Chapter 6 Nostradamus #4
Shannon is gorgeous, stupidly gorgeous, and deliciously mean when she needs to be.
She was perfectly comfortable kicking people out of bars if they pissed her off—she is a punk rock skater girl at heart.
She’s been through a lot, seen a lot, done a lot.
She has beautiful kids. Really smart, really eccentric, interesting, brilliant children, highly politically charged.
She’s my friend who posts everything about this march and that march, fuck the government, fuck the patriarchy.
She wants to change the world. And I love that about her.
I’m a turtle. I like to go into my shell.
But Shannon is intense, and so funny. We’ve done everything together, from traveling to taking French lessons to getting kicked out of Formosa Café together. She’s my rock.
And then there’s Carolyn. She grew up with Shannon in San Jose and was even a competitive skateboarder at one point.
Throughout our lives, our paths have crossed and uncrossed.
She went off to have kids before any of us did, while I was working so much, but when I got sick, Carolyn was there.
And now Carolyn’s with me almost every week.
Tommi, also part of what became the Viper Room club, is what I call lusciously eccentric.
She’s married to magician Rob Zabrecky, a fantastic musician and former lead singer of Possum Dixon.
When Rob started doing magic, he and Tommi would take a break in the middle of the show and tap-dance onstage.
They’ve been together for almost thirty years now and they’re perfect together, both beautifully weird and loving and kind.
China—who happens to be Grace Slick’s daughter—is the funny, raw, unapologetic, chain-smoking heart of our group. These days she’s a sober Christian pastor, but whenever I see her, she’ll still sit and just be China.
Along with Pharel from my childhood, these beautiful women are scrappy as fuck, righteous as fuck.
They are my girls, my tribe. They would do anything for me.
All my friends are wonderfully strange and beautiful and kind, but they will also beat up someone for you.
We’ve all changed across the years—become mothers, or taken the cloth, or whatever—but whenever we get together, it’s like we are still the same group we were way back when we first met, back in that club drinking vodka gimlets.
Except these days when we meet, I’m not crying.
I’m swearing and laughing. They gave me their energy.
By the end of that first night, I was a little buzzed and had gotten rid of my huge stack of registrations, and then that Clinton guy won. I like to think his victory was entirely down to me.
These girls saved me, but not all in one night. My relationship with this man went on, but they sparked something inside me.
I had to be my own savior. I always fought back, I always physically struggled, but sometimes I feared that was so that he would hurt me more.
I think part of me wanted him to hurt me.
I wanted him to beat the shit out of me.
I wanted him to beat my face up. It took me years to understand why—and then I realized it was because I wanted help.
Just like when I was younger and I would take pills or cut myself, I wanted someone to say, “My god, look what he’s done to you.
We’ll get rid of him for you.” I didn’t know how to do it myself—in fact, it wasn’t even an option.
We must have broken up eight or nine times throughout the relationship, and each time he’d guilt and woo himself back into my life, saying things like “You need to give me five thousand dollars because you’re making me homeless. ”
On one of the occasions when we broke up, he left and went to San Francisco.
When he called me a few days later, I faked trying to kill myself, faked that I was stabbing myself—this is how ridiculous the whole situation was.
I wanted him to feel as bad as I felt. I would do anything to try to make him feel guilty for what he’d been doing to me.
But instead of showing guilt, or concern, or God forbid realizing the damage he was doing, he drove all the way down from San Francisco and showed up in my house. I woke up to him looming over me, like he’d caught me in a lie, which I suppose he had.
On and on I stayed with him, with a constant and futile determination to turn it around, turn him around.
In late April 1991, I fell pregnant. I want to turn away from what happened, but it’s all recorded in my diary. There are moments in my life that are too painful to force into narrative or meaning, so I’ll let my voice from back then speak.
Well, yesterday I found out I was 6⒈／⒉ weeks pregnant.
Too many emotions are filling my soul. I love this being.
Anyway, two days before I found out, I got into a car accident on the way to the gynecologist. My car didn’t survive, but luckily, I did.
I knew I was pregnant. I couldn’t understand why even though I was watching my eating I still felt fat.
I couldn’t understand why sex made me sick and I cried at the drop of a hat.
Now I know. I always felt that if I ever got pregnant when I knew it was the wrong time, I wouldn’t have any problem having an abortion.
“Oh, whatever, it isn’t even a baby yet.
” That’s bullshit. This creature is incredible.
It makes me feel whole, safe… My boyfriend said I was a disgusting, self-obsessed, eating-disordered fat pig today (not in so many words).
That opened my eyes a great deal… I don’t really understand my relationship anymore.
It isn’t good. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it.
It all started to get heavy when we moved into the new house, which, by the way, is fabulously, incredibly beautiful.
Maybe I just want to enjoy it on my own.
Maybe I want to have whoever over whenever I want…
I feel I have lost myself somewhere, and I can’t find her for the life of me.
Only days later, my diary takes a brutal turn.
I’m fucking pregnant and I’m killing my child on Thursday.
I’m thinking where the fuck can I go to recuperate from murder…
His family will hate me when they find out that I killed their family member because they don’t believe in it.
But I can’t have this baby because I have work to do to entertain this fucking world. Besides, I can’t… now.
It breaks my heart, reading these pages. On June 9, I wrote a poem to my child, convinced it was a baby girl. I have no actual proof, but that doesn’t matter: to this day, I know.
Hello little thing.
