Beer Shampoo

Trendy Trophy Girls -- the real Brooke on the right
photo by Carrie Scott

             Our good friend Brooke, prances through the school

                looking really keen; she thinks she’s really cool

                We tend to disagree…

                              ---from the song “Beer Shampoo” by Bitch Fight           

         In around fourth grade, there was a girl who came to Summerville Elementary school who got a lot of attention. Her name was a Brooke, a pretty unusual name at the time. We heard of Brooke Shields yet. In Tuolumne, the name still meant something from nature, a small stream, something that even ran in some of our backyards but not a name for a girl. 

        Summerville’s Brooke was an adorable girl with sandy blonde hair that sometimes curled into perfect little ringlets. I hated her right away. Her clothes were always crisp, her tights never snagged, and her Mary Janes never had scuffs on them. She also thought she was really great because she had reportedly appeared in an episode of Little House on the Prairie, which was occasionally filmed nearby on Baker Ranch. She talked about it all the time -- like she was already a big shot actress.

“I was in Little House on the Prairie. I had a small part, but I’m probably going to be in more episodes. That’s what their called, episodes.”

I imagined her riding through town in the eight-door, black station wagon used by Michael Landon and company. I had seen it drive through, and I had even seen Michael Landon and his big hair inside.

 “There was a set built on Baker’s Ranch. One side of the building didn’t have any walls. That’s how they do the filming.”

The Little House on the Prairie book series was only my favorite book series of all time. I read all of the one-hundred and fifty plus page to three-hundred plus page books in one-day sittings on our saggy green couch in front of the wood stove on rainy days in the winter. Little Laura and Mary had a wood stove too. They played with a pig’s bladder filled with air, played with it like a balloon after Pa slaughtered their pig. They also ran around in the snow in dresses and bloomers, and they were afraid of Indians. I had seen The Little House on the Prairie show at a friend’s house a couple of times, but we didn’t have a TV, so it was easy to pretend that I didn’t care about the show or that Brooke appeared in it, or that she was a star.

A lot of other girls did care, however, and they orbited around Brooke like planets. I watched from afar. It was annoying how difficult it was to ignore her, to not admire all her new clothes, or not notice the cute freckles on her nose.

When I wasn’t alone on the playground, captivated by Brooke, the embodiment of everything I didn’t have, I was playing with Noel Lark, Jill Crocker, and Emma Tilson. Amelie lopez and I had not yet become good friends, so I made do with some girls in my class who made me feel less bad about myself than Brooke. Noel and I were in band together with her dad Mr. Lark, both on our way to becoming band geeks. Jill was a pretty blonde girl who played clarinet and who lived in ponderosa hills, Tuolumne’s more upscale neighborhood, which boasted a community pool, but was in Tuolumne, nevertheless. Jill's parents were nice working class professionals, her mom an overweight nurse, who had passed the chubby gene down to Jill, who still had a bit of baby fat, which actually made her cuter. Emma Tillson was the awkward looking one of the bunch with what some would describe as a horse face. Her mom, sometimes, ran in the same circles as my mom, which meant they were hippie types, dabbling in unsavory extracurricular pot smoking and the occasional psychedelic drug – a secret which both Emma and I guarded with our lives, for our reputations depended on it though my mom’s reputation around town for being wild and loud escaped just about no one. My role in our clique added an edginess and mystique not possible for a group of girls, which included the daughters of the school’s vice principal and a nurse. Although we never said it aloud, we fancied ourselves a bit different from the other girls, and we regarded prissy girls like Brooke, and girls who were younger, and therefore not as cool, as pointless and trivial.

