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 the one I planned.
Some of the Lost Boys, as I now call them (some of whom were girls), had moved on from the 736 Club, but I had plenty of friends in high school. Somehow, I got the notion that I would screen the film Woodstock for my birthday. This was back before videos were available, but I learned I could rent the actual film (which came in several reels) and a projector from a local company that rented educational films to schools.
Some friends and I hung a white sheet across a wall in the large living room at 736 and then watched in amazement as an overflowing crowd showed up. The living room became a sea of teens from all over town crowded wall-to-wall throughout the two-story house. It was like any teen party scene held at a teen’s home, except in this case the parents weren’t merely away; they were never coming back. That cold night in February, we—the youngest of the Woodstock generation—partied like it was 1974.
Dean “Andy” Mathis, hunting in Oklahoma, mid-1970s. Dean was my best friend my freshman and sophomore year of high school. He and his family were like my own before and after my father’s death.
Me and René, Dean’s sister and my best friend since seventh grade. This photo was taken in their home in Seattle in 1973, when they brought me down for Christmas. René and I remain close.
Despite a huge group of teens doing what teens did at parties like this—play music really loud and drink alcohol—the cops never showed up. That was probably because the house sat in an area partially zoned for commercial development: Al’s Body Shop was across the street, the Tesoro gas station where I worked was next door, and Mark’s Drive-In was on the corner. There were no neighbors to disturb, no neighbors to watch us—or watch out for me.
CLEARLY, AT SOME POINT, I needed rescuing. Eventually, the cavalry showed up.
One day late in the school year, I was called from class into the counseling office to find a beautiful woman with stylish blonde hair dressed in a fur coat and in no way looking like what she was—a state social worker.
Her name was Michael Giesler and she saved my life that day. She told me my seventeen-year-old stepmother had called their office, saying I was a delinquent. Considering the source,