The Friend Who Got Away

Soo...I’ve been cleaning house today...almost threw out this story I wrote for a web-site called “The Friend Who Got Away”. They posted it, it was probably my first piece of “published” writing...thought I’d share:

The Friend Who Got Away

She was my hero, saving me from the school bully who’s self-appointed job was to intimidate the new kid at school. We were in second grade. Jenny was beautiful, with crystal blue eyes and high cheekbones and blond wavy hair (the kind of fresh beauty you’d expect to find in Southern California, not in our little Oregon ‘burb). But there she was, yelling at the girl who had just pushed me down, “If you ever touch her again, I’ll kill you!” WOW! At age 8 you just didn’t say those things.

Turns out she had heard a lot of those kinds of things in her short life. Her daddy drank, her mother drank and took loads of Valium. She had three very-much older stepbrothers (one of them was still living at home) at one stepsister who was already married and living far away when I met her. The brother at home was either very kind to her (when her mom was lucid) or very very cruel to her (when her mother was incapacitated by drugs and alcohol). She told me once that when two of her brothers got together, they put her in the drainage pipe in the road and stood on the grate so she couldn’t get out! That wasn’t the worst of it. Years later, (when the brother who had lived at home when she was very young) was arrested and convicted of molesting his stepchildren, she told me she remembered him molesting her too.

What I remembered was that most of the time she wanted to go to my house after school. And never hers. I didn’t know why. But as we got older, and braver I suppose, we would go to her house sometimes. It was always dark inside and if her mom and dad were home, they were inevitably fighting. Her mom, in her drunken stupor would yell things like “If you ever touch her again, I’ll kill you!” and then she would pass out. I had no idea who “her” was. I assumed he had a girlfriend. It was years later when Jenny and I tried to sneak a smoke from her father’s pack of Camels that I understood. When he caught us, he took his belt to Jenny’s behind until she bled. I cried all the way home. Jenny didn’t come to school for the rest of the week, and when I saw her the following Monday I knew better than to bring up the awful thing I had witnessed; she adored her father. He died that same year, and I remember being relieved, almost happy. Of course, to Jenny, I showed only sadness and compassion.

About that same time, Jenny found Vivarin. And she shared! And it was fun! We’d tickle each other’s scalps during class and zip to our locker during lunch to re-dose ourselves. On the weekends we’d combine speed and alcohol and we’d spend our time chasing boys and sneaking out of our houses and going to forbidden parties, each telling our parents that we were spending the night at the other’s house.

One night Jenny decided she was going to have sex with a boy she didn’t even really like. I was dumbfounded. Until that time we had been inseparable, but I began to be a bit jealous of this boy and was a bit freaked out that she was having s-e-x. We stopped talking for a year. The next year I had a boyfriend and I realized; Jenny had always been just a bit more “advanced” than I was, and we made up.

After graduation we moved into a crummy little apartment together. My mom swore to disown me if I moved out before I was 18, but when we moved in I was a month away from my 18th birthday; Jenny became my only family. A month later, we found a “care package” of cleaning supplies, food, and basic staples on our doorstep. My mother had forgiven us. Jenny and I both worked downtown but had different schedules. Mine was nine to five. Hers varied. We were, of course, broke. I still had the same boyfriend from high scool. Jenny’s bedroom seemed to have a revolving door and the boys she brought home always seemed like jerks to me.

One particular afternoon I arrived home to hear arguing, then muffled tears, then voices rising from Jenny’s bedroom, which turned in to the sounds of someone being hit. I was mortified! Her latest boyfriend was beating her up! I couldn’t stand it and my gut took over; I should have called the cops, but instead I burst in to Jenny’s room and screamed as loud as I could “If you ever touch her again, I’ll kill you!, get out of my house and don’t come back!”