          One thing that we thought made us different from the others was our preoccupation with Charlie’s Angels. We ran around the playground, pretending to be the Angels, saving each other from dangerous men, aka gross boys on the playground, wielding our forefingers and thumbs like guns and posing provocatively with our legs spread, and in our imaginations, our long hair blowing back behind us. The giant tractor tires climbing structure and tunnel served as our private investigator’s office where we spoke to Charlie by phone. While playing Charlie’s Angels, however, Noel, Jill, Emma, and I probably spent less time running around the playground and more time arguing about who was going to play the part of which angel. Since there were four of us, instead of three, our version of Charlie’s Angels included Jill Munroe, Farrah Fawcett’s character, and Shelley Hack’s character, Tiffany Welles, who replaced Sabrina Duncan in season four of the show. Noel and Jill played the blondes; Noel, being the dominant girl in the group always got to be Farrah Fawcett’s character, Jill Munroe, and our Jill who was too sweet to argue, but blonde, always played Shelley Hack’s character, Tiffany Welles.  Emma and I were left to fight over which brunette to play. I always wanted to be Jaclyn Smith’s character and usually got my way because I was better at arguing my case, or maybe just louder. I secretly thought Jaclyn Smith was the prettiest woman on the show, in spite of not being blonde. Emma wanted to be Jaclyn Smith’s character too, and whenever she got to the tires before me I’d be stuck playing Sabrina Duncan, the pointy-faced, short, dark-haired, angel played by Kate Jackson.

“Anyway,” Emma would point out, “My hair looks more like Jaclyn Smith’s than your hair does,”

If by ‘looks like’ she meant frizzy and way lighter in color and not feathered and not shiny, dark, and brown, ok.

And you and Kate Jackson have the same birthday,” she'd continue. “Why wouldn't you play the one with the same birthday as you,” she's say smiling wide all satisfied with herself for making such a convincing argument, and Noel and Jill would nod in agreement.

I couldn't help but thinking that Emma looked even more like a horse when she smiled that way.

After seeing the show a few times at a friend's house, I realized that Sabrina Duncan was smart and took charge, so it wasn’t so bad playing her after all. It’s just that at nine years old we all wanted to play the prettiest characters, not necessarily the smartest. So sometimes after all our wrangling, just when we had each of our parts and our scenario worked out, the bell would ring, leaving us stuck to play which ever part we had worked out at the next recess.

When we weren’t playing Charlie’s Angels, Noel, Jill, Emma and I would hang out around the spinning bars where Brooke spent most of her time. Each of us tried pretending that Brooke didn't exist. It felt good having a bit of power, the power to ignore someone, to make her feel small because we were tired of her acting like she was so hot, like she was already famous or something. Besides looking cute and acting, Brooke had the ability to spin several revolutions in a row on the low spinning bars. Noel, Jill, and Emma did a lot of spinning too. I couldn't do it at all. While I watched on, each would hook one knee around the low bar and get going as fast she could, turning as many revolutions as possible. On a good day, Jill and Emma could do three or four revolutions. Noel, who was great at just about everything she did, was a very good spinner -- she could do about four or five revolutions in a row, her hair flying. Brooke, however, could do even more, though I wasn’t counting. And it seemed like whenever she saw us at the bars, she’d float on over with her planets all around her and wait her turn for a spot on one of the two bars. Even though there were four places for kids to spin, and I didn’t usually take up one of those spaces. When I’d see her coming, I’d lean against the bar and make her wait. Occasionally, she’d float over unnoticed and would find a spot on the bar, and in a dress with shorts underneath for modesty sake, hook her leg over, and start spinning, the skin of her hands on the bar making little squeaks, her hair a sandy blond blur. It was hard for Noel, Jill, Emma, and I not to stop and watch. Eventually, we wised up and simply left the bars once we saw her coming, or we’d make her wait for her turn, then leave just as she was about to get on.

Brooke didn’t last long in Tuolumne, she moved, winding up in Sonora, which boasted its own police department, courthouse, jail, newspaper, and more grocery stores than bars. Sonora being Tuolumne County's capstone city, like Brooke, was a much more sophisticated place than Tuolumne and a much easier to stay clean. I wasn’t surprised to find out that Brooke and her family had moved to Sonora. What did surprise me was how Brooke returned to my life later, still wanting my approval and the approval of my group of friends.

At sixteen, Amelie, Sammie, who was a year older, and I were running around in our punk rock contingent that had grown to a sizable number of about eight solid with a few peripheries, and four of us had formed an all-girl punk band. I played drums, Amelie played guitar, Sammie sang, and with each new song we wrote, we’d teach Chris canella, Sammie’s friend from Sonora high, the bass lines. While I was still friendly with Noel, Jill, and Emma, I had left our Charlie’s angels days far behind, and I had become a minority among minorities – a Mexican-American, punk rock girl, though I had cool punk rock friends and a band.

