Traci Lords Read online

In Weirton, West Virginia, with my older sister, Lorraine (left), 1973.

  The collection of Traci Lords

  My father was furious when he arrived home to an empty house. We were holed up at my great-grandma’s house in the projects and he called there, blaming Mom for their marital problems and demanding that she “get her ass home at once.” But Mom decided we would stay, even though my sisters and I weren’t welcome in this new black neighborhood, and the local girls made sure we knew it every single day. Maybe Mom thought it was safer than going back to Dad, but for us kids it was just a new battlefield. After school we always rode the bus home and the moment our feet hit concrete the war was on.

  Great-granny’s house was only sixty-three steps away from where the bus left us, but as close as we were to the safety zone, we were still sixty-two steps shy of getting away. We were never bothered until we reached our stop on Parkview Circle, where we would be out of parental sight and alone. Lorraine and I plotted our escape route every day on the tense ride home. We tried everything to befriend these girls but nothing worked. I offered sweets and Lorraine tried reasoning. When that failed, we prayed for the front seat closest to the doors to get a head start on them. But the angry gang of ten-year-old girls who enjoyed beating the crap out of us was not to be denied.

  The white bus driver turned a blind eye, letting these kids beat on us while he sat safely in his school bus. Like so many people I’d encountered in my young life, he didn’t want to get involved. I promised myself I’d never be like him and punished him with spitballs to the back of his head while he drove.

  I didn’t understand why the neighborhood girls hated us so much. We were all in the same boat. We lived seconds from one another, but apparently the color of our skin set us a world apart. And it was hard not to hate them back, since they made my life such a living hell.

  These battles after school went on for weeks until finally we spilled the beans and told Mom, who started showing up at the bus stop to collect us. Lorraine and I were mortified that our mom was now picking us up. It was even more ammunition for ridicule in the schoolyard.

  The day after Mom started showing up to collect us from the bus stop, the mothers of all the little black girls started showing up too, screaming about how “no white woman” better tell their kids how to act. My mother ignored them, leading us away and explaining that those girls were just doing what they’d been taught. Somehow that made sense. Maybe one day they would discover democracy, I thought, and rule more fairly. Still, I knew it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon and I hoped Mom’s presence had scared them off. Otherwise we might have to run away. We decided to give it a little more time, but I started hoarding my milk money just in case.

  During this time, Dad seemed to enjoy Mom’s struggles to make ends meet and deal with the gang of us on her own. I guess he figured that if things got hard enough she’d come back to him. But he was wrong. Mom enrolled in college at the University of Ohio down the street and she also landed a part-time job with a lung-study program. I remember she was studying the air and people’s lungs to see if there was a connection between the two. She was very proud of this, but I thought it was really silly. I mean, anyone could see that the air in our town was brown and that couldn’t be a good thing. I often felt like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown who was followed around by a dirty brown cloud that hung over his head wherever he went. But I didn’t share these thoughts with Mom. She was happy being in school with her new job and I didn’t want to spoil it.

  Things were looking up. Mom bought an old Dodge—which I thought was the coolest car ever—she landed on the dean’s list at school, and the neighborhood girls had grown bored of beating us up. But for my mother, the better she did, the more jealous my father became.

  One afternoon he showed up after school. Granny answered the door and he told her he needed to speak to Mom. I watched my parents arguing as they walked across the street toward the park.

  Later, I found out Dad had heard a rumor that Mom had a new boyfriend, a black man named Howard with whom she worked. Apparently one of Dad’s buddies had seen them having coffee together and reported back. Dad was livid. From across the street, we saw him punch her in the face several times. The blood streamed down her neck as I stood screaming in Granny’s bedroom window upstairs.

