CHAPTER 3

HORROR, HOLIDAYS, AND HORMONES

Toward the end of the ’50s, when a little more money started coming in, Daddy embraced the latest craze and built a fallout shelter under our house. When the threat of the Cold War eased, he expanded it to a “rec” room, decorated with a fake leather couch and matching chairs featuring bucking broncs stitched on the seat backs and wooden wagon-wheel arms. The new wallpaper had a lovely cowboys-massacring-Indians motif. The floor was an array of multicolored individual linoleum tiles, and of course there was the all-important bar that my parents had adorned with bathroom-style pink mosaic tiles and lined with shelves stocked with every imaginable type of booze.

Liquor was a big deal in my family. Many of my relatives were alcoholics, but nobody called them that back then. They just liked to drink. When we went with my parents for family drives in the mountains on weekends, which we were frequently forced to do, it was normal for Daddy to have me drink the top third out of his Coca-Cola so he could fill it with Jim Beam while careening down the mountainside on cruise control. I couldn’t wait for him to fling the empty bottle from the window, because I knew what was coming—more Coke! I love those cute emails that used to circulate on the Internet about how great it was to grow up in the ’50s, before there were rules about drinking and driving or wearing seat belts. It’s a miracle anyone survived.

Beginning in junior high, because my room was in the basement right next to the rec room, which gave me easy access to the bar, I took a cue from my dad and uncles and used the contents to regularly top off my orange juice or soda pop.

My parents were very big on entertaining and threw lots of parties, inviting relatives and my dad’s coworkers. My mom rarely drank alcohol, but at these parties, she let her hair down. I wish she had drunk more because she was always so much nicer after she’d had a Tom Collins or two. They laughed, danced, smoked, and drank long after we kids were sent to bed. I can still hear the sounds of Nat King Cole’s “Stardust” wafting up from the rec room through the heater vents as I drifted off to sleep.

The holidays were almost always a good time for me and my family. At Christmastime, my mom wore her “outside face” because there was always company around. As far as I could tell, she had two completely different and separate faces: her mean “inside face,” reserved for us kids and Daddy; and her nice outside face that she presented to most relatives and all strangers. People were always telling me how much fun she was to be around and how lucky I was to have her for a mom, which confused the hell out of me. Were they were talking about the same person I lived with?

Christmas Eve festivities were usually held at our house and relatives would come from all over the Midwest. Because Grandpa Peterson was Swedish, we always celebrated Christmas with spicy sausages called potatiskorv (or “potato carve” as we called it), a long, coiled sausage that we cut into bite-size pieces and speared with toothpicks. The main course was lutfisk, creamed dry cod served over boiled potatoes. I was the only kid in the family who would eat the stuff.

My sisters and I loved Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We were allowed to eat whatever we wanted and didn’t have to clean up afterward because there were so many aunts there to do the job, and my mother was distracted cooking, serving, and gossiping, so she paid no attention to us at all.

I remember only one bad Christmas, and that was when I was five and we still lived in Randolph. Mother and Daddy had been running around the house all day, cleaning like maniacs and making last-minute preparations before the onslaught of relatives began. The highlight of Christmas Eve was always Santa showing up with his big pillowcase full of toys for me, my sister, and my cousins. Santa always knew our names and exactly what was on our Christmas lists. He always seemed vaguely familiar, but it took me a few years to realize he was really just one of my uncles dressed in a cheap Santa suit and fake beard.

I’d been waiting weeks and weeks for this night and had been as good as I could stand to be, just so Santa didn’t pass us by. I’d made my list and asked him for a Terri Lee doll. My parents had gone to great lengths to get a Christmas tree. I stood before it, gazing up at the star on the top, and I remember thinking it was the biggest, most beautiful tree I’d ever seen—and it was in our living room! My mother had spent much of the day hanging the brand-new, shiny ornaments on the tree and stringing the multicolored bulbs. Melody and I weren’t allowed to do that part because the balls were so fragile, but we did get to toss sparkling silver tinsel on the branches after the ornaments were hung.

As my mother put the finishing touches on the tree, I heard a plaintive “meow” outside the front door and looked out the window to see my poor kitty-cat standing on the stoop in the snow, looking pathetic. I opened the door a crack, just enough to let him in and keep the cold air out, and he slipped into our tiny living room. “Don’t let that filthy cat in!” Mother snapped.

