Recently, I spent some time with my ex-husband, Charley, picking
his brains and getting my memory jogged by his recollections. The
events and facts I present here are as accurate as I can make them,
although neither of us is certain of the chronology in every
instance. The immediate lead-in to this segment is in the Hulk
moves out
blog, but if you’re not familiar with the story, I suggest reading at
least the part after I come to Alaska (links are in my sidebar, main
page).
When Hulk moved out of the threesome arrangement in our little basement
apartment on 11th Avenue in Anchorage, and moved in with Mollie, my
former co-worker at Open Door Klinic, we all remained friends.
Michael and Mollie lived for a while with a friend who was a
professional magician (prestidigitator, not wizard), before
renting a small house beside the Anchorage landfill, and then later
they put together a teepee and pitched it on the bank of Rabbit Creek
south of Anchorage. They were living in the tipi when they
were visited and converted by Jehovah’s Witnesses (but this is getting
‘way ahead of my story). He was “Mike” by then. Nobody in
Alaska knew him as Hulk, and I was the only person who ever called him
Michael. I’m abandoning my attempt to keep these people
anonymous. What’s the point?
Stony (my ex-boyfriend,the man with whom I came to
Alaska) and I also remained “friends”, meaning that he kept coming
around and I didn’t try to avoid him. The friendship with
Michael/Hulk was a two-way street. We were there for each other
when one of us needed something. We had good times together in
our group of new friends, most of whom were old friends of Charley’s or were people we had met where each of us
worked. Stony’s “friendship” was
a one-way thing. I now recognize in him all the signs of
narcissistic personality disorder, but back then I (and just about
everyone who knew him) simply considered him an asshole.
Several times in the year that I lived in that little basement
apartment, Stony came and stayed for a few days, or came just for a
shower, or for a meal, or to introduce me to one of his new girlfriends
(as in the picture above). When he found a temporary job as a
security guard, he stopped in to get me to take a picture of him behind
his badge and under his new Alaskan bush hat, with a rifle he’d
borrowed somewhere.
He was homeless much of the time except when he moved in
for a while with some new girlfriend. If one of them still lived
with her parents like that one above, he found it inconvenient and soon
found a new one. When the latest girlfriend tossed him out, he’d
come crash on my floor for a night or two, or drop in for a shower if
the weather was warm enough for him to sleep in a park or his car. He’d
bring weed to ensure his welcome, and often brought food as we had done
when he and I were hitchhiking across country and crashing with
strangers.
One of the saddest and most disgusting visits he paid me was on the day
before his marriage to Debbie Roehl. I felt sadness for the two
of them and disgust at him. He was very drunk when he showed up, drunk enough that he might have been in a blackout,
slurring his words, weaving and staggering into things. First he just said he
needed a shower, but after the shower he wanted to talk. Soon after he
started talking, he started blubbering, sobbing, weeping loud and
hard, with mucus bubbling out his nose and running into his beard..
When he had come over a week or two before that to invite us to the wedding,
he had been prancing, all smiles, and expressing pride that Debbie said
she’d marry him. When he was there alone with me on the eve of
the wedding, he said she was pregnant or he’d not be marrying her, and
that if I’d just take him back he would leave her. I told him
that no law said he HAD to marry her and that he, she, and the kid
would all be better off if he didn’t. Then I helped him up the
stairs and out the door. I wonder if I’d written my advice in a
note and stuck it in his pocket where he might find it if and when he
sobered up, if maybe he might have followed it. Fat chance!
I don’t suppose he even remembered that visit afterward.
The next day, Charley and I went to the wedding at Debbie’s parents’
house. Michael and Mollie were there, and Mardy and Terry, and
other friends. Gary was drunk, and Debbie and her whole family
were well on their way, too. Her pregnancy was far enough along
to be apparent. (I’ve noticed that in one earlier entry I had slipped
and called Gary by his real name. After the “real” Stony came to
visit us in Colorado, he stopped introducing himself as Stony and
became Gary again from then on.) At the wedding, I wasn’t trying to
conceal my dismay and disgust at him, and a few people who didn’t know me very
well mistook it for jealousy. Mardy and Charley knew better, and
that was all that mattered to me. I just kept my mouth shut.