One clove-smoking weekend at Sammie’s in Columbia, where she lived with her mom and super skinny younger brother, before we stopped going to high school dances, and before our band started playing parties, Sammie was complaining about some snooty girls at Sonora High – she called them the “beige girls” because they all only wore khaki and white – crisp white tops, khaki jumpers and white Topsiders, or crisp white tops and khaki pencil skirts with Keds. We were sitting on a step outside just off her bedroom, which for some reason had a door, it's own entrance, when I realized who she was talking about.

“One is named, Brooke!” Sammie said, taking a drag from her clove cigarette. “Can you believe that name, Brooke?” Sammie said, exhaling hard and squinting to keep the smoke from going in her eyes.

“Brook!” I said, nearly choking and not from the smoke. “Brooke Banyon?  Are you kidding me?”

         “Yeah, do you know her,” Sammie asked.

“Yeah, I know her alright. She went to Summerville. After you moved to Columbia.”

“What was she like?”

“Totally stuck up.” I jabbed my clove into the cement step to put it out because I was feeling light-headed already. “She strutted around the school with her nose in the air thinking she was hot shit because she was in one episode of Little House on the Prairie.”

Apparently, things hadn’t changed all that much – I was just glad it was Sammie who had to now put up with her and not me. My dirt on Brooke fueled Sammie’s ire, but I chocked it up to the fact that Sammie was easily much angrier than I could ever be, though Brooke moving in on my love interest, Toby Denton, fellow marching band geek and a drummer too, gave me a whole new reason to be pissed off at the world and every single privileged blonde in it.

Because there was absolutely nothing punk rock about Tuolumne, no good places to skateboard, no one to see our spray painted graffiti, no cops to hate, and no place to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries, Amelie and I often hung out in Sonora with the other punks. We’d meet Sammie, Cindy, her boyfriend Chris, her brother Toby, and Sam, the Billy Idol look alike who Sammie was still all crushed out on, and a nutty wannabe bi-sexual girl named Lucky who smoked way too much pot, at the Europa. My mom called it the Throw-upa. The Europa was a greasy spoon diner that also served a few Greek dishes and had really good Baklava. Toby and I got to know each other at the Europa, talking all about band and John Phillip Souza marches while sitting side-by-side in a cramped booth at the Europa, our thighs all mashed together, making it difficult for us to look at one another, except through lowered lashes. Before long, everyone could tell we were into each other, and thinking it was so cute, Sammie and Cindy, always made us sit together in the backseat of Amelie’s mom’s Fiat.

I was eager to work up the courage to make a move on Toby because I knew he wasn’t going to make the first move on me being younger and as shy as he was, smiling wide and exposing his braces only when caught off guard and couldn’t help himself, and being invited to a Sonora High dance would give me the chance.

Sammie and Cindy got their male friends who didn't have dates anyway to get us passes and Sammie took Amelie as her date, and Cindy took me as hers.

Arriving a little late, having taken extra care to dress for the occasion, ratting my hair extra high, and applying my black eyeliner extra carefully, I didn’t wear my regular black but instead a frilly white top with layers of vertical ruffles, red leggings, and black granny shoes. I was horrified when I walked into the Sonora High hum and spotted Toby surrounded by the beige girls and talking to Brooke, or her talking to him.

While the punk rock girls never dated trendy guys, only other punk guys, stoners, or working class dudes, the punk rock guys lusted over the most popular trendy girls in school and visa versa. Toby, I thought was an exception to this rule, and mostly he was, but I could tell he had a weakness for any kind of female attention.