The fat, gray-striped tomcat skittered across the newly waxed wood floor and made straight for the Christmas tree. He batted a paw at a sparkly red ornament. Mother hollered, “Get away from that tree, you damned cat!” She rushed forward and just missed grabbing hold of his tail. He darted under the branches and before I could register what was happening, he shot up the trunk of the tree to the very tippy top and clung there for an endless second. Mother stood stock still, her hands covering her mouth. Her hair was still up in rollers and wrapped in a scarf that had little pictures of red and blue sailboats scattered across it. She wore her handmade turquoise apron, the one with the rows of rickrack, tied over her red, short-sleeved “Christmas dress.” Time seemed to stand still as the late afternoon light reflected off the snow and bathed the living room in an eerie, bluish glow.

The presents Melody and I bought with our allowance at the Woolworths dime store in Manhattan for aunts, uncles, and cousins were tucked under the tree on the candy cane–striped tree skirt my mother had made. A lone strand of silver tinsel draped itself along the edge of our big, oval rag rug. For a moment, the room was dead silent, except for the hum of the furnace droning in the background.

Crash! Down came the cat, the tree, the ornaments, the lightbulbs, and the tinsel. I held my breath as I looked from my mother’s face to the mess of tangled branches and broken glass on the floor. “That’s it!” Mother shrieked. “Christmas is cancelled!” She stormed down the hall and a moment later the bedroom door slammed so hard the floor reverberated under my feet.

I have absolutely no recollection of what happened after that, whether Christmas went on that year or not, just the vivid memory of that moment and the aching feeling in the pit of my stomach as I pictured Santa Claus flying over our house without stopping. And it was all my fault.

My parents were hard workers and extremely upwardly mobile, so they were always able to come up with new resources for making money. Daddy went to people’s houses at night after work to repair, or sometimes repossess, sewing machines, washers, dryers, and vacuum cleaners, and my mom opened a day-care center in our home. During my grade-school years, in addition to my baby sister, we had anywhere from three to five screaming infants at our house every weekday. This led to me putting off having a child until I was forty-three.

With not only my mom, but several crying babies at home, I stayed away as much as possible. I usually went to my best friend Marilyn’s house, right across the back alley. She was the first “latchkey” kid I’d ever encountered, and I thought it was really neat that both her parents worked out of the house, because that meant we had free rein until they got home at night. It was like living an exciting scene from one of our favorite books, Lord of the Flies.

We could pretty much do whatever we wanted without getting yelled at, like create science experiments using chemicals from under the kitchen sink, take off all our clothes and play nudist colony just like in the magazines we’d found under her dad’s bed, or just peel off our unlimited scabs and add them to the extensive collection we kept hidden in a milk bottle in the pantry. With the money Marilyn “borrowed” from her mom’s savings jar, we bought our favorite snacks: various flavors of Gerber baby food. Our favorite toys were thermometers, which we bought and broke open so we could play with those fascinating little silver balls that ran every which way—m ercury—h ellooooo?!

At my house you ate whatever my mother put on your plate, whether you wanted it or not, and stayed in your chair until you finished every last bite. (I once refused to eat something—I think it was liver and onions—and woke up the next morning still sitting at the table when it was time to go to school.) When I got the lucky opportunity to have dinner at Marilyn’s, I couldn’t believe that each person was asked whether they’d like a particular dish and how much!

On Halloween, we were allowed to create a haunted house in her basement and invite all the trick-or-treaters in to roam through the darkened hallways and sit in an “electric chair” (a vibrating massage cot), dig their hands into the guts of a recently departed convict (a bowl of spaghetti), and hold his eyeballs in their hands (peeled grapes).

I yearned for adventure and spent a lot of time in my head creating elaborate fantasies. Marilyn and I referred to each other as Nyliram and Ardnassac (our names spelled backward, in case you hadn’t figured that out) and spent our summers with the other neighborhood kids in the alleys, streets, and creeks that were the perfect setting for bringing these fantasies to life. For months, we played “flying horses,” inspired by the movie Fantasia, building large nests out of sticks and leaves down by the creek. We staged elaborate circuses for the neighborhood kids and charged admission, of course, and with her mom’s eight-millimeter camera, we made movies that we played backward, so we appeared to be superheroes, able to leap up into trees or magically produce food from our mouths.

