that I finished my homework, brushed my teeth, got to bed on time. She let me paint my room bright yellow because I loved Tweety Bird so much. She was attentive to everything in my life, including the friends I was making at school. If I went to the movies, she would pick me up, or, if she was working, she’d arrange to have someone else get me. Never once was I left standing on a street corner, wondering if anyone would show up. The daily disasters of life with my parents were nonexistent. In essence, I got the version of my grandmother that my mother had always yearned for.
After my granddaddy died, my grandmother went through a prolonged mourning period. For almost two years, every day when she got home from her job in the office of a legal title company, she lay on the couch in the living room without turning on the lights. Then she met a lovely guy named Harold and found love again. They had their regular schedule, and I became part of their routines: Tuesday and Saturday nights they went dancing, so I either had a sleepover at a friend’s house or someone came and slept over with me. Wednesday was Grandma Marie’s standing appointment at the beauty parlor, and when she finished getting her hair done after work, we would go out to dinner, just the two of us, at one of the usual spots: the Mexican restaurant, Furr’s cafeteria, or the Chinese place. The Roswell rotation.
It was a halcyon period of safety, a time when I saw what a parent could be—should be—and an example I would look to when I became a mother. And yet, I started to get restless. By that point, I was conditioned to not stay in one place for too long. I didn’t have any experience in following through; I had no barometer for the hardships—or the rewards—of commitment. I’ve often wondered what my life would be like if I’d remained in Roswell. I would have had to work on developing and maintaining friendships, which had always been disposable. I would have had to set goals for myself, which I’d never done, because we weren’t in one place long enough to see them through.
None of that happened. I had learned to crave extremes: it was like I needed the juice of it. I lasted six months in Roswell. Then I went back to my parents.
I was with my family in Washington for just two months before they decided we were moving, this time to Southern California—and in a hurry. Maybe it was because of a mistress, maybe they were dodging a bill collector, or maybe the Pacific Northwest chapter of the mafia had figured out where to find my dad. We may simply have been evading Roger the therapist. My mother had stolen his credit card, and we used it to pay for our trip to California.
Somewhere along the never-ending nineteen-hour drive to Redondo Beach, my dad got badly beaten up; his face was swollen and bruised and he had a black eye. He looked awful: I can picture his battered face behind the wheel. In keeping with the silence that surrounded every unpleasant aspect of my family’s life, there was no explanation or discussion.
Once we were installed in our new place in Redondo Beach—an apartment in a beachy, stucco, pseudo-hacienda-style complex a mile from the water—my mother told me that when anyone called I should say that both my parents were away and couldn’t be reached. They were eluding the phone company, the electric company, and credit card carriers—all of whom would ask to speak to the variations of my parents’ names they’d been given, like “Virginia King,” my mother’s maiden name, or my dad’s first and middle names, “Danny Gene.” My parents even rented our apartment under the names of my aunt DeAnna and my uncle George, my father’s little brother, who lived nearby in L.A.
This came to light when George and DeAnna decided to move into our apartment complex and discovered that, thanks to my parents, they were already there. I don’t even remember them being particularly angry about it; they simply assumed my parents’ names for the purposes of their own lease. Having my aunt and uncle so close by was a huge comfort. As my mom and dad spiraled further out of control, George and DeAnna filled in the gaps time after time: they gave us rides when we needed them, fed us, listened to us when we had problems. They took me to my first concert: Aerosmith, in 1975. (They wanted to sit up in the stands; my friend and I were desperate to get onto the grass down where the action was. During “Sweet Emotion,” I remember, a stranger casually passed me a bottle of rum; I went to lift it to my mouth, but DeAnna snatched it away.)
Southern California in the mid-seventies was different from anywhere we’d been before. I was in seventh grade—at my third school that year—and all the cool kids wore Dittos jeans and smoked cigarettes and pot. I became close with a girl named Adrien, who had long blond hair: the quintessential California girl in a tube top. She was my mentor in misbehaving, introducing me to hard liquor and Marlboro Reds.
I got busted smoking at school and was sent to the principal’s office. My punishment was suspension. I was horrified. I’d never been in trouble before; up until then fitting in had never required acting out. My mom came to pick me up, and we were quiet on the way home. Then she removed a cigarette from her pack, waved it in my direction, and said, “Go ahead.” Instead, I took out one of my own. She reached over and lit it, and we never talked about it again.
That marked the beginning of a new stage in our relationship. I was only thirteen, but when I asked Ginny if I could go with friends to a club in the Valley, she said, “Sure—take the car. If you get stopped by the police just say you’re driving it without your parents’ permission.” I had learned how to drive back in Roswell, but I didn’t know the Valley. I didn’t know the freeway. I had no experience driving at night. Somehow, I made it to the club, with two other kids—who are lucky to be alive—as my passengers. From then on, I was regularly assigned to run family errands in that car. “Just remember: we don’t know you’re driving it,” Ginny told me. It was convenient for my parents, and it was one more way of seeing what they could get away with.
My parents didn’t set boundaries for me because they couldn’t even set them for themselves. They were drinking more than ever and taking Percodan, Valium, and Quaaludes that my father somehow obtained prescriptions for and filled at different drugstores using all my parents’ various aliases. He had the look to go with the partying: bell-bottoms and long sideburns. He even got a perm.
As for my mother, she often got aggressive when she mixed drugs and alcohol, and my parents got kicked out of restaurants and bars as a matter of course. My mom would start a fight with other patrons or lose her temper with my dad and start breaking dishes. Once, when she didn’t like the way the check was delivered, she took off her high-heeled shoe and used it as a weapon against the waitress.
Somehow, in the middle of all their partying, my mom found a good job as a bookkeeper for a magazine distribution company owned by a man named Frank Diskin. DeAnna started working for him, too, and suddenly my family had more money—especially my mother. Frank gave her luxurious bonuses: a mink coat and, eventually, the ultimate status symbol for a New Mexico girl of that era, a Cadillac Seville in pale yellow. We ended up moving into the nicest house we’d ever occupied in Marina del Rey, with Frank Diskin paying our rent.
Why was this guy willing to spend so much on his bookkeeper? DeAnna remembers that whenever my mother was alone with Frank in his office, the door was always locked.
EVER SINCE THE episode in Canonsburg when my mother had tried to kill herself, I’d been subconsciously waiting for another disaster—another truly devastating situation that didn’t make sense, that I couldn’t control, and that would upend my already unstable life. It arrived without warning when I came home from school one day to find that my brother, my father, and almost every trace of them had vanished. “Where’s Morgan?” I asked my mother. “Where’s Dad?” It was not unprecedented for my dad to go missing, but my brother? She shrugged. “Your father and I are getting a divorce,” she said. “And he’d only consent if I gave him Morgan.”
I was stunned. I don’t know what was worst: losing my brother,