Not knowing what else to do, I marched right up to where Toby stood surrounded by Brooke and the beige girls, with Sammie, Amelie, and Cindy behind me, cut my way through Toby’s adoring crowd, and said, “Hi, Toby.” He looked from me to Brooke, and back, his eyes making their way down to my red leggings and back up. I smiled, and Sammie, never known for her patience, cut in from behind me, and grabbed Toby by the hand and dragged him to the dance floor, where we descended on him like magpies. Chris and Aaron joined us and we danced together for a couple of fast songs, making lewd hand gestures and faces at anyone who stopped to stare. When a drippy 80’s slow song came on, changing the mood entirely, Sammie pushed me toward Toby and left the dance floor with Amelie, leaving Cindy and Chris to slow dance, and Toby and I in an awkward but not terrible position. Knowing this was my chance to make it clear to Brooke and to Toby that he was mine, I moved even closer, looking up and into his face smiling, and when he smiled back, a shiny braces smile, I leaned into him and put my arms around his neck. Trembling a bit, he drew his arms up slowly and put them around my waist, letting one droop down and rest on the rump of my tight, red, dollar-store leggings. About halfway through the song, with Toby’s breath hot in my ear, I spotted Brooke with her beige girls standing at the periphery scanning the dance floor. When she saw me in Toby’s arms, dancing with his hand resting on my rear, I narrowed my eyes and smiled, then nuzzled my nose into his neck, breathing in the smell of his Polo cologne.

Maybe it was because she was still after Toby, or maybe because she still wanted our approval, or a combination of both, Brooke showed up to a party at Sammie’s house, thrown one night a couple of months later when her mom and little brother were out of town. It wasn’t a big party, but our cool friends from Sonora High were all there, and a few others who had heard about it through the grapevine, and who could navigate the bumpy, deeply rutted quarter-mile long dirt road out to the property where Sammie’s small house and another sat amongst a grove of oak trees. Brooke knew we hated her, that she was our nemesis, and that she represented everything we thought was wrong with the world, but she had a friend of hers, one our peripheries, drive her to the party anyway. Having this connection to one of our peripheries was in our eyes a sense of entitlement over our shabby part of town – her pass into our world, and we were pissed off about it. Sammie and I were especially pissed. Sammie couldn’t believe that Brooke, who at school with her friends, looked at Sammie like she was a piece of dirt would think it’s cool to show up her house.  I just knew that Brooke was there to move in on my man. After having tortured me with her beauty and privilege in elementary school, she had returned and posed a threat to my love life, holding up what represented a perfect standard of female beauty up to me like a mirror, in which I saw (and had created) a carnival mirror version of myself reflected back at me.

Sammie and I both knew that Brooke had to go, and I had the perfect way to get rid of her. Because she was a two-faced, approval-seeking, boyfriend-stealing, trendy, and because I was a jealous, insecure, angry, self-hating, punk rock Chicana, I was just the person for the job. I called Sammie to the kitchen, grabbed a beer from the fridge went to the front room, Sammie following behind me. Cracking open the beer on the way, I sidled up along side Brooke and Melissa where they sat on Sammie’s mom’s thrift-store couch. She looked out of place in crisp white and beige amongst the pegged jeans, band t-shirts, black eyeliner, and converse. Standing now between the wall and the arm of the couch, I played nice.

         “Hey Brooke, how did you find out about the party?” I asked, taking a sip of the beer.

         When she looked up to answer, I began dumping the nearly full can of Old Milwaukee onto her head. Squealing, she sat stuck to the couch in shock, allowing me enough time to drain the entire can of beer all over her sandy blonde hair and to drop the can, which bounced off her head and landed somewhere on the floor. Sammie who had posted herself nearby for the show, was howling with laughter along with the rest of the witnesses. When Brooke finally jumped to her feet, she was crying and wiping beer from her face and hair, and in a deliciously satisfying fit of gulps and sobs, she managed to speak. She said that she couldn’t believe how she had been treated after she had come to the party hoping to make friends with us, hoping to bury the hatchet, and after making some kind of lame threat, she stormed out, her ride Melissa, following along behind her.

For months afterward, some huge girl, a friend of Brooke’s, got in my face and threatened to kick my ass any chance she got. However, the memory of the night I humiliated a trendy, the night I humiliated Brooke Banyon, the laughs we got from those who witnessed the beer shampooing, which inspired the song we wrote and performed at parties, which elicited wild chanting during the chorus, had made it all worth it, even if it wasn’t a nice thing to do.