Nyliram and I also collected Breyer scale model horses. She had many more than I did because her older sister, Corliss, was already off at college, so she was treated like a spoiled only child. Later on, our obsession with horses paid off. We said to hell with the toy horses and made up our minds that we wanted the real thing. Marilyn’s parents got her a big, gray Appaloosa she named Blue, and, after much begging and expressly against my mother’s wishes, Daddy bought me a beautiful buckskin Indian pony I named Apache. From then on, no matter what the weather, the two of us spent our afternoons and weekends on Blue and Apache exploring the nearby mountain trails. We joined an equestrian drill team, got to ride in a Pikes Peak or Bust parade, and participated in gymkhanas, practicing relay and barrel racing. My passion for horses kept me sane through my preteen years. Whenever things got too intense at home, I could always jump on Apache and take off for the hills.

Thanks to Nyliram’s influence, my favorite pastime became reading. I loved books—all kinds of books, but especially ones about animals. We spent as much time as we could at the city library, checking out the maximum number of books allowed and carting them home. Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little were favorites, and we were both especially obsessed with books about horses: Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague, National Velvet. When I wasn’t riding, books were my salvation, my soother, my escape from reality.

My pink cat-eye glasses with the rhinestones on the corners helped make me an exceptionally homely kid. Throughout grade school, my mom sewed all my clothes using Butterick and McCall’s patterns, keeping me in “jumpers” and pinafores with crinoline petticoats that stuck straight out from my skinny body. It didn’t help that she forced me to have regular Toni home permanents so that my hair looked like a tight, frizzy ball of yarn. All that, combined with my scars, made me lovable to no one but Daddy.

Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants to school in those days, making for a frigid hike through the snow in winter with bare legs. By the time I reached school, my legs were red and chapped from the cold and I had to dig the icy slush out of the tops of my shoes and “anklets.” I was sent home one particularly snowy day because I’d worn ski pants under my dress. It’s the one time in my childhood I remember Mother standing up for me. She stormed into Ivywild and went crazy on the principal’s ass. From then on I was allowed to wear pants to school under my dress, as long as I took them off when I arrived. Stretchy ski pants in bright primary colors with little stirrups to hold them down were all the rage at the time, so I felt not only warm, but fashionable.

Other than Nyliram, I didn’t have many friends in grade school. I was actually put in the “smart” class along with her and Kathy Mitten, the school’s genius nerd, which made me even more of a pariah. The two most popular girls, Jinda Norris and Alice Spencer, invited me to their “pajama parties” a few times, where I felt strange and out of place. But when they’d put on a record like Leader of the Pack or Sugar Shack and I danced the way I’d learned from watching American Bandstand with Jeannie, I could tell the girls were impressed.

I spent a lot of time during the summer break from grade school hanging out alone. Because my mother considered reading a waste of time, I had to find a hiding place to do it. I spent endless hours up in the big elm tree in our front yard, reading the Superman comics and Mad magazines I’d bought with my allowance. Sitting on my butt reading or drawing was grounds for a slap in the face or a yank of my hair. As far as Mother was concerned, if I wasn’t cleaning something, I was a lazy bum.

On Saturday mornings my older cousin Danny took me to the movies. I’m not sure if he wanted company, or just felt sorry for me, but in any case, I couldn’t wait to go!

I loved the British humor in Carry On Sergeant, Carry On Nurse, and Carry On Teacher from the film series that played at the more “artsy” Peak Theater downtown. I also adored any film starring Jerry Lewis, like Cinderfella and The Nutty Professor—t he big blockbusters that the historic Chief Theater showed on weekends. But what I really craved were the scary movies.

I saw my first horror movie at the age of eight—William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill. I was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by it. My favorite part was when a rat was dropped into a hole full of murky liquid and, moments later, floated to the top, nothing but a skeleton! I had horrible nightmares for weeks and woke up time after time in the middle of the night, screaming. I’m sure Danny’s ass was royally kicked for exposing me to “that kind of trash.” In any case, I couldn’t wait to see more of the same: House of Usher followed, then The Pit and the Pendulum, and finally The Tomb of Ligeia in 1965—the last of the American International Pictures films directed by Roger Corman that were loosely based, and I mean loosely, on Edgar Allan Poe stories. They always starred the dark and sinister Vincent Price, who became my favorite antihero.