I went through a rough time after I came back from my wilderness
trek. I was jobless. There was no long-term economic hardship because
I was soon on unemployment compensation (first and only time in my
life), and Charley had a job. He worked at Replacement Glass Co.,
a job I’d found for him when I worked at New Start Center, until the
ex-cons’ organization formed Re-Construction Inc., to cash in on the
housing construction boom that accompanied the construction of the
Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Then he and Michael started working
together for Re-Con, Michael doing framing and Charley operating a
forklift moving materials around on the jobsite and doing excavation and backfill with a backhoe. (I must go back and straighten out
some jumbled chronology on that in a previous chapter.)
What bothered me about joblessness was dependency. I have always
associated autonomy and liberty with independence. Since those
days thirty-some years ago, I’ve come to associate all three of those valuable
intangibles with joblessness, too, but at the time I believed I needed
a job to have money and needed money to avoid homelessness or
prison. I didn’t want to be dependent on unemployment
compensation, and had learned suspicion and avoidance of the welfare
system from my mother.
Another important aspect of my independence was threatened by
Charley. He’s a control freak, a fixer of people and situations,
always wanting to steer me one way or another, make things right for me
and with me, step between me and anyone he perceived as a threat –
taking care of me as he saw it. I recognized it as benevolent,
good-natured psychopathology. I understood co-dependency and
didn’t want it, but at the same time I enjoyed some (sumbunol:
some but not all) of the manifestations of it.
I spent a lot of time looking for a job. I’d never had such a hard time finding work since my initial job
search at age sixteen when I had no experience and met consistent
prolonged failure.
Anchorage was full of boomers who had come north for the well-paid
pipeline jobs and ended up taking any job they could find.
Consequently, there were a lot of jobless people around. Many of
them were homeless, so I was doing better than most.
I made things even harder for myself by choosing not to take waitress,
cooking, or housekeeping jobs. I was seeking only social service
work, determined to “make a contribution” in exchange for my
salary. I see now that I’d gotten a bit twisted around by that venture
into social services, where most of the professionals see themselves as
economic martyrs to a sociopolitical cause. The pay is relatively
low as professions go, the work is largely thankless, and the only
apparent consolation is the self-consolation that one is “helping
out.” At Open Door, the staff meetings consisted of a lot of that
self-consolation, reinforcing each other’s social consciences.
I got very few interviews. There were few openings. One that
stands out in my mind was at McLaughlin Youth Center, the juvie
jail. It was a counselor position, and the interviewer asked me,
“What pushes your buttons?” I’d never heard the phrase before,
and she had to explain “hot buttons” to me. Then I shot
down any chance I might have had at the job by telling her that I react
negatively to
defensiveness because I know that it’s covering some dishonesty, which
implied that I also react negatively to dishonesty. That is not
the attitude and disposition a counselor at a juvenile jail needs.
With so much spare time, I spent a lot of it in the library
studying. I paid a lot of attention to Alaskan history,
geography, and the local flora and fauna. I placed an ad in the
newspaper and made a few dollars calculating and interpreting
astrological charts. I got stiffed a couple of times by
people who ordered charts and then after I’d done the work they decided
they didn’t want them. One of those people is a member of a
prominent political family. I know things about her no one else
knows, and that’s about my only compensation for those efforts.
I also did some baby-sitting for the red-haired kids of some of my
fellow-Mensans, and for my old friend Mardy’s daughter Shanda.
It
wasn’t just Shanda who stayed with me. Mardy had a stormy
relationship with her boyfriend Terry, and sometimes she’d show up on
my doorstep without so much as a toothbrush, and stay for two or three
days to let him sober up and cool off and start missing her… or until
she started missing him. Here we’re on my bed. She’s
wearing one of my dresses and I’m toying with Beaner, the cat Gary left
at my place because he couldn’t care for him.
