Acquired Daughter

Note: refers to sexual violence, suicide, mental health issues, and contains normally explicit language but no explicit descriptions of sex or violence.

Acquired Daughter

“Nice day for skipping school.”

“I am not skipping school.”

“So, why’d you hike all the way up here instead of joining the gathering behind the amphitheater fogging away this fine Friday afternoon?”

“I’m Rhona. You didn’t ask. Why are you here?”

“I teach at the college. I come here Fridays because it’s high up. I’m into views and swings and drinking bad wine and reveling in solitude after vegetating in a library all week with assorted assholes in my field who are no worse than me.”

“What’s your field, then?”

“Deranged teenagers.”

“I should teach that. If all you have to be is an asshole.”

“I lied. I’m in deconstructive psychology. So. What would Mommy think of you hanging out with a strange forty‑year‑old guy in an empty park during hours of mandatory public education?”

“How strange? If you’re an alcoholic perv, she’d yell at me for about nine seconds. Then she’d beg you to ravage her bed. Was gonna say, I went to a psychologist once. Was having problems at home with Mom and her man. They all agreed! Girl’s seriously fucked.”

“Let me guess. Just a wild, stupid guess. Mom’s alcoholic perv was coming on to you.”

“Three years ago, Mom’s boyfriend told me when he was wasted, which was always, ‘Just call me Daddy!’ Do you mind?”

“I smoked all that shit I wanted to back in the Sixties. I have a fully developed, mature, cerebral cortex. I stick to liver‑rot now. So, Mom’s main man. . .”

“Was always trying to do it with twelve‑year‑old me, like you said. I told Mom, like the household idiot. She came unglued. I got sent to the ward for a month.”

“You mean just like that? This is the Nineties. They’re supposed to be believing the kid these days.”

“Not this kid. See, Mom’s smart. Told them I was a crazy doped‑out shoplifting bitch, a lying little nympho, all of which I am sometimes, except for the last one. She gave them these notes I wrote to a guy in my class I was hot for. Pretty disgusting stuff, I confess. So that proved I had all these sex fantasies about her old man, Pee-tey. Gross thought. Anyway, Mom adores those types. Got a worse one now.”

“What became of old Pee-tey?”

“Dead. Drunkass driving. Smacked a Jolly‑Dayz ice cream truck on New Year’s Day, doin’ one‑oh‑five down the Arroyo from the Rose Bowl. Half hour later he woulda been in the Parade. Mom picks ‘em.”

“Cried much?”

“Sobbed. Threw myself on his grave. Did not. Fucking hated him. I was glad they had to bury him in chunks.”

“Let me understand this. You told Mom the love of her sheets was grabbing at your twelve‑year‑old ass, you got sent to the doc, did your thirty days, and now it’s happening again?”

“As in, happened last night. Mom’s new guy, he’s always remarking on my boobs, such as they are, trying to walk in on me in the bathroom, getting handsy, shit like that. Nothing new in my little house in the neighborhood. ‘Cept this guy’s evil. Last night, I was asleep, felt something grab me. I woke up, my shirt was being ripped off. Really rough. He was holding me down hard, getting a hand down there. He reeked. I screamed. He goes, ‘Cooze, shut up.’ Like that, real soft and mean. I saw a knife in his belt. If Mom hadn’t turned on the light…

“Of course, he lied. Said he was just playin’, no big thing. At five in the morning in her little daughter’s bed? C’mon! What fucktard mother would buy that? But you gotta understand Mom, she lives on her own rock in space. She ate his lies up.

“So-o-oo, this morning I stuff my daypack, I drop it out my window, crawl out an’ hide it in the bushes by the park. Mom uses her purse as a pillow, so I don’t have money. Went to school, went to the store, met you, here I am. The complete mini-series starring Rhona.

“Been a great life. Be a fucking shame to die now.”

“See, when I was twelve—many, many years ago, that was my free love year. I had this see-through blouse I wore to school all the time. No bra. I even wore it to the Pasadena Art Museum. But I had nothing to see, see? It was all like that, free love in my head, bad notes I wrote.

“Anyway, when I was thirteen, I decided okay, so much for my free love year, this is my drug year. Trouble megashit. Two, three busts, possession, shoplifting, skipping school, bad attitude . . .

“So, I got to meet all the counselors, social folks, probation guys. They locked me up. Nobody ever asks my opinion. They’ve all decided how little Rhony is. What I think— now that I’m old—big fifteen last week, not that anyone noticed—is, what’s gonna happen now?

“What scares me, I fucking hate everything. I hate men, my mom, I hate myself, I just fucking hate the world. Mom’s new guy isn’t your grope-ass drunk like old Petey an’ the crowd. Last night wasn’t just a little feel-up-the-kid scene. He’d hurt me. He’d kill me.”

“What did you do on the big fifteenth no one noticed?”

“In the riots? I threw a big chunk of cement through the window of Ardelle’s Thread Spread, by that crappy plaza up on Colorado right before Glendale. You can see it now. In the window, with a reward note stuck on it.”