Collecting Boyfriends

        One summer, I collected boyfriends. I was fifteen and dating three guys all at the same time. Al was my Mexican-American boyfriend, Toby was my punk rock boyfriend, and Mike was my San Diego, skateboarding boy friend. Al, who was older, never told me his actual age because all the pot he smoked made him paranoid about statutory rape. Toby and I were both marching band nerds. We both played the drums. Mike spent the summers in Soulsbyville, a tiny spec of a town wedged between Tuolumne and Sonora, even smaller than Tuolumne. His parents were divorced, and he spent the school year living with his mom in San Diego. Mike must have dated Mexican girls in San Diego, or wanted to because he was more comfortable with me in public and otherwise than any guy I had dated.
         Alphonso Garcia, or Al was tall with washboard abs, long dark hair, and big brown eyes and long eyelashes that women always commented on. That I met Al through my mom was not lost on me. He and Randy would come over and hang around the house visiting with Mom and getting high. Al tried to ignore me at first -- tried to stay focused on sampling the product, but I found ways to get his attention. I wore catholic-school girl skirts or camouflage shorts with men’s see-through-white undershirts, cut so they'd bare my mid-drift. My shoulders, arms, and legs were defined from playing drums and twice as dark than usual from the sun. I was inexperienced, and Al knew it, liked that about me. Not quite a virgin -- someone had to show me the way, and he knew the way. But he vacillated between keeping things all business and acting his age. He didn’t want to fuck things up with my mom, and he knew my step-dad Donnie was uneasy when he and Les were around.
         Toby had braces and wore eyeliner. He was skinny, and he always brushed his teeth before we went out to smoke cloves and hang out at the Europa diner with Amelie, Sammie, Cindy his sister, and whomever else we could fit in Amelie’s car. Toby liked me but he was shy, and I probably came on too strong, getting drunk and kissing him when all he wanted to do was press his leg against mine in the car or under the table at the diner. The wealthier, prettier, trendy girls liked Toby too -- I felt I had to work extra hard to keep him interested, and I got the impression that he both liked and worried about my being Mexican. Even though he was a year younger and Sandy’s younger brother, I felt the most insecure about my looks when I was around him.
         Mike wore plaid board shorts and sex wax t-shirts. He told me I was beautiful as he rubbed his hand down my thigh, his skin light in comparison with mine even though he was a rather tan San Diego boy. We spent a lot of time rubbing up against one another in our bathing suits and otherwise at the Tuolumne pool, at the river where I took him skinny dipping for the first time, and in his dad’s bed. His dad told him that he was glad that he had found someone to spend time with while he was at work, and my job being shut down mid-way through that first summer made spending the day together possible. For the first week after the summer program for school-age kids had shut down, I continued getting rides to work from my step-dad. Mike would wait there for me with his skateboard, and after pressing me against the gym wall, pushing his body against mine, and kissing me soft then hard, he’d flip his bangs out of his blue eyes, grab me by the hand, and we’d half-skate, both of us on his board, half walk to his dad’s house where we’d spend the rest of the day alone.
         Since my mom sat around the house and smoked pot all day, I didn’t bring a lot of friends home, certainly not boyfriends. Al knew all that; he was on the inside, and so when my younger sister who I shared the attic bedroom with wasn’t around and my step dad was still at work, he’d sneak up the ladder to find me, his heavy boots on each two-by-four step giving him way every time. He’d sit down on my bed, a box spring and mattress on the floor, and lean back, his arms over his head, the back of his head in his hands, and his daddy long legs splayed in out in front of him, his knees forming pointy angles. His dingy white t-shirt always rose up as he leaned back exposing his stomach -- muscular and brown. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his bare stomach. Still early in the relationship, I reached out and slid my hand up under his shirt. I could feel goose bumps rise up over his skin. He closed his eyes for a second. Then he grabbed my hand, stopping it before it slid any lower.
         “Jail bait, that’s what you are. Jail bait,” he said, holding my hand under his shirt in place and smiling. He had a fantastic smile.
         I kept my hand where it was and climbed on top of him, straddling him, pinning him down to my bed and leaning my face close to his.
         “Don’t worry, no one here wants the cops around,” I said breathing hard into his ear. He smelled earthy and sweaty, and I could feel his heart beating under his shirt. I didn’t care that he was older, or a high school drop out, or laying low growing pot in the foothills –- his black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin didn’t look out of place on mine. I felt him warm and hard under my thigh. I licked the skin under his ear, pushing his hair back. His large hands gripped my thighs, pulling me toward him hard.
         Toby was shy. He liked me, but I had to pursue him. He was only fourteen. I was just getting to know his older sister Sandy who was a year older when Toby caught my eye. The Summerville High and Sonora High bands had a couple of joint events every year. He played the trumpet, drums, and bass guitar and he looked like his sister Sandy who was one of my first girl crushes. I liked that he was younger and shy. I remember really seeing him for the first time behind a drum at Sonora High. He had an earring in his ear and he was wearing eyeliner, pegged pants, and an open, button-down, plaid shirt with a grey t-shirt underneath it. He sort of took my breath away, a band geek and punk kid all in one. His favorite record was Social Distortion's Mommy's Little Monster, a record that we all listened to over and over. He didn’t talk much, and when he did it was about music or his father, also a musician who had toured with a variety of bands when he was younger and who died suddenly a short time later, devastating the entire family and the rest of us too because his parents had still been married after many years and had still been totally in love.