I had a warm and playful friendship with Charley, as well as a
passionate love affair. The friendship has always been there,
stronger than any of our differences. Our relationship is still close and caring. When the passion waned the friendship
stayed. Recently, as we talked about the events of the
mid-seventies and tried to sort out the chronology, we laughed together
and had fun. Life together wasn’t fun all the time, but the good
generally outweighed the bad. It still does. We’re
friends. That’s important to me.
Our mutual playfulness was often mischievous. Early on in our
relationship he told me he was blind without his glasses. For a
while, I would hide his glasses occasionally while he was in the shower
or asleep, but it bothered him so much that it wasn’t much fun, so I
quit. We’d both do things to annoy or pester the other, but not to
hurt. We could, and often did, get into loud arguments without
any real hostility. That used to vex our friends or anyone who
heard us, but it just amused us. It was how we resolved
conflicts. I have read somewhere since then that some families
yell, some families hit, and some families go for the “silent
treatment.” I’ve always been a yeller. Raised voices don’t
bother me unless I’m trying to concentrate or sleep. It’s just a
way of emphasizing a point.
One of the best things Charley did for me was getting me out of the
house and into public events around Anchorage. He had to do a lot
of talking to convince me to go to the first one, a Gordon Lightfoot
concert at West High Auditorium. Eventually he wore me
down. To me, concerts meant huge crushing crowds, lots of
allergenic perfumes and traumatic psychic overload. There was nothing we
could do about the perfume other than take my asthma inhaler along, but
he assured me that there wouldn’t be any big crowd. He was
right. The auditorium wasn’t large, and it wasn’t even close to
full. As I sat near the back and watched the audience come in,
one thing I noticed was people’s hair — a predominance of blondes,
something I wasn’t used to seeing in crowds with a more typical mix of
Afro- and Hispanic Americans where I’d been living before then.
In the intervening three decades, Alaska has gotten a more diverse
population than it had then.
In terms of drugs, I’d “gone organic” somewhere between Colorado and
Alaska. I always suspected that my stillborn baby was the result
of the MDMA I took at the Grateful Dead concert in Boulder. I
made the decision not to do chemicals any more, but stick with the natural highs. Essentially, that meant marijuana, peyote, and a
few dozen herbal ups, downs and hallucinogens. The remission of
my asthma and allergies that I’d experienced during that pregnancy was
in the past, and I’d been experiencing new symptoms that I now
associate with ME/CFIDS. At the time, they were just a disparate
bunch of symptoms. The pain took me to a chiropractor who
recommended ginger tea and saunas, told me to get orthopedic shoes to
correct my short left leg, and to quit smoking. I never even
seriously considered the shoe thing, since he wanted several hundred
dollars for the X-rays that would measure the disparity so he could
prescribe the lift, another hefty chunk of change for the shoes, and then I’d have to wear the damned uncomfortable things. No thank you very much,
I’ll limp.
Since the only thing I smoked was marijuana, I started eating it
whenever I had enough of my own stash to be able to cook it up into
something like spaghetti sauce or hash brownies. I was also
trying to control my weight, and knew that chocolate was addictive, so
I tried to cut out the brownies. For the Gordon Lightfoot
concert, Charley had come up with about three-quarters of an ounce of
hash and I pulverized it and baked it into a Lemon Snack Cake, an easy
mix thing that came with its own baking pan. Charley reminded me
of that on my latest visit when I was trying to let his memories
refresh mine. He rolled his eyes when he said that,
“three-quarters of an ounce!” I’d had no conception at the time
how much stone-potential there was in that much hashish, and the two of
us split the little cake before the concert. Mmmm, wow! I’m
sure that helped make my first Alaskan “crowd scene” more
pleasant. I remember watching the people come in and sit down, noticing the absence of dark skin and abundance of blond hair,
but the music didn’t leave a lasting impression.
For my thirtieth birthday, Charley gave me two big mirrors. He’d
gotten the mirror wholesale where he worked, a full sheet. He cut
it in half, beveled the edges and drilled corner holes for
hanging. Each mirror is about four feet long and three feet or so
wide. They still hang in my old trailer at Elvenhurst, across the
highway from here. There could be no more appropriate gift than that for a
Virgo. I think I’d expressed the need for a full-length
mirror so I could check my appearance before going out. As
Charley sometimes does, he took it to the extreme, made it
double. They stood, one behind the other, leaning against a
bedroom wall until we moved out of that basement apartment, because
there was no suitable wall to hang them from.