Suddenly, I couldn’t get enough horror! I somehow got ahold of a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine—a publication edited by Forrest J. Ackerman (who coined the term “sci-fi” and would later become a pal). Late-night horror movies abounded on TV back then, conveniently timed to air after my parents had gone to bed. The Twilight Zone and, later, The Outer Limits became my TV-watching staples. I soon learned from the back pages of Famous Monsters that real, lifelike plastic model kits of my favorite Universal monsters were available from Aurora. I put Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman at the top of my Christmas wish list, and that ghoul-lovin’ Santa delivered! While my sisters played with Barbie, Midge, and Ken, I spent hours lovingly assembling and painting my little monsters. Actually, I have no idea how much time I spent on them, probably because I was high from the glue and enamel-paint fumes.

Later on, TV series that combined monsters and witchcraft with humor, like The Munsters, Bewitched, and my favorite, The Addams Family, became my must-see TV. They obviously had a big impact on my developing personality.

As I mentioned, my parents were very industrious, and soon my mother ditched the babies and began working for Evelyn, the neighbor lady across the street, who ran a costume-rental shop out of her garage. Evelyn was a mom, but she was nice, and her son Kree was one of the neighborhood kids I often played with. Once, they invited me over for dinner and Evelyn served artichokes, which were the weirdest things I’d ever seen! It might have been the first time I’d actually seen a vegetable that didn’t come from a can. My mother was really big into convenience food.

Mother took a liking to the costume-rental business. With the money she’d made, she and Aunt Lorrayne, who was an exceptional seamstress, opened a costume shop in the little one-room “patio house” my dad had built in our backyard. After business picked up, they were able to afford bigger digs, renting an old house a few blocks away and opening Colorado Springs’ largest costume shop, Peterson’s Party Land.

Summer break seemed to drag into endless, lazy days until just like that, an electric charge filled the air and the weather changed overnight. Red and gold leaves drifted from the trees and the smell of logs burning in fireplaces wafted on the crisp breeze. Autumn had arrived—my favorite time of year. With it came the return to school, my birthday, and my family’s busiest, most exciting time: Halloween. After school, Melody and I rushed to the costume shop, a block away from school, to help stuff chunks of foam rubber into tiger tails, tack fringe onto Roaring ’20s “flappers,” and hang freshly washed and ironed bats and devils back on the racks.

During the Halloween season I felt like the luckiest kid on Earth. My mom and aunt made costumes for me that were heads and tails above all the other kids’ cheap polyester suits and cheesy dime-store masks. My obsession with dressing up in costumes began when my mother still worked with Evelyn at her shop across the street. When her son Kree and I were eight years old, our moms entered us in a costume contest in Manitou Park. He dressed as the gunslinger Maverick, from the popular TV show of the same name, and I dressed in heels, fishnet stockings, and a feather boa as Miss Kitty, the saloon girl from the show Gunsmoke. Inappropriate? Maybe. But we took first place and each won a one-hundred-dollar bond, which was the equivalent of about a million dollars back then. Best of all, I got my picture in the paper again. I was becoming a regular media whore!

Halloween took over as my new favorite holiday. As our ex–first lady so eloquently put it, “Who gives a fuck about Christmas?” And was there any reason I couldn’t wear costumes all year round? I didn’t think so. I wore them to stage elaborate shows for the neighborhood kids, to hang out around the house, and even to go to school. Unfortunately, wearing costumes at a Gestapo-run place like Ivywild, which didn’t even allow girls to wear pants, didn’t go over so well.

As I got older, my mother and aunt used me as a guinea pig to model their creations, making me costumes from whatever TV show was popular at the time: Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie, Ellie from The Beverly Hillbillies, and, my favorite, Ginger from Gilligan’s Island. I knew when I put on that skin-tight sequined gown and red bouffant wig, I was home!

