
Somehow the feigned friendship of her father’s lover along with a bunch of empty promises that there would be no further punishment, that it was safe for her to go home, that her mother was a wreck with worry and regret, made Kristie give in and go home.
Ruth Jean delivered her into her mother’s weeping arms, but Kristie didn’t trust the situation. Her father was still a first class asshole as far as she was concerned, and her mother was a weak-willed enabler to all his vices. RJ felt very proud of herself for arranging the reunion, but Kristie felt betrayed.
“Look at her!” her father said with disdain, “She isn’t even sorry!” He huffed on a cigarette, took her by the arm, and led her into the car. “We have to go down to the Sheriff’s Station and follow up on the report we had to file on you running away.”
The fight taken out of her, Kristie complied laconically. Her father was committing her to Juvie because, as he told the intake officer, “She is incorrigible and promiscuous. She ran away and she has had sex with at least a dozen guys including a couple of black guys on the West Side.” The officer seemed to understand the situation, but he wasn’t ready to take sides.
What her father said wasn’t true. “Yes, I had sex with four guys and one black guy,” she told the officer, and then she named them: right in front of her father: “Joe, Dylan, Cheesy, Doug, and I am currently seeing Rey, who happens to be black.”
What was so odd about that? If she had a boy friend, she was doing him. Then she added to the officer’s amusement, “My dad is cheating on my mother with RJ and having illegal porn and wife swap parties at our house with all of us kids in the next room. Plus he keeps me on permanent restriction and beats me up whenever he gets drunk.” All the family secrets out with one fell swoop.
She had to give a nod to the fairness of the officer taking the report. He wasn’t going to make any judgments, “Just the facts, ma’am…” like an episode of Dragnet. Realistically who was the problem here? The officer ended up being sympathetic to Kristie. He could see that she was basically a good girl with a wild streak, but he locked her up in isolation for one night to make a point.
Kristie carved her name into the wall with a spoon like all the other girls who had ever stayed there in a similar situation. She overheard the officer talking to her dad in the next room the following morning, “If you commit her to Juvenile Detention for the next few months until she is eighteen, she will learn more than you ever want her to know. She is smart and beautiful. She will get beaten up and have to fight. She will learn about drug dealing, prostitution, scamming, and thievery. Is that what you and her mother really want for her?”
The officer eventually convinced her dad to a detente. Kristie would continue living under her parents’ roof for four months until her eighteenth birthday. Her senior year was ruined. All her friends abandoned her at their parents’ insistence. She found out that Rey was cheating on her. She lost the lead in the senior play. She was in such a state of emotion that she barely passed the classes she needed for graduation.
When she turned eighteen, her mother placed all her things in boxes on the front porch and then drew the drapes closed, slammed and locked the front door. Her father as ruthless as ever fired her from her job at his restaurant.
She decided not to walk at graduation. Her parents attended the ceremony expecting to see her there – the largest graduating class in America that year. Her mother cried and cried. Her father decided to re-hire her giving her just enough money to make her rent on the apartment she had rented with a couple of her gay friends.
She threw a big party on grad night at her new digs. An assortment of former grads, gays, and party people from the apartment complex got things jumpin’! They played loud music (Beatles, Stones, Cream), drank a lot of beer, smoked cigarettes, some marijuana, and partied all night. Much later, Kristie had sex with Roller Girl on the floor of the living room. It was going to be a fun and fabulous summer! A Summer of LOVE!