We threw a party for my birthday and invited about fifteen or so of our
closest friends. I was pretty sure that someone would bring dope
to smoke, but I wanted some I could eat. I had previously found a
recipe in the Tassajara Bread Book for “Date, Fig, or Prune Bar
Cookies.” I pulverized and sifted some weed and substituted it
for some of the flour, used a mixture of dried fruits instead of just
one type, and the results were tasty and stony. I did it again
for the party, but that time I got in a hurry and neglected to add the
nuts to the recipe. To solve that problem, I whipped some cream,
added the nuts to it, and spread it on top of the fruit bars.
Even better!
From experience, Charley and I warned our guests that three fruit bars
were probably an overdose, but the foreman from the Re-Con construction
crew was smoking dope and got the munchies and ate
he-didn’t-recall-how-many bar cookies — at least five. He got lost on the way
home, didn’t find his way home until the next day, and blamed me and my
fruit bars, even though we’d warned him. The fruit bars became
popular, and I started making them for every party, feast and
potluck. Many people appreciated the “health-food” aspect of
them: no chocolate, whole wheat flour, herbs and spices, all
natural ingredients. 
Before Xanga, my most widespread notoriety was for those FUBARS.
Later on, in our health food booth at the Alaska State Fair, we sold
them under the counter. Our customers included many of the
carneys, who appreciated being able to stand there operating the rides
and munch on green cookies instead of having to sneak smoke
breaks. We also sold them to a State Trooper who appreciated them
for similar reasons, and to a mountain climber who was in Alaska to
climb Denali. He called us from Hawaii that winter to order two
dozen bars, and then wrote later to say that he’d saved the last one of
them and had eaten it at the top of Mount Everest.
The fruit bar party marked a turning point for me. I had known that I was
allergic to tobacco smoke ever since I’d had allergy tests in Japan in
1966, and yet I worked in smoky bars, lived with smokers and let people
smoke in my house. That night at my birthday party so many people
were smoking that it triggered an asthma attack for me. I went
outside. Charley explained the situation to our guests and told
them the party was over. While Mardy opened windows and cleared
out the smoke, Charley and I walked around the block.
Immediately, I put a no smoking sign on the outside door. Even my
husbands have done their smoking outside since then.
Charley and I used to take “candid” pictures of each other. I
think I started it by taking his pic sitting on the toilet not long
after he moved in with me.
Then he got a shot of me naked, just out of the shower.
The one of me in my nightie and fuzzy slippers was very early in our
relationship. I know that because I’d not yet gotten my hair cut, and I remember who I was
talking to on the phone. It was a client from Open Door Klinic who had called in the middle of the night and awakened me,
so I was still employed there. This was sometime between April
and June, 1974.
One of my favorite shots of Charley showed our parakeet perched on the
frame of his glasses. I couldn’t find that one, but this next one is
almost as good. That bird loved his face. I know that this
was taken later, spring of ’75, shortly before we moved from that
basement apartment, because that was when we got the first of our birds.
Charley bought me a series of birds around that time, to “brighten up
the place,” he said. He tried very hard to fix my winter blues
that first winter. The first three of the parakeets died within a week
after I got them, which didn’t help my blues at all. The pet shop replaced each one, by their
guarantee, on the assumption that the birds had been sick when we got
them. I suppose they were — I never got very good at recognizing
bird diseases if the symptoms weren’t obvious. Then someone clued
me that the white parakeets (which I had chosen because they were so
beautiful to me) had genetic weaknesses and I switched to more colorful
birds. They proved more durable.
Another effort Charley made at lifting my seasonal depression during
that first dark winter we were together, before I learned that I needed to brave the cold to get sunlight, was my first light
garden. There was an alcove in the living room, beneath the
landlady’s front steps. He installed a fluorescent fixture and
ceiling hooks, and I stacked up fruit crates for shelves in
there. I planted the seeds from oranges, grapefruit, avocados,
and marijuana, and bought a few small houseplants. I also bought
some books on household horticulture and learned that the reason I’d
never been able to keep a houseplant alive even though I was a great
outdoor gardener, was overwatering.