Despite my scars, I’d never been shy about performing in front of people, which was odd considering I was especially shy and withdrawn in my everyday life. At just three or four years old, my mom and dad had me dancing on tables in restaurants, singing “Que Será, Será” or the big Patti Page hit, “(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window.” They scraped together the money to give me tap, ballet, and modern-jazz dance lessons from the time I was five.

At twelve years old, I saw Ann-Margret for the first time in the film Bye Bye Birdie and instantly identified with her in ways I was still too young to articulate.

Then, one warm spring afternoon…

I was sitting in the back seat of Mother’s old baby-blue Ford Fairlane while she ran into Safeway to grab something for dinner. I lolled against the ultramarine cloth upholstery, listening to the car radio, the sun streaming through the windows and spilling across my bare legs. Barbara Mason’s top-ten hit “Yes, I’m Ready” played on the radio. “Are you ready? Yes, I’m ready… for loooooove…”

I was feeling warm and drowsy. Every word she crooned sank deep into the recesses of my mind. Note by note, lyric by lyric, the whole sex-and-love thing clicked in my head like tumblers being dialed into place on my school locker. I got a tingly feeling all over my body, but especially “down there,” and in that instant, I got it. I’m telling you it was a goddamn epiphany! The focus of my life changed in the three short minutes that song took to play. Suddenly, my life was all about boys. I was about to become a temptress.

At thirteen, I saw Ann-Margret for the second time, costarring in the movie Viva Las Vegas with Elvis Presley. As I sat in the dark theater staring at the screen and munching my popcorn, I suddenly stopped and drew in a breath. My eyes glazed over and time stood still. That was it. I wanted to be like Ann-Margret. I wanted to look like Ann-Margret. I wanted to be Ann-Margret. In the film, she plays a swim instructor (something that would have been a terrible job for me because I never learned to swim), but near the end of the film, she competes with Elvis in a talent show, and her hip-shaking, hair-whipping performance mesmerized me. I sat through that movie over and over until I’d memorized every line, every lyric to every song, and every move she made. There were also several glitzy musical numbers in the film, featuring glamorous Las Vegas showgirls, something that until that moment, I never knew existed. I dreamed about the movie at night. I daydreamed about the movie all day. My fantasies starred me in the Ann-Margret role and Elvis as my love interest.

Since my fifth birthday, when I’d gotten a portable record player and a forty-five single of “Hound Dog” from my dad, I’d been in love with Elvis and his music, even the less-than-stellar soundtracks to his schlocky movies, which I swooned over. I performed in the rec room for anyone I could force to watch. I played cuts from classic Elvis fare like “Little Egypt” from the film Roustabout, “Do the Clam” from Girl Happy, and best of all, the soundtrack from Viva Las Vegas, which would eventually play into my life in a big way. I wore my little black leotard and lip-synched for my life, long before RuPaul made it a thing. Later on, I’d sometimes wear a red turtleneck with three-quarter-length sleeves over black tights, just like Ann-Margret wore in the movie, and during school events inexplicably leap to my feet at a moment’s notice to perform a sexy, improvisational dance, much to the delight of my male classmates.

The Beatles burst on the scene when I was in seventh grade, and their influence on me, and an entire generation, was staggering. They literally changed the way I saw the world, and I cannot overstate the profound impact they had on my life. I was exactly the right age to be hit by Beatlemania head on. I collected every picture of John, Paul, George, and Ringo I could find, saved every penny of my allowance for their singles and LPs, and caught them on every TV appearance they made. Each new Beatles album was a revelation!

Being the fickle girl I was, I threw Elvis over like an old, used dishrag. When I heard the Beatles sing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was like I’d been struck by lightning. Overnight my world became mod, gear, fab!