I feel you every moment of my day
Such a tiny existence
Such an immense effect you have
…
You are a miracle
A tiny-handed miracle
I love you.
But you know your fate.
It is not your time.
I know you didn’t make the decision.
But it can’t be your time.
You will live on, though…
You will live through another.
…
I hope you will forgive me.
But I want you to know how you’ve changed me.
You’ve opened my eyes.
You’re letting me know something is more important than myself.
But Mommy can’t be with you right now.
But know she loves you
More than any other miracle.
And know that when it’s your time
It will be your time.
There is a page with various sentences blacked out, like a redacted government report, written the night before I had my abortion. I was afraid, terrified my boyfriend would read what I had written about him.
Wednesday, June 12, 1991
Tomorrow is the day. Yes, pain and all the other emotions are pummeling my soul.
But that is a whole other chapter. My main frustration/XXXXXXXXXX etc.
is basically geared towards my “relationship,” or whatever the fuck you want to call it.
Maybe it’s the pregnancy, I don’t know, but at this moment in time XXXXXXXXXX The sick part that I don’t understand is that I love him.
But right now XXXXXXXXXX I XXXXXXXXXX I do not XXXXXXXXXX I XXXXXXXXXX I don’t want to XXXXXXXXXX.
I do not want to try to work it out… Right now, all I want is silence, I want my life back, my privacy, my love for myself.
But it is virtually impossible when one continues to put you down. Now, I’m sure I’m imagining most of it…
Then it was done.
Thursday, June 13, 1991
Well, it’s over. I feel pretty okay. Just kind of woozy.
That gives me no time to realize what I have done.
Which is most likely the best right now.
I was looking over what I’d written yesterday and just have to laugh.
My emotions were extremely warped (I really don’t feel that way).
Honestly, I think when you’re pregnant you tend to feel that way about the male figure in your life…
My life is pretty wild. I could seriously write a book. I guess this kind of is.
When you’re at the bottom of a well, you can often see light, way up there, a distant sky of hope, but that doesn’t mean you can easily climb out.
It’s clear from my journals that I was struggling not only with him, but with myself.
This is also one of the first times that my diary sounds prescient—it’s almost as if I could see a future in which the bill for all the guilt and unhappiness and trauma would be paid by my body.
Maybe it’s just the long hours I have been spending on my bed thinking about my illness, but in reading these words from more than three decades ago, I find that I suffer a kind of concussive awareness of the future impact of all these dark events from my early life.
Saturday, September 14, 1991
Change is needed desperately or else I will fucking shoot myself because I’m so tired of living a depressed fucked-up lie.
Yeah I’ve had some good, sure, but mostly plain torture to myself.
Mainly by not speaking my mind. Standing up for my honest immediate feeling.
That word “sorry” sucks. It’s bullshit. I’ve been wrong.
Maybe I’ve caused it. Maybe I fucked up.
Didn’t handle it correctly. But I can’t be sorry.
I can’t feel guilty. Guilt is not an emotion, it’s a disease.
A pathetic life-altering and in the long run fatal disease.
A slow-process disease… It begins in the brain, then spreads the illness throughout the entire body until not only does the mind shut off, but the body as well.
“A slow-process disease… It begins in the brain.” It seems poetically fitting, and devastating, that I now suffer from a condition in which my body’s very immune system—the thing that should save me from harm—has turned in on itself and attacked the myelin that protects my nervous system.
I spent so much of my life racked with guilt that it’s no surprise to me that it felt like a disease when I was younger, and has, in some ways, felt like the driving force of a disease I suffer now that I’m older.
“Long run fatal…” There is no cure for MS, and no one knows why anyone gets it, so my contention in this diary entry from 1991 makes just as much sense as anything.
I didn’t know back then that one day I would be mostly bedbound with MS, but I did know that something very dangerous was happening inside my soul, something that might one day shut off my body.
These journals I turn to read like prophecies as much as a historical record. Who knew I was the Nostradamus of Laurel Canyon?
Things began to crack. I started writing about what it would be like to be single, and started expressing self-awareness of his direct impact on my deteriorating confidence.
His sway and the love I thought I felt kept me coming back, but I see the early signs of escape.
It was torture, an internal battle every day.
I would think, Here’s somebody who I hate more than anyone on the planet.
But he gives me flowers. But I hate him.
But he tells me he loves me. But I hate him. Over and over and over.
Sunday, November 10, 1991
A scenario repeated one too many times. [He] is angry and had barely spoken a word in two days.
I acted wrongly on Friday, made, once again, an ass of myself.
Now I must live in this punishment. I don’t know where to turn.
I’m constantly “fucking up,” but with what?
Who knows why what where. I used to be confident in knowing I was a good person, despite my neuroses.
But since I’ve been in this relationship, my confidence in myself has deteriorated.
I can’t seem to please him, no matter what I do.
I sabotage everything. My motives are right, but as he always says, I’m only 19 and acting accordingly.
Funny how most 19-year-olds own a house, keep it together, cook for their boyfriend, have a job, are responsible?
But I suppose I’m just a fucking kid, right?
Lived through life and still managed to have a fucking sense of humor.
A tolerable temper. Gee!! But there are more-together, wiser ones out there…
When someone is always telling you what’s wrong w/ you and not balancing out w/ what is good then it is hard to be able to stand back and evaluate.
Just getting pushed down further into the depths of depression.
So what do you do? Have space? What space?
I am on a constant, never a chance to breathe…
Please God lead me to the bliss I once felt, the freedom I once felt. Been a long time since I felt that.