  Granny grabbed a butcher knife, I got the broom, and the whole tribe of us tore across the street like banshees screaming our heads off. But before we got there my father took off in his red Ford truck, leaving Mom stunned and bleeding on the sidewalk. Rivers of blood streaked her beautiful white skin. I thought she was dead, and I was hysterical. My eighty-three-year-old granny tried to help her up. Mom was moving and I begged her not to die. She got up and headed for the preschool that sat on the corner where our school bus stopped. There through the window, I saw one of the teachers look at her, look at us, and then slowly close the blinds.

  We waited anxiously while the doctors sewed up our mother. It took more than twenty stitches and she nearly lost her eye. Even at ten, I knew that my father’s actions were nothing but cowardice. Boys weren’t supposed to hit girls. My father had taught me that. The barely solid foundation beneath my feet—after the divorce and the move and the fights and separation—gave way. My whole life was turned upside down and it made me feel like God was somehow punishing me.

  I thought my head would explode. My left eye twitched nervously and I couldn’t stop blinking. Breathing heavily, I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else. My thoughts drifted to Saturday-morning cartoons. Images of the coyote and the Roadrunner filled my mind. I became the Roadrunner, running from the coyote. I attacked the coyote with dynamite and he blew up and I raced off into the sunset free again.

  Dynamite! That’s what I needed, something strong enough to stop all my enemies. I AM DYNAMITE! I thought. I AM DYNAMITE! The chant grew louder in my head as I shook in my chair, balling up my fists into tight knots of power and imagining blowing up my father’s truck, orange flames dancing around me as I watched.

  My mother emerged from the room with black zigzags all over her face that held the skin together. Horrified, we raced to hug her. We were so small we ended up hugging her legs, sobbing until no tears would come.

  An elementary school photo.

  The collection of Traci Lords

  We left town the next morning. My mom’s brother picked us up and we drove and drove. We were on the run, to where I didn’t know.

  We played the license plate game, counting them all the way to the Grand Canyon.

  We hiked around it, saying hello to all the geckos and other creatures that lived there. I was fascinated by that whopping hole in the ground.

  We stayed two days as Mom slept the hours away while our uncle watched us.

  I idolized my mother’s brother. He became a hero in my eyes for rescuing us from a bad place. He took us to eat at McDonald’s and played hide-and-seek with us in the woods behind the motel. When Mom seemed a little better, we packed up our stuff and headed for Utah, where, she said, there were lots of jobs to be had.

  As soon as we arrived she started looking for work, but it didn’t go very well. I wondered if it was because of her face. The stitches had already come out, but the scars were still fresh. And her eyes were haunted. She was no longer the perky, happy woman people wanted to have as an employee.

  The summer came and went and so did we. We were on our way back to Ohio.

  I don’t know why she went back, but she did, and the whole way there I was terrified of what was waiting for us. I started having frightening, vivid dreams about my father punching holes in us. I would wake in a sweat and be scared the entire day, but when I told my mother about the dreams, she simply said that Dad had done a bad thing, that he was going to be punished for it, and that we shouldn’t be afraid because it was all going to be all right.

  But it wasn’t.

  As soon as we got home, Mom was slapped with divorce papers. She was called a “kidnapper.” Dad file
d on the grounds of abandonment, and Mom’s lawyer told her not to contest it or she would get stuck paying court costs. We attended court wearing our Sunday best and I tried to hide under the bench in the long hallway as my father arrived. We sat in the front row like evidence of their coupling. The judge turned bright red when he was handed my mom’s hospital photos and immediately dismissed the kidnapping charges. Then he turned on my father: “If you ever show up in my courtroom again, it’ll be a sad day indeed.”

  But his words meant nothing. Dad was only fined ten dollars, and he was even granted visitation rights.

  Visitation rights? I jumped to my feet to protest, but Lorraine pulled me back down. I thought I must have heard him wrong. The judge was supposed to be on our side. We were the good guys. Dad was the bad guy. Mom said so. She said he was going to be punished. Why was everyone lying to me? I was indignant. We were going to be sent straight into the monster’s den. That stupid man in the robe said we had to visit our father every weekend. No one asked us how we felt about that. He’d ruled without our vote. How could that happen? Didn’t he see that we could be hurt? Even killed!