         I mostly hung out with Toby in crowd with all our other friends -- it felt better that way. We’d sneak glances at each other and sneak off and kiss for a bit, but I was careful not to steal all of his innocence all at once. When I first met Mike that summer I invited him to the river with a group of friends, that included Toby and a bunch of others from Sonora, so he could make some friends. We had a favorite spot down under an old railroad bridge in Sonora just off of Tuolumne Road.  It had a waterfall and a couple of deep pools and level places to wade with wine coolers in hand. Toby was into me that day, pulling me into the water and kissing me like I was his. I could see Mike watching us from where he sat alone on a nearby rock. I had invited him so he could make some friends since he was only in town for the summer, not sure if Toby was coming or not or if he did if we were even really together. Toby and I were standing in a pool of water just above the bar of sand where everyone else was hanging around, and he was holding me around the waist and kissing my neck -- something that I had wanted, been wanting for months, and it felt good, but I could barely feel anything, not with Mike and his sad blue eyes so close by.
         Mike loved the Rolling Stones. Just before we met, I had lined up a housesitting job. One my high school teachers who lived in town hired me to take care of her chickens, goats, and cats. Mrs. Somerwell and her husband were super intellectual communist hippie types with a big record and book collection that lined the walls of the living room and dining room. I had planned on trying to take Al to their place to keep me company, but he hardly ever left Randy’s side, so I wound up taking Mike instead. Al told me to date other guys because he didn’t want me getting to dependent on him; I was in still in high school and he wanted to keep it that way. Even though he wanted me to see other people, I didn’t tell Al that Mike and I spent a night up there together, listening to Stones tracks the whole time: “Brown Sugar,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” Satisfaction” “Paint It Black,” and the song “Angie” over and over again. We put blankets and pillows on the front room floor but we barely slept. Mike had only had done it with one other girl, and I had only done it with Sam that one time and Al only a couple of times at that point, and our fifteen-year-old bodies, cursing with horny hormones needed more. We rolled around under the covers all night, dozing off for short periods of time, one of us waking and reaching for the other -- I’d unwind myself from his arms and pull myself back on top of him where he’s open his eyes all blue and sleepy, and he’d grin, a sign that he was ready to go again.
         “You are so fucking beautiful,” he told me in the morning as the sun was coming up over the hills. He was propped up on an elbow, the other hand tracing my collarbone and down under one breast then over the other.
         I couldn’t help smiling and lowering my eyes.
         “I mean it,” he said, lifting my chin to make eye contact and kiss me soft on the mouth, so I’d believe him -- wouldn’t contradict him or point out a flaw or wish for something that I didn’t or would never possess.
         It was a deliriously hot summer. There were days when I’d get home from work after seeing Mike for an hour or so after my shift and Al and Randy’s car would be in the driveway, and the phone would be ringing, and it would be friend Sammie calling to say that Cindy, and Toby, and John, and Paul wanted to get together. I had gone from being rejected or ignored by all boys at my own high school and not wanting to date any of them anyway and replaying The Smiths in my head over and over, “I am human and need to be loved,” to deciding that I need to make a rule about only sleeping with one guy on any given day and maybe even creating a two day rule, if that was even possible. Seeing Toby less that summer made it easier, and he was the easiest to give up or avoid since he was shy and young and a virgin, and lived in Jamestown. While others may have, I didn’t get all caught up worrying about my reputation, or feeling bad, like I was disrespecting myself. I actually felt pretty damn good. I only worried about getting pregnant. And I mostly only worried about getting pregnant because Al worried about it all the time, but I was on the pill -- had been for about two months. I was taking some precautions.
         Mine and Al’s relationship took off that summer. He brought a strange kind of balance to my life and to my sense of self, and he was a realist, also paranoid and ignorant and frustrating at times. Al knew that I dated other guys, wanted it that way too, and we continued seeing each other for almost two years, but only when he’d show up at my house with Randy to see my mom or conduct business. For a short period one winter when it was too cold to stay in their cabin in the hills, I saw Al nearly every day because he and Randy stayed in a small trailer on the lot behind our house. Randy picked fights with me and with Al because I was coming between them, keeping Al from him, and jeopardizing their operation by risking problems with my step-dad. I knew that Randy was jealous too, not of me, but that it was Al who had a girlfriend this time when he didn't. All the adults in my life, including Randy, said that what I felt for Al wasn’t really love, but they were wrong.