From that moment on, I ate, slept, and breathed the Beatles. The downside was that this spelled the end of my long friendship with Nyliram, because she hated them and said they looked like girls. That was it. I was forced to drop her like a hot potato and search out other like-minded Beatlemaniacs. I found them in the form of my new BFFs, Molly, Kathy, and Eileen. We talked in British accents like the Beatles, dressed in Beatle boots and hats, and screamed our heads off whenever one of their songs came on the radio. We went to the Chief Theater to see A Hard Day’s Night at least a half dozen times and shrieked and sobbed our way through it until we lost our voices. When one of the Beatles’ birthdays rolled around, we held a party, complete with candles and a Jiffy cake we whipped up ourselves. We put a lot of energy into hating the guts of Cynthia Lennon, John’s wife, and Jane Asher, Paul’s girlfriend, because we were so jealous. Although I loved all the Beatles, in the beginning my favorite was Ringo, but I quickly moved on to George, then to Paul for a while, and eventually settled on John, which never changed. I spent hours lying on my bed listening to him sing “I’m a Loser” and bawling my eyes out because I loved him so much and he wasn’t mine. My room was papered floor to ceiling in Beatles posters, trading cards, and pictures cut from teen magazines. My cousin Jeannie, who was working as a hair stylist by this time, chopped off my long red locks at my insistence and gave me a Beatles haircut (something I immediately regretted).

Kathy, Molly, Eileen, and I were the only mods in South Junior High. We went to a school dance together and I spent weeks planning what to wear, finally deciding on a sheer, empire-waist, baby-doll minidress—white with black polka dots—along with a pair of black tights with white polka dots. Kathy painstakingly painted black dots on my white fingernails and I did a fab job of adding black and white patent leather Twiggy eyelashes to my lower lids. We all looked unbelievably gear! Boys still didn’t ask us to dance, but we didn’t care. The music they played there sucked anyway.

Suddenly one day I sprouted boobs. Not just boobs. Enormous boobs. When puberty finally struck, I developed faster than a Polaroid. In my mind at least, I remember going to bed flat as a board one night and waking up with ginormous breasts the next morning. It was like, whoa, dude—this is better than the tooth fairy!

To emphasize my newly sprouted bosom—which wasn’t really necessary, but why not—I borrowed a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog from a neighbor girl’s older sister and ordered a major push-up bra. The cleavage this little miracle invention created was insane. Each cup contained more foam rubber than a Tempur-Pedic mattress. It really made the boys in school, and more than a male teacher or two, sit up and take notice. This bra was one of the best things that ever happened to me and I ordered a couple more as backups. The only time it betrayed me came years later, on a trip to Las Vegas when I wore it under my bikini top in a swimming pool and it absorbed so much water I nearly drowned.

Almost overnight I’d gone from pariah to princess, at least in my mind. I lost the glasses, refused the Toni perms, and began picking out my own clothes from seventh grade on. For my thirteenth birthday, Grandma and Grandpa Schmidt took me shopping at The Fashion Bar, Colorado Springs’ ritziest store, and bought me a wardrobe of clothes that made me look like I’d just come from Carnaby Street—lots of burgundies with pink trim and brown velvet with tiny English flowers and lace. I still can’t imagine how my grandparents came up with that kind of money! They lived in a house the size of a train car and their only income was their Social Security checks. But it was one of the best, most game-changing gifts I’d ever received, and I was so thankful to them. For the first time in my life, I could finally look the way I felt.

I now ironed my hair to make it stick straight and wore the shortest miniskirts and tightest, lowest-cut tops I could lay my hands on. I’d gone from being overly sensitive about my body because of the scars to showing off as much of my “good” skin as possible. It was a lucky thing that I’d grown as tall as I had, and that such an accomplished surgeon had done my skin grafting. No longer the angry red and purple raised scars from my childhood; the color had faded and the skin had smoothed out. I globbed on makeup (yay Pan Stik!) and wore my hair long to cover the worst of it, developing a lifelong habit of pulling my red locks forward to make sure the scars on my neck were covered. Hosiery did the job of hiding the scars on my thighs where the skin had been removed.

At one point, a modified “Ginger” became one of my signature looks and went over very big at South Junior High. With the boys, anyway. I wasn’t allowed to wear the sparkly gown, but I did get away with the flaming-red bouffant wig (flipped up on one side and rolled under on the other). I was sent home on quite a few occasions when the girls’ counselor, Mrs. Dean, deemed my skirt too short or my neckline too low.

Around this time the mutual lovefest between Daddy and me came to a screeching halt. One day I ran over to him and jumped into his lap, and much to my surprise, he gave me a rough shove and growled, “Get off me.” I was shocked and surprised. “You’re too old for that kind of thing now,” was his only explanation. I had no idea what he meant, and was left crushed and confused. I’d always been Daddy’s little girl, his fishing buddy, his dance partner, his best friend. What had changed?