Am signed online to give myself a mental break. For two hours, I've been typing up stuff for my book, and in a mere two hours -- four pages -- I'm so worked-up that you'd think I've been eating five-pound bags of chocolate-covered espresso beans for the past two hours instead of typing.
Norman and I talked for several hours last night. I'd had a couple of screwdrivers at the Belmar, but was feeling surprisingly coherent. I guess it's only wine that gets me really trashed. Anyway, we talked for awhile about Evergreen, and then I told him about the book.
He had EXACTLY the reaction I expected he'd have: it sounds like a good story, but holy shit, Helena, what a bunch of fucking freaks we're talking about here!
I shouldn't have told him anything. It's just that I'm so excited... His comments put me on the defensive a little bit, which... oh hell... I have to back up a little:
Most people, I think, have a time in their lives when they "come of age." It's not the day a boy wakes up to find he's had his first wet dream; it's not the day a girl gets her first period. It's not a baptism, a confirmation, a wedding, a graduation. It's a time when you wake up one morning and you simply have no idea who the hell you are. It's when you look around and you realize that you only listen to the music you listen to because your friends listen to it, or because your parents listen to it, or because your parents don't approve of it. It's that instantaneous realization that the stuff you've been reading has been to impress a boy, and that the stuff you've got hanging on your walls seems really babyish and you don't know why. It's looking around, realizing you have a nice normal life, with a couple of friends, a couple of hobbies, and a boyfriend, and you don't identify with ANY of it. It's the morning you wake up realizing you don't know dick about what you REALLY want; you only know what you're SUPPOSED to want. It's that groundless, disoriented, floating feeling that you're not really sure you exist, and if you DO exist, you don't know where to find yourself, or where to look.
So it started off pretty suddenly for me. I could probably give you a specific date and time that shit started to fall apart for me, although I guess I would have seen it coming if I'd been paying attention and knew what to expect. My best friend had moved out of state, essentially without telling me, my boyfriend was a clod, school was about to end for the year, my taste in music sucked ass, I wasn't reading anything interesting, my social life was kind of sad, and I was looking forward at a bleek summer with my stupid boyfriend. And THEN, to pitch a lightning bolt into THAT storm, somebody decided to make up a rumor that David had AIDS.
So what the fuck DO you do, you know? You get a bad case of gastritis and watch Spice Girls music videos for four days straight, that's what you do. You lose twenty pounds and end up in the hospital, that's what happens. You come to a point where you feel you're pretty close to a live-or-die ultimatum, and you shrug and make your choice.
I made some new friends. I fell madly in love with somebody else. I picked up a coffee habit. I broke up with my boyfriend. I acquired a new notebook.
Well, good for you, little teenaged Helena. You made the right choice. You didn't spend your summer moping. You didn't spend your summer whining. You STILL listened to mostly-shitty music, but at least it started to improve a LITTLE bit... And gahd knows, at least you didn't spend your summer trying to make yourself HAPPY with stuff you were quite aware wasn't making you happy... Good for you. Do what feels good, and don't catch anything gross, like an addiction or a case of genital warts.
If I was my parents, I would have been proud of me.
Well, the new friends I'd chosen were... a little strange. (My parents were not exactly proud of THAT...)
They had some strange beliefs. They did some weird things. They told me some weird things. They smoked some weird things. They wore some weird things.
Now, the really ironic thing about all of this is that, even with my little Existential Teenaged Crisis going on, I DIDN'T end up smoking weird things (...well, not right away...), and I DIDN'T end up wearing weird clothes (...well, not REALLY weird, unless you count the leather pants, the shrunken Roxette t'shirt, and a tiny little pentacle that I wore inside my shirt...), and I didn't end up DOING much of anything that was REALLY bizarre...
(...well, okay, I did, but very little of it was actually illegal, and even less of it was actually immoral, so WHO GIVES A SHIT?)
I had gotten myself hooked up with what the Good People of the World would call "The Wrong Crowd." On one of the occasions that the police came to my house, they told my parents I was in a gang of satan-worshippers. They compared my friends to Mid-Evil, this gang that had some sort of base around here in the eighties and early nineties. (Incidentally, all I really know about Mid-Evil is that one of its members shot a cop and committed suicide one day back in 1995... Everything else is just hearsay and bullshit...) Well, let me be the first to tell you that my friends were a little grubby sometimes, and more than a little weird most of the time, but they WERE NOT killers, robbers, extortioners, baby-rapers, or terrorists.
...And they didn't even BELIEVE in Satan, anyway.
So I got in a little over my head with some occult stuff these nice folks had dreamed up and handed to me. NOT Satan-worshipping, just occult stuff. Metaphysical stuff. It kind of started to scare me. I mean, holy shit, when you're having an Existential Teenaged Crisis, and somebody says to you, "I don't think your god exists, but here's what I DO believe," you're going to LISTEN at least, right? And then, if it's really weird, and you don't quite understand it, and you start to do some hardcore research, and you start to kind of freak yourself out, and you end up unhappy all over again, it's NOT because your friends are bad people or that they're "only trying to manipulate you," or whatever. It just means you're a little bit in over your head...
I never said I BELIEVED the stuff they told me. I never said I DIDN'T, either. As a matter of fact, I remained pretty damned neutral, considering the circumstances. I just said I listened.
So I tell people about all of this stuff sometimes -- not even one-eightieth of what I've just typed -- and nobody ever says, "wow, that must have had a great impact on your life." Nobody ever says, "wow, that'll make a GREAT book!" Nobody ever really listens to much of ANY of it; they just say, "whoa, that's FUCKED UP, man..."
Well, they're right.
But NOT ONE OF YOU can say "Helena, when I was that age, I had a very similar experience," because NONE of you did. My experience is MY experience, and it WAS fucked up, but it was also a very beautiful (and sometimes traumatic) time in my life. It SHAPED me. It IS me. And not only that, but it's a HELL of a good story, and it doesn't matter one fucking little bit whether or not my friends are/were psychos or assholes, and whether or not I ever completely believed their occult stuff. It DOESN'T matter. What does matter is that it all happened, and it was wonderful and tragic and fascinating.
I have not been able to find any more of my old letters. I HAVE, however, found something just as valuable: an old diary. In fact, it's not even MY diary; it's a photocopy of one of my friends' diary, dated April-July of 1997. I've been typing it up all day, trying to translate the handwriting. This is a HUGE break; this is SO much help.
Anyway, I signed on to stop thinking about the book, and now all I'm doing is talking about it. Duh.
Off to make some cheeseburgers.
~Helena*