         Toby and I would see each other off and on for about a year or more without ever getting super serious because there didn’t seem to be any point, and we waited until he was fifteen to go all the way. I couldn’t bear to tempt him into anything other than intense kissing sessions and heavy petting which he got rather good at until he was at least fifteen, the age I was when I did it the first time. It happened one night at a big sleepover party at Amelie's house, the same night that we had to get Amelie's grandmother to drive our friend Becky to the hospital because she poisoned herself drinking too much. She was fine in the end, only in terrible trouble with her parents. The next morning, bleary-eyed and jittery, Cindy came out of the room where she had spent the night with her boyfriend, and gave Toby a congratulatory hug.

‘You’re a man now, Toby,” she squealed loud enough for everyone to hear.
         Mike was only in town for a few weeks the summer I collected boyfriends. He went on vacation with his dad near the end of his stay only to return for a couple of days before going back to his mother in San Diego, something that I was almost relieved about because I didn't think I could keep up such a frantic pace though we had a long, teary goodbye on our last date. Chaperoned by his dad, we went to see National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation. Mike’s dad sat away from us nearer to the front of the theater amongst a group of people who laughed at every single one of Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold’s blunders. Mike and I sat in the back kissing the entire time, stopping to wipe away tears, each of us promising the other, not to be true, but that we’d see the other again. And I did see Mike again the next summer after his dad moved to Angels Camp and one time the summer after that though we were never quite able to capture the magic of that first summer, the summer that Al showed me the way, and Toby let me pursue him, and Mike said, “Look at you. You are so fucking beautiful,” the summer I collected boyfriends.

Delilah

Coming of Age -- The High School Years

My mom called me that sometimes. It started somewhere around middle school.      

I knew about Delilah from the yellow hard-back book of Bible stories that my grandfather had given me. Even though the yellow book didn't say so, Delilah was a harlot who betrayed Samson after seducing him with her cunning beauty. I had learned that much like I learned other things, from listening to different versions of the same story, the way they were told, watching expressions on adults’ faces when they told them, and putting it all together in a way that made the most logical sense.

         Many of mom's male friends told me that I was pretty when I was little. What big brown eyes you have, what pretty skin, like a pretty little Indian girl. Once I turned eleven they just leered or pretended I didn't exist at all, which was just fine with me. I didn't understand the connection between those looks and my mom calling me Delilah. But I sensed there was one.

          Two of Mom's friends made me keep a secret. I was a good little secret keeper – nothing like Delilah at all.