A week later, she invited him back into her life. He said he was sorry, he said he loved her. I was astonished. But she seemed happy and what I wanted more than anything was for her to be happy, so I didn’t protest, but he was not allowed to come back to our apartment. I felt good about setting the boundaries, but she was irritated. Shortly after that she moved in with him, and I had nowhere else to go, so I moved home. When that jerk dumped her she begged me to move back in with her and I did, but I also made sure I had other roommates so I wouldn’t get stranded again.

Fast forward through a pregnancy (hers), a coerced marriage (yeah, hers), a big white wedding (mine), a mother’s funeral (hers), two divorces (ours), two remarriages (ours). Ironically we both remarried and both husbands names were Dave. But our Daves were very different men. Hers was a mormon and when she married him I was not allowed to come. Mine was a party-boy and when I married him, she called crying and apologizing that she had not come, something had come up and she was moving (suddenly) from Washington to Alabama. She told me that she felt trapped and controlled by Dave and that he made all the decisions and would not allow her to come to California for her best friend’s wedding.

Fortunately, because I traveled alot for business, I was able to arrange a side trip to Alabama a year later. Good lord, she was a mess. Her second pregnancy had been incredibly difficult, her stepdaughter had a life threatening health condition and she desperately missed her first child, who she had left in Washington with his pot-head father . She herself had been diagnosed with Crone’s disease, and was going through testing to see if she had Lupus (her stepsister went blind with the disease). Her husband was seemingly oblivious to the challenges she was facing as a stay-at-home mother; he just went to work for ten to twelve hours a day, and expected to come home to a hot meal. Jenny was trying to be a good Mormon wife, and had learned to grind wheat into flour and churn milk into butter. She showed me their stockpile of supplies, and their shelter, should the apocalypse occur. It was pitiful to me. She lived in fear. Real, imagined, or otherwise.

I had tried so hard, over the years, to show her what “normal” was. I had given her my heart. I had given her my family. I would have given her my life, if that were possible. She was so beautiful, inside and out, and she deserved, like we all do, to be happy. I felt like I had failed her. I had no idea how useless all my efforts really were.

Over the years, Jenny and Dave moved about the country, supposedly because of his ladder-climbing, egocentric, selfishness. Finally after 15 years, Jenny and Dave moved to Southern California, and she and I would get to actually spend time together. We were about to turn 40, and to be together to celebrate that milestone was a gift and a also a little bit dangerous. She came to visit in May and we got drunk, got high, and went to a concert. So harmless. We were acting like we were kids again, and it was a blast! We stayed up all night talking and looking at old yearbooks, scrapbooks, and pictures. Then in August I went to visit her and we repeated the activities of May. It was like old times, and she seemed to be so healthy and happy. A year later, all that changed.

Our close friend, one of our roomies from so long ago, was also turning 40. We decided to head to L.A. once again, to re-create days gone by. Only this time something went horribly wrong. When I arrived in L.A. Jenny was clearly agitated, driving eratically, she looked like hell and she was bitchy. I actually called our other friend to warn her. When Jenny saw me on the phone, she questioned me. ‘Who was I talking to? What did I tell her? Why did I need to cal her when “we” were supposed to spending this time together?’ She was completely unreasonable. We went to a concert that night, the three of us, and it got worse. Jenny spent most of the evening in the bathroom, distraught and consumed by paranoia that we were conspiring against her. We barely made it through the evening without a major crisis.

In the morning, as planned, we headed for San Diego. Only Jenny needed to go back to Orange County to get a prescription filled she supposedly just couldn’t live without. We obliged. She took her meds in the car, and we headed down the Pacific Coast Highway in our rented convertible, determined to put the previous night behind us and enjoy the rest of our holiday.

About an hour into the trip, I realized Jenny was no longer talking to us. I turned around to find her passed out. At one point, we stopped to eat, and I had to shake her and yell at her to get her to wake. By the time we arrived at the hotel in San Diego, we realized she was completely overdosed. We were about to call the ambulance, but she managed to pull herself together enough to get checked in to the hotel. That night, we were supposed to go out but Jenny was asleep again by 9 and my friend andI didn’t think we should leave her for too long. We went to get some dinner, and talk over the day’s events. When we arrived back in the room, Jenny was gone and so was most of our alcohol. We were worried sick, and pissed.