“Because you care about police brutality and social injustice and racial minorities, some version of which… what are you, anyway?”

“I’m purple, okay? I don’t know what I am!…”

“Tomorrow Girl?”

“Um. Okay. Anyway, Ardelle’s a beeyotch to me and my girls because we can’t afford her three-bill clothes. She shoved us out. I mean, it was my birthday. We were just looking. So, we got stoked in the park, we listened to the radio, ‘specially about Frederick’s of Hollywood getting trashed. Big light went on, we paid a visit to Ardelle. Goodbye glass.”

“Rhona, why’d you trust me? I mean, I’m old, I’m a guy, how do you know—”

“Becaaaause, if you were gonna pull perv shit, you’d’ve started in the park! You didn’t do a damn thing. Face it, you don’t come across as a guy hot to rape little girls.”

“Wow! Was it because I didn’t go, look at those big brown eyes, those eighth-grade tits, that swishy little skirt? C’mon. Some middle-school nymphet wants to jump my old bones, I’d be flattered, but I wouldn’t send her to a shrink. I’d take her to get glasses.”

“Black eyes. Ninth-grade tits. You were different, that’s all, helping me out, not trying to make something out of it. I’m used to guys acting all weird, not normal—”

“Because normal is weird. Dad‑types rip your clothes off, angling to stab you, Mom cares more about knifer-rapists than her daughter, you get slammed, lied about, caged up by a bunch of social-jerkers and psycho-jailists who’re supposed to protect you. That’s the plan to make you Orange Blossom Queen?”

“There’s never been a fucking plan. Monday this happens, Tuesday that happens, dot dot dot, so sorry to bring up this bummer shit, Mommy, but your lover-man grabbed my ass and tried to cut me up—”

“I get it. So, what’re you gonna do? About the guy from hell, the mom, life? I know, that’s an essay question. Take your sweetass time.”

“I don’t need time. I’d murder him with a rusty razor in his sleep. When he’s really, really drunk. Who cares about Mom—she doesn’t care about me. Maybe someday I’ll be the shrink that saves kids. Right now, only thing I can think of is running away. Squat on the Boulevard. Do what I have to.

“I am so scared.”

“Rhona, you really believe your mom doesn’t care about you?”

“I fucking know she doesn’t. Let me explain this again, an’ try to keep up. I’ve run away before. She didn’t even call the cops. When I hide out or get locked up, she an’ her Rick‑the‑dick split for Vegas. Mom was gonna name me Rhonda, but she was stoned blind for the big event. That tell you anything?”

“Sorry, girl. You sleep okay? How are you feeling?”

“Like I look. Like shit.”

“We need a plan. We can’t tell your mom, she’s enemy. We can’t call the cops, they’ll call the child abuse folks. We can’t call the child abuse folks, they’ll haul out The File and lock you up in some hole or pack you off to foster care, maybe six months, a year, whatever Medi-Cal’ll buy. Are there any people you can think of who’d help?”

“Yes. No.”

“All right, here’re the options. You keep quiet, get sent home and raped and cut up. Or, you can tell the social workers what you told me and see if these highly-trained professionals finally catch your drift.”

“So you believe me.”

“If I believed you broadcast sex fantasies about old guys, you think I would have let you stay here on the couch last night?”

“True. Hadn’t thought of that. You’re way foxier than Petey, the human prune. But as a sex fantasy? — no offense…”

“I’m foxier than char-broiled roadkill? Thank you, Ms. Juvenile Delinquent. Ms. Ninth Grade Youth‑at‑Risk.”

“Why don’t you adopt me?”

“There’s a plan! They’d never let a single man adopt a fifteen year‑old girl. They know the Peteys and Ricks‑the‑Dick your mom trolled aren’t the only ones out there.”

“But I get it from Daddy at home while Mommy washes down Jäger bombs on the patio, nobody gives a ratshit!”

“Look. I don’t see a crazy lying bitch. You walked halfway across town to give me back eleven cents. You got unlucky. You’re young, you’re a girl. Your color, whatever it is, wins no points. You had a record. Your mom knew just the way to convince them you made it up.

“All that would fuck anyone up. But they don’t take a kid seriously until she acts unfucked. It’s that simple, that wrong, and that’s the end of the speech.”

“But that is the problem. I am a crazy little bitch. I lie when I have to. I’m so pissed at what I live with, I even thought of getting knocked up just to get away. But you’re not scaring me or making me lie. So, I’m not.”

“Rhona, I’d keep you with me if I could. Let you finish school. But they’d catch up to us sooner or later. Then I’m looking at jail, you’re headed back to juvey. Our best shot is to go City Hall. Make your case. Maybe you’ll score a richie foster home in San Marino, Altadena, up San Rafael. If they believe you, Mom’ll get the riot act. Psycho-killer Rick will probably get an ugly plea bargain followed by ninety days and some sit-in-a-circle time.

“Another little matter. If you don’t make your case, Rick the Knife will sure as hell give it to some other kid.”