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         I am sitting as close as I can to the door. In his white, 70's model Datsun pick-up truck.
         He is driving with one hand, weaving down Apple Colony Road.
         His other hand is on my thigh, snatching at my skirt. He pushes it up; I push it down. I lean closer to the door, sitting now on one hip.
         He's drunk, just on his way home from the bar where he's been all afternoon. My mom is at his place, probably making dinner. I was on my way home from school, walking down Apple Colony Road when he stopped and told me to get in. This had never happened before.
         He leans the right side of his body across the seat and feels for my thigh. The truck swerves toward the shoulder.
         We had been staying at his place quite a lot. It was much nicer than our house. A tidy Victorian style farmhouse set in the middle of two or so lush, green acres of land, a large corner property.
         My hand is on the door handle. I try to get a glimpse at the speedometer.
         His hand finds my cotton underwear. He's pulling it to the side, fondling me. The white fence along the road rushes by.
         I lean back toward him, now sitting on his hand, an attempt to hold it in place. I grab at his wrist, pulling it away. I am eight or is it nine -- I don't know.
         The truck swerves to the left.  

         I can see the house.
         His hand is back on my thigh, fingers searching for the elastic pinching at my inner thigh. I clamp my legs together. He lets go.

         I pull my skirt down, smooth it over my lap.
         Both hands on the wheel, he turns the truck uneasily onto his property, the gravel crunches under the tires, and the truck lurches to a stop.
         Inside the house, I have no words for what just happened. My mom is in the kitchen. It all looks so wholesome -- the tidy house, the white metal kitchen cabinets, something simmering on the stove, only some days she goes to the bar too -- it's where they met.
         I hear him behind me greeting her, pushing the screen door open behind him, and I go to the front room and turn on the TV. It was one of the things that I had liked about his house -- besides the fact that it was so clean.                        

                                             *   *   *

         By fifteen I had another secret. I had given it up to a bleached blond, Billy Idol look alike.

         Mom was in the middle-room that had been transformed from a bedroom to her sewing room since we were all older and needed a bit of privacy. I shared the newly converted attic bedroom with my sister. We had to climb a ladder to get up and down, but once there we had a room away from everyone. My friends slept over only when my sister Zhanna stayed the night with her friends because then she wouldn't try to butt into our business. Mom was focused on some sewing project. I could hear the squeak of the foot pedal as she pressed down and the slamming sound of the sewing machine needle working its way in and out and in and out of the fabric. She had allowed my friend Sammie and her friend Sam the Billy Idol look alike to spend the night in my room. Maybe she thought that Sam was Sammie's boyfriend. Well he wasn't. And he wasn't mine either, but we had been making eyes at each other for a couple of weeks even though I knew that he wasn't really attracted to me, maybe just curious, so I let him get on top of me, but not for long because it hurt, and maybe I was changing my mind. Annoyed, he pushed me away and rolled closer to Sammie who was stoned and already asleep.

         Soon after, I began having a recurring dream. I was pregnant just like Rachel and Winnie two of my childhood friends. Pregnant and frantic because it was almost too late to get an abortion and no doctors performed abortions in Tuolumne County, and I didn't know who I could ask for a ride to Modesto. All I could see were the mountains that surround Tuolumne, and I was stranded, stuck in the middle of the valley, floating there but unable to rise up and see over the top – to see what was on the other side.

         I'd wake from these dreams in a panic or rouse myself enough to know it was a dream, a dream that I had to force my way out of. I wasn't going to wind up like Rachel, or Winnie, or Katie the cheerleader at my high school, a junior who hid her entire pregnancy because she didn't show. She cheered on the squad in her short pleated skirt and black vest with orange trim into her last trimester. The baby was born with bruises on its face born after Katie was taken to the hospital with inexplicable stomach pains. The next thing her parents knew, she was birthing a baby. And she was from a good family. No one ever called her Delilah.

         I had to get on the pill quick. I had still only had sex that one time, but I knew I couldn't stop it, to go back, back to pretending there was such a thing as childhood innocence, a time when others took what they wanted from me, to now being able to choose with whom I wanted to share it. My dreams were trying to tell me something and the reality was all around me – a rash of teen moms in Tuolumne, a couple were my friends, walking around town pushing strollers and wearing half-tops.

         Amelie's mom took me to Sonora to the clinic where I had to speak with a nurse practitioner, get a pelvic exam, and learn about different methods of birth control: condoms, the pill, the IUD. And they made me talk about my family life. I lived with my mother, sister, brother, and step-dad, and no, I didn't know my real father. Finally, they gave me a wheel of pills that would prevent my worst fear: an unwanted pregnancy and what I imagined would be a life of doom stuck in Tuolumne forever, keeping secrets that weren't really secrets at all.