A few hours later Jenny showed up all teary eyed. Apparently her husband had called and said that he was divorcing her - just like that; while she was on vacation, with her friends, in San Diego. She said she wanted to go home to talk to him. We refused. None of us were in any condition to drive. I felt terrible about how my friend’s birthday celebration was turning in to such a bummer. The next day, we took her home. Her son was waiting for her, and while they waited for Dave to show up, they got high together. I was appalled. My other friend and I went to the airport to wait for our flights out of that nightmare!

The next day I get a phone call from Jenny saying she’s been thrown out of her house, and she's driving to Oregon and can she crash at my place (about half-way) on the way? Absolutely!

You see, in the interim, Dave and I had had a very long, revealing conversation about my best friend Jenny. Turns out that all these years she has been playing us against each other. Apparently the”party-girl” I once knew and loved had turned in to a junkie. And junkies will do anything, ANYTHING, to get their fix, cover their lies, and stay high. Jenny had been addicted to alcohol since high school, crack since Alabama, and OxyContin since it first appeared on the market in 1995. She told Dave that I am the one that gets her drugs when we get together, and she told me that Dave is the one responsible for her misery and all those radical cross-country moves.

In fact, the reason for the moves was because Dave has been rescuing her from crack houses, near arrests, prostitution, and financial ruin for the past 17 years. Every time they moved, and he switched jobs, it was because of her. And when she and I did get loaded together, she supplied the drugs. (I always wondered how she knew where to find the stuff. That is one of the awful things that goes through my mind when I think “I should have known. I should have seen it”.)

Her aches and pains are real, but exaggerated, and she has found multiple doctors to prescribe her the meds she needs to manage her pain and get her really, really wasted. She has stolen prescription drugs from church members, and tried to get a job as a housekeeper to gain access to homeowner’s medicine cabinets. Her Crone’s Disease may actually be her internal organs shutting down - a side-effect of addiction. Her teeth are falling out and her beautiful blond hair is kept very short to hide the fact that it too, is falling out.

So on the day that she called me crying that Dave threw her out of the house and she has nowhere to go, except back to Oregon, I have already spoken with an interventionist, a drug treatment program in Laguna Beach, an M.D., and Dave. We all agree that if we are to help her, we must intervene. When she comes to my house, my job will be to convince her that she’s dehydrated and get her to an emergency room. Once there, I will tell the hospital staff that she has threatened to kill herself. We will be able to get her committed and then, hopefully, into rehab.

So, while I wait for her to arrive at my house, I rehearse the scene over and over... But - Where is she? She should have been her by now! I call her cell phone, no answer. I try to get some sleep...where could she be? Has she already killed herself? Did she crash her car and she’s lying in a ditch somewhere?

In the morning, the phone rings; she ‘decided’ to just drive straight on through. I think, ‘she must have heard something in my voice! She must have known I was going to try to help her.' And she doesn’t want help. Not yet anyway. So much drama follows; the frantic phone calls, the pleas for money, the name-calling, the apologizing. But, the unchangeable end to this story is that she just doesn’t want help. She wants to be miserable. She believes that’s what she deserves because that’s all anybody (other than myself and my family) ever told her.

I have had, over the years, a lot of conflicting emotions about this friend. Mostly grief. I miss her so. And then I stop and think...How can I miss someone who wasn’t even the person they pretended to be? For 17 years, she has not been a friend to me. She has lied to me. She lied about me. So I grieve for 17 years of lost time, lost reality, little girls who grew up together, but never were the same.

I’ve tried to locate Jenny over the years through MySpace and Facebook, (her beautiful stepdaughter and I have been able to reconnect). At one point she was living in Louisiana, but the fact is, as of today, I don’t know where she is, or even, if she’s alive... My friend really did get away. And it breaks my heart.