  I was too young to die.

  I no longer believed in democracy. Did that make me a Communist? My head was spinning. The monster was smiling and I wanted to smash my shoe right into his ugly face.

  2

  The Curse of the C Cups

  A week had passed since the judge ordered us to visit our father, and my mom moved us into an apartment a few doors down from Granny. Being close to the university made it easier for her to get to class on time, but I didn’t understand how every day Mom could walk down the very street where she’d lain bleeding only a few months before.

  I guess being close to Granny was more important to her than I knew. Great-granny was like a mother to my mom, always there when her own mother was not.

  Visiting day arrived and Dad’s red truck rounded the corner, the horn blaring. He wasn’t allowed to come up to the door, though, which was the only thing that dense judge had done right. When my sisters and I had discussed our impending doom, we decided not to bring up the horrible fight unless he did. I wanted to make it go away, and my only hope was that Dad would see he’d made a terrible mistake. But he never said he had, and although I slowly got over the idea that he was going to murder us, I was still pretty rattled by the fact that a crazy man would have control over us for a weekend.

  Lorraine was the brave one. She volunteered to sit next to him on the way to his house. I was in awe of her fearlessness. Mom watched us through the window as we walked toward the truck. I tried to stay calm. He would never get away with killing us all, I reasoned with myself. Besides, Mom wouldn’t let us go if it wasn’t all right, would she?

  I felt my chest heaving as I watched my feet move along the walkway to the truck’s door. Panicking when I saw his face, I commanded my feet to run away, but they defied me. Before I was able to force them into submission we were sitting in the long front seat of Dad’s truck.

  A row of eight little hands grasped the dashboard and I hoped my sisters wouldn’t notice that my knuckles were the whitest. Silently, I cursed the idiot who’d invented trucks with no backseats.

  As we rolled out of the driveway, country music played on the radio station, my dad laughed often, and he acted like nothing had happened. I felt like we had entered the Twilight Zone, and all we could do was sit quietly, not say a word, and speak only when spoken to.

  From then on, we stayed with Dad every weekend.

  What had been “our house” was now “Dad’s house,” and “visiting” it was weird. The pink piggy bank still lived in the corner by the front door, but that was the only thing that hadn’t changed. There was a new carpet, a game room, and a brand-new pool table. The place was a mansion compared with Mom’s one-bedroom apartment. At Daddy’s, we each shared a bedroom with our designated sibling: Lorraine and I slept in the upstairs front bedroom and the little girls were down the hall. Dad’s room was in the front, open to the stairway so there was no way downstairs except through his space.

  Luckily, Dad slept like a log and his thunderous snores shook the whole house.

  I loved prowling around that big house after everyone had gone to sleep. I fixed snacks in the kitchen and took strolls on the front lawn wearing the big boots that Dad always left by the door near the patio. My mom used to say, “Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes,” so I strolled the yard in Dad’s boots, trying to feel like him. I wanted to understand what he had done and forgive him, but I couldn’t get the image of Mom’s bloody face out of my head.

  For years I would replay our first evening back together, amazed at the things he never did or said. I just couldn’t figure out how he could fix a barbecue as a special treat for us yet say nothing about the beating he gave our mother. Didn’t he realize how frightening that was? I was sure he saw me eyeing him at supper, searching his face for signs of remorse, waiting for him to say he was sorry. The words never came out of his mouth, but I thought I saw regret in his eyes. I just didn’t know what he regretted. Was he sorry he had beaten a woman? Or sorry we saw him do it? I couldn’t read his mind. Where was Great-granny when I needed her? Maybe her mental powers could give me the answers I so desperately needed.

