began this book to answer that question. But then I realized it served a larger purpose.
A friend once described me as a motherless child. Orphaned as a teenager, I have fought a lifelong yearning for something lost. Writing this book, I began to reflect on all the choices I’ve had to make on my own, all the battles I’ve fought, all the times I’ve tried to be there for my children when no one was there for me.
So, girls—Charlotte, Kristan, and Mary—this is about who I am and how I became your mother. This is why your mom acts like a nut sometimes, why I lose my temper on occasion, and mostly why, to your horror, I ask your friends too many questions.
Your mom has always loved a party, a good story, and all three of you.
CHAPTER 1
Neverland
Not long ago, I met an old friend from Alaska for coffee in Los Angeles, where I was visiting family. Brent and I knew each other as teens. For what seemed forever, I had an overwhelming and obvious crush on his brother, much to his brother’s dismay. I was not the girl everyone wanted to date. With naturally curly brown hair and no hair dryer (and no idea how to use one), I didn’t fit the Farrah Fawcett blown-dry, swept-back blonde look popular at the time.
If I had someone to show me how to make my hair look like that, I might have tried. But I was raised by my dad, with intermittent influence from his cocktail-waitress or topless-dancer girlfriends, and one wonderful second wife who lasted less than a year, when my father’s explosive rage drove her away. The girlfriends were not much help in the “how to be a girl” department. Go-go boots and fringe and pasties? I don’t think so.
In junior high school, I thought Brent was too good-looking for me. He was also a really nice guy, then and now. He is the kind of friend who would race out of his house at nearly the last minute and drive across LA to catch a quick cup of coffee with an old friend. I hadn’t seen him in about forty years. Forty years.
I brought two of my young teen daughters with me—a mistake, Brent and I realized as soon as we sat down to reminisce.
The two of us grew up in Anchorage in perhaps one of the toughest eras to be a teen in America, right after the Sixties. The decades—and their pop cultural influences—don’t neatly start and end when the calendar turns over. The turbulence and challenges of the late Sixties snowballed into the following decade, picking us up along the way.
“Oh, God, Kimmy, remember all the parties—ah, I mean, ah…”
“Bible group meetings?”
Our conversation drifted into reliving get-togethers—ah, parties… ummm, Bible study sessions—where we would listen to Led Zeppelin.
“Your mom and I never…” Brent said, turning to the girls in the middle of our conversation.
“Oh, God, no,” I muttered, shaking my head in case they might have been paying attention. Never fear. Their heads were buried in their smartphone screens.
So, Brent and I took the G-rated journey down memory lane that night. We marveled how we’d both gone to the first concert we had ever been to—Jefferson Airplane. I was twelve, I think, and in seventh grade. I went with a woman friend of my dad’s.
At one point, Brent turned to my two daughters and said, “Your mom was a rebel!”
They smiled politely and returned to their smartphones and videos.
I was struck by the label. Rebel. Me?
All I ever wanted was a normal life.
THE LAST TIME I had seen Brent, and many of my friends from junior high school, was late summer 1973. That August, my father was kidnapped and murdered.
That was the end of anything resembling a normal teen life.
The police didn’t make any arrests of his captors and killers until November. That fall, I lived a life I can only describe as akin to the Lost Boys in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
I lived in Neverland.
Before my father’s disappearance, he spent most of his time at the living quarters in one of his “massage parlors.” I was left at our house—a large, two-story, ugly brown mess of a place at 736 East Twelfth Avenue. It was also known as the 736 Club, the name of the after-hours gambling parlor he operated there when I entered middle school.
Most kids want to live in a candy shop. I got a casino.
I hated the place from the moment we moved in. It was always dark inside. There were few windows, and except for one window in the kitchen, they had all been boarded up by my dad or closed with tight shades. He wanted to keep prying eyes from seeing the illegal activities going on inside.
Even my sole bedroom window was boarded up. To this day, I do not close curtains or blinds during the day in any house where I live. I cannot stand to be shut in. I don’t even close up my house after dark.
Even now, I have nightmares about the place. The dreams are always the same: I am back in that house, which is usually remodeled and made to look so different that it’s unrecognizable. Unrecognizable to anyone but me, that is. In these dreams, I know what lies under the shiny new furnishings. In these dreams, I wonder at whatever form the house has taken, marvel at how it doesn’t look the same, and feel a vague sense of unease, disorientation, and fear that one day I might end up there again.
IN THE EARLY 1970s, Anchorage was a hard-working town of about 147,000 people. Its slapdash post-war, post-earthquake buildings hunkered between the majestic peaks of the Chugach Mountains and the muddy waters of Cook Inlet. The entire state was poised to begin making big money working on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. My dad was ready to make big money off the workers.
When I was twelve or thirteen, the 736 Club opened every morning after the bars closed, around 5 a.m. It stayed open until late morning or until everyone left. The illegal gambling club was set up in two connected rooms that made up what must have originally been the home’s dining room and living room. My dad hung a colored beaded curtain to divide the two. Tasteful, I thought.
In the first room were secondhand couches where patrons sat, drank, and relaxed. The other room had a craps table and large poker table. When not in use, the poker table wore a laminated wood cover my father would slip on to protect the table’s expensive padded green surface. In my memory, the rooms are crowded, smoky, noisy.
By the time I was fifteen, the 736 Club was no longer operating. Arguments between my dad and me had grown more frequent, and he became physically violent. I left the house and went to the authorities. I returned when he promised to close the club and seek counseling for his anger issues.
While my dad spent most of his time keeping an eye on business at the massage parlors, he still kept a bedroom at our house. Another bedroom was mine, and my dad’s friend, Al, and his girlfriend lived in the third. Al was a longtime friend who parented me perhaps more than my father ever had. He got me up for school. He got me off to my after-school job at the nearby gas station. He cooked dinner every night. Al and I remain close to this day.
But after my father’s kidnapping, Al was gone, pushed out by my dad’s last wife, Bridget. They had just married that summer, when she was pregnant. Bridget didn’t stay long either, perhaps because we did not get along. She was barely seventeen,