“Thanks for that! One life of never‑ending shit, coming right up! Now, later, this way, that way. . . Just pick, little girl.”

“Were things this bad when you were a kid?”

“Some PBS show called the Sixties a dark time to grow up. That’s about right. Not the stoned‑out love‑in Woodstock bullshit people romanticize. In ‘68, when I got out of high school, it was assassinations, riots, cities burning up, 1‑A draft notices in my box, kids killed in Vietnam. None of it made any sense to me.

“I hitchhiked out from Oklahoma to California when I was seventeen. Sure, some of that time was fun, passing joints in hot springs ‘way up Big Sur or Sespe, living inside our heads and all that, but most of it was scary. The thing I understand about your story is fear. I was always thinking, ‘Why do adults hate me? Why are they trying to kill me?’

“Now we ex‑pothead acid‑tripping free‑lovers out to fuck the Establishment to save our worthless hides have grown into the most moralistic money‑grubbing kid‑bashing establishment‑types ever. We stoned ourselves silly in the Summer of Love, now we’re going to throw you out of school, kick your ass and call it ‘tough love’? I could rave about that all day. Might just.”

“Stop. I get it. You ever drop acid?”

“I did everything else, but I was gutless about acid.”

“I did, once. Scared crap out of me. Saw this desert sandstorm howling, burning up trees, cracking walls, leaving bodies lying around like they’d been there a hundred years. An’ there were these . . . things outside, dark dead things, making noises like. . . Went on forever. Anyway, when I got done screaming, Xany and girlfriends told me acid’s rad, I’d just had a bad trip. But I know it wasn’t that. It was letting my mind say something scary to me. Does that sound weird?”

“No. Yes.”

“Yesterday I had a couple flashbacks I thought about when I was up half the night peeing my guts out from all that water you made me drink. Something about knowing Mom didn’t want me, an’ getting raped, dropping acid, seeing the desert rolling over everything, all that shit. So maybe you kids, with that war, being hated, doing all those drugs and free love and radical things, maybe you scare yourselves now when you remember it. Maybe that’s why you’re scared of us.

“No! I don’t trust the fucked‑up establishment, whatever you call it, one fucking bit to help a kid like me. Did you?”

“Yeah, that’s us. Scared of ourselves, everything you say, worse. Flower child withered. Hippie morphed into Yuppie. New Age is Screw Age. My generation started right. But we lost it.

“Get off your Nintendo ass. Do something.”

“You don’t have overmany friends? Like a girlfriend, maybe?”

“More solitude for my post-evolutionary interior life.”

“Oh, sure. Are you telling me how life’s a lovely bitch? Am I bothering your whatever-shit interior life much? You, I don’t get. You’re a loner type who wants to drink his life away. ‘K, that part I do get. Now, you meet me. I know what I am. I’m one big crap-mess that never ends. Why didn’t you just walk, hell, run, the fuck away from my ass?”

“Rhona, what do you think I was doing in the park when you strolled up out of nowhere?”

“You were sprawled in a swing. You had a daypack with a green bottle sticking out. No, I noticed that later. What I noticed right then was you looked so damn… I donno. Beyond everything.”

“‘Beyond’? Go there!”

“Like if you had a gun…”

“Yes! To stick to technical fact, my preferred method is jumping off the Arroyo Bridge. Spend my last seconds on this mortal coil flying, splat, leave the maximum technicolor for the ingrates to clean up. What you couldn’t see was that I’m chickenshit, years away from ever doing anything that actually hurts. That’s why the green bottle and writing implements, to get me through another day, as if finishing my dumbass dissertation was going to move the world the tiniest millimeter.”

“Wow. Your life is so hard, there in your university. I feel so bad for you.”

“Screw your sarcasm. I know I’m a phony. The worst, an academic fraud. I study adolescents and write deranged‑teenager papers. I never wanted to actually meet one—”

“Fuck you all! You tell me what to do, then! They didn’t care whether I got stabbed! I could have AIDS! I could be fucking dead, dead, dead. They. Don’t. Care! You tell me where I can go where this shit does not fucking happen!

“Before I met you, I was gonna crash in the park. You seem like what I thought a dad would be, ‘cept you’re not forever on my ass about dope and drinking and the way I talk.”

“You bet. Let me dish out sermons on clean living. Rhona, I tried scheming. We could buy fake I.D.’s, get you through school somewhere till you’re eighteen. But that’s lying. And you haven’t done anything wrong. Unless we’re going to hide out in a cave in the Mojave chewing ocotillo leaves for the next thirty years rereading Helter Skelter, we have to trust the mysterious ways of The System its wonders to perform.”

“Yeah. I vote Mojave.”

“So, today our lives end?”

“They do.”

“We go City Hall?”

“You do. We do.”

“We meet again if it all goes to shit?”

“When it all goes to shit.”

“Um… Acquired Dad… don’t jump off a bridge, k?”

“I promise, Acquired Daughter.”

“See you June 4^th.”

“June 4^th. Pick you up at the Reseda High side door.”

“Right before the world ends.”