dad routinely dated gorgeous women—cocktail waitresses and topless dancers and strippers and such. Bridget looked twenty-one or older. She’d been on the streets for years, which probably gave everyone—including my dad—the impression she was old enough. Just barely. Her convoluted life included the baby born after my father disappeared, a child who was believed to be my father’s son.
Bridget was my own version of a fairy-tale evil stepmother. Soon after it was clear my father wasn’t coming home, Bridget moved in some friends of hers to rent one of the bedrooms. They were a couple. A man and a woman. They were also heroin addicts; he was a pimp, and she worked as a prostitute.
My friends and I called them “the vampires” because they only came out after dark. We managed to avoid them most of the time; thankfully, they weren’t interested in socializing with teenagers. When they finally moved out, they left the carpeting littered with bloodied cotton balls and empty syringes.
I started school that fall on my own, but soon Bridget came around and tried to parent me. I would have none of it, because she was also looking for the Social Security checks that came in the mail for me after my mother’s death a year earlier.
We would fight, and she would threaten to “call the authorities” and have me picked up and thrown into juvenile detention or foster care. Of course, I had no business living without adult supervision—I’ll give her that. But I’d be damned if that supervision came from her.
It wasn’t long before she, too, disappeared from my life, as well she should have. She had been a heroin addict before meeting my father and became one again after his disappearance.
So, while everyone who gave it any thought at all probably assumed Johnny’s new wife was taking care of Kim, Kim took care of herself.
That winter, other runaway and castaway teens came and went from the house on hearing from one friend or the other that it was an adult-free zone. Some stayed a day or more, some longer. The whole place came to look like an average teenage room—a mess. I’m neat and clean, but somehow the house fell into chaos, with clothes, shoes, even garbage strewn about.
Whenever anyone had some money, we might walk across the street to the grocery store and get some things. A big splurge would be to go over to Mark’s Drive-In to buy the “Mark’s Special,” a hamburger, fries, and milkshake. But mostly our pockets—and the cupboards and refrigerator—were empty.
I have gone hungry twice in my life. The first was when I was about six. I can’t remember whether it was for just a morning, a whole day, or longer, but no one seemed to be around to make me anything to eat. My mother was in bed, having fallen into a deep depression and probably a psychosis, as she slowly slipped into schizophrenia. I ate all the frosting off a cake in our fridge. Later I dumped a box of tapioca in a bowl, added water, and ate it.
The second time was that fall of 1973.
I got by somehow on the money I made at my after-school job at the gas station. The utility bills just went unpaid until six months later, when I finally left the house once and for all.
How I hated that house. I would have friends drop me off down the street so no one could see where I lived. I felt depressed about my life, and why not? I was a fifteen-year-old girl, full of angst and self-loathing, with a toilet that had stopped working in the house’s only bathroom.
Fortunately, it was the middle of winter, and the temperatures were below freezing. My response to the toilet problem was to scoop the toilet bowl contents into a mop bucket using an old kitchen ladle. Then I’d take the slop to the carport on the side of the house and set the bucket there to freeze. Later, I’d dump it upside down and do it all over again, leaving the frozen and growing blob of sewage to sit there until the spring thaw.
This could have gone for days or weeks. I don’t recall. Ironically, I was a clean kid. Before my dad disappeared, I had always kept our house tidy.
SOMEHOW, I MANAGED to get up every day and go to school for my tenth-grade classes at East High School. My bus was full of African-American students from Fairview, Anchorage’s largely black neighborhood.
I was scared to death the first time I got on the bus. I had no friends from the neighborhood, never had any. Fairview was full of government housing projects and low-income housing and some modest, working-class homes. Many of my fellow East High students on my bus were streetwise; like me, many were veterans of lousy childhoods.
One day, I mouthed off to the bus driver over something. That drew the attention of one tough black girl who intimidated me. But after that, she decided I was all right, and we sat together from then on.
At school, I kept my head down in class and did my work. I enjoyed art class the most, where a kind teacher named Bonnie, with long, blonde hair and a gentle nature, looked after me.
When home, I did what teens do—I listened to music a lot and talked on the phone. I recall listening over and over again to Neil Young’s two albums Harvest and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
I’d sing along to the former; the latter certainly described life at the new 736 Club, home to wayward teens.
I might not have made it through those months if not for my best friend at the time, Dean.
Dean and I began hanging out in middle school. I was friends with his younger sister, René, and became close to their family: their mom, Sue, her husband, Bernie, and two adorable little brothers, who I would sometimes babysit.
Then and for years after, Sue was like a mom to me; René, a sister; and the younger boys were like my little brothers.
Dean had dark hair worn in a short ponytail. He was handsome, with a little air of mystery, having spent some time in a juvenile facility for some minor behavioral issues.
I initially had a crush on him, as did many girls. But until my late teens, when we went out for a short while, we were always just friends. Good friends.
In 1973, Dean’s family moved to Seattle, and he went to Oklahoma to live with an older brother. Dean was half Cherokee Indian on his mother’s side. If he graduated from high school in Oklahoma, he could go to college tuition-free, he told me.
But then he learned my father was missing. One day, I heard a knock on the door, and there he stood.
He came back to stay at the house that fall until he couldn’t miss any more school and had to go back.
It was a relief to have someone I could rely on in that house.
That Thanksgiving, Dean’s mother had a friend stop to check on me and deliver a turkey. I was embarrassed when I let him in. For the first time, I realized how deplorable the place looked. That nice man didn’t even blink. He just smiled and gave no indication of the horror he surely must have felt seeing me alone in that house full of debris and neglect.
THERE WERE MOMENTS that winter when a normal life seemed possible. For Christmas, Dean’s family bought me a ticket to spend the holiday with them in Seattle. It remains a cherished memory. Sue and Bernie bought René and me a generous number of matching gifts, including clothing and jewelry. It was one the best Christmases I had ever had.
When I turned sixteen in, friends planned a birthday party for me. They created a restaurant-like atmosphere in the living room of the 736 Club, complete with a waiter and a home-cooked meal.
But the real Sweet Sixteen party was