  It was hard to hate my father He was my father and I needed him. I wanted to forget, so I made myself think of all the things I liked about him. He was the Julia Child of Weirton. A fabulous cook, he filled our weekend visits with homecooked pierogies, sweet cakes, and stews. The kitchen was the only place I ever felt at ease as a child. Food was like a tunnel straight to Dad’s heart and he was kindest when covered in flour with a piecrust in his hand. Soon I was promoted to his assistant, since I spent so much time in the kitchen by his side. I loved rolling up the cabbage, and together we created the perfect blend of spicy-sweet cabbage rolls.

  These good times would later confuse me, as it was always feast or famine for us girls. We were stuffed to the gills on the weekends and hungry the rest of the week. Dad seemed blind to the fact that Mom never had enough money to give us the things we needed, and seeing our father live comfortably while we struggled every day made me resent him.

  Eventually the weekends blended together as time began to heal our wounds on the inside as well as the outside. Mom’s face was glowing again. That horrible day at the hospital became a distant memory. Finally, it was as if the doors to our prison had been unlocked. We were pardoned, and I was allowed to be happy again.

  We spent many Sunday afternoons digging in the huge garden Dad had planted in front of his house. We grew tomatoes, corn, lettuce, and radishes. My sisters and I picked the fresh vegetables to make big salads for dinner, and Dad gave us bags of tomatoes to take home. When it was hot, Dad took us swimming at his brother’s house, where we played in Uncle Johnny’s pool while the grown-ups drank beer under the sun. We rode our bikes, played cops and robbers by Granny Kuzma’s creek, and I even snuck Granny a beer now and then.

  Those are the early days I remember most fondly as a kid: hanging out on Granny’s front porch, listening to crickets sing, and going about our business of growing up.

  Lorraine and I developed early. We were nine and ten when Dad started talking about our “blossoming,” and it turned him into a maniacal clipper of sex advice columns. His favorite was “Dear Abby,” which we secretly nicknamed “Dear Old Daddy.” It was embarrassing to be constantly greeted with clippings about young girls who get pregnant. Dad referred to these girls as “whores,” “bad girls” who got what they deserved. I didn’t understand why my father was so obsessed with this subject. Did he think I was in danger of becoming one of “those” girls? I became resentful of my ever-changing body. “Play and you’re gonna pay,” he’d ramble, or “only whores make out with boys” or “boys only want one thing.” But I had no idea what the “one thing” was.

  Word on the school playground was that if a boy gave a girl kisses “down there” a baby was made
. I wondered what it would feel like to get kissed on my panties, and fantasized about my new friend, Ricky, doing the kissing. He was an older boy I’d met a few months earlier. I’d been walking to the birthday party of a girlfriend from school when he did a few laps around me on his ten-speed bike. I was ten, he was sixteen, and he was funny, making me laugh by pretending to fall from his bike.

  Christmas in Mingo Junction, age ten.

  The collection of Traci Lords

  When I arrived at the party I told all my girlfriends that I had a secret admirer. I didn’t even know his name, but I was sure he liked me. It made me feel wanted, and as I walked home that evening, I heard the clicking of his bike behind me. He stopped, got off, and pushed his bike as we walked together. He told me that his name was Ricky and that he saw me at the park up the street all the time. He liked the way I wore my hair. I’d never had a boy speak to me like that before and was flush with excitement. As we neared my house I got nervous that my sisters might see us together and report to Dad, so I told him I had to go as I raced off, promising to meet him on the swings in the park the following afternoon.

  Ricky looked young for sixteen, and he wasn’t much taller than I was. He had no guy friends and got teased constantly because of his height. He told me how the girls at school were constantly mean to him too, and how bad it made him feel, but none of that mattered anymore because now he had me.

  I couldn’t wait for the school bell to ring every day so I could see Ricky, and we had so much fun playing together. We wrestled in the tall grass and he always let me win, and we collected lightning bugs in a big jar. They were our candlelight, he said, and I thought that was so funny. When he pushed me on the swings, I soared so high I thought I was going to fly away. I screamed and laughed until tears ran down my face, and the pure exhilaration of it all set me free.

  Through him, I was learning how to be fearless, just like my sister Lorraine.