In this shot at left, he called my name to get me to turn, and caught me
reaching up to brush away a lock of hair. My bangs were just
starting to grow out from my last short haircut. And I do mean
LAST. I had my hair cut in a wedge in the fall, about the time The
Exorcist was released to theaters, and hated the growing-out period so
much that I never had bangs again after that. They never laid
across my forehead right anyway, because of my cowlicks.
Charley
did take one picture of me in that time that I like. I was
cooking something there in the little kitchen that was actually just
one side of the hallway between the bedroom and living room. It was the least
efficient or convenient kitchen I’ve ever had.
Charley decided that fall that we needed a car, and he found a cheap
beige 1964 Volkswagen bug in a downtown car lot. We named her
Lucy. Up to then, we had been riding our bikes or the city’s
People Mover buses everywhere. Now I could drive him to work, do
grocery shopping, conduct my job search, and pick him up after
work. We did a lot more visiting of friends after we got Lucy,
and got out of town a few times. I got my first sight of the
Matanuska-Susitna Valley and of Denali, the mountain also called
McKinley. Since Michael and Molly still didn’t have a car, we
sometimes picked them up to go with us.
I hadn’t been thrilled at the thought of spending hundreds of dollars
on a car when we were living on one income with my unemployment
insurance about to run out. I thought we could make do without
it, and we probably could have. Even so, it was a wise and
prudent move and made our later move out of the city feasible,
too. I realize now what I didn’t know then. I was living in
fear, unwilling to take risks, wanting safety and security and willing
to accept many limitations to attain them.
If there had been any ice fog during my first winter in Alaska, I never
noticed it. One Saturday morning that second winter, in early 1975, I
stepped out the door into a frigid fairyland. Every tree and
fence and many roofs and vehicles were glowing frostily in the
sunshine. It was about 25 below zero, and I was worried that my
camera wouldn’t work or the film would freeze, but I had to take
pictures. We left Lucy parked at the curb and walked all over
downtown Anchorage. I shot Charley in his parka.
I shot the Chugach Mountains through a frosty fence on the Park Strip
in the Anchorage Bowl. That strip of parkland had once been the
airstrip for the town when all there was to the town was clustered in
that bowl around the harbor.
I shot a whole roll of film, a lot of pictures of little or no
significance except that this was my first experience of the visual
effects of extreme cold. The “ice fog” is a result of human
habitation, heated buildings, car exhaust, etc. It condenses on
cold surfaces and becomes hoarfrost. The icicles are the result
of melted snow from a poorly insulated rooftop and extreme cold.
There was still dirty slushy snow on the ground when I found a job. It was
getting close to the end of the unemployment checks and I was becoming
more flexible in my requirements. On the board at the State Job
Service office was a notice of an opening for a clerk-typist at YES,
the Youth Employment Service. There was no contract, no minimum
time commitment as there often is in social services, so I knew if
something better came up I’d be free to take it. The YES office
was in the back portion of the Job Service building, so I went around
the corner, had my interview and was hired.
The work wasn’t interesting, but it was my first (and only) real
experience of the life of an office. At New Start Center I’d been
based in an office, and spent many evening overtime hours there doing
clerical work after the rest of the staff went home, but most of my
work was done out in the field. At YES, I had a desk in a room
with five other desks. The office manager had a cubicle separated
by half-walls from the rest of us. She could hear what went on,
but not see us without going to her door.
Mornings and afternoons we passed around sections of our shared
newspaper between phone calls to and from employers and the intake
interviews with new clients or the brief contacts when we sent them out
for job interviews. The life of the office, much like the real
(social) life in prison, was at lunchtime. We’d pile into
someone’s car and go to some cheap cafe. We’d talk about current
events, about office politics, or tell stories. I was telling one
of my stories to that bunch of women one day as we returned from lunch
when several of them said in unison, “You oughta write a book!”
To be continued….
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