chapter twenty-five
HOMECOMING PRINCESS
December 1997
The visiting room was crowded and Leslie wanted to smoke, the one addiction she hadn’t yet managed to shake, so we sat outside. (She has since quit.) It was mild but breezy and there were lots of kids buzzing around the picnic tables. If you blurred your eyes a bit, you could imagine that we were in a suburban park. Well, blurred your eyes and held your nose. The breeze, though light, was blowing the smell of cow shit right into our faces and, I feared, cow shit particulates into our noses. I briefly considered taking up smoking myself.
Every once in a while an inmate would stop to say hello or to introduce Leslie to a visitor. Her reaction was always animated, her eyes eager and bright. There was something poignant about her lively cordiality even under those bleak circumstances. She acknowledged that she had periods of depression, especially in connection to the endless cycle of parole hearings, but clearly her temperament’s set point is one of good spirits.
When I asked her about her childhood before her parents’ divorce, she described a picture-perfect suburban family: a community-minded, churchgoing mom and dad; well-adjusted, healthy kids living in a comfortable house with a swimming pool. At some point, Leslie’s parents wanted to share their good fortune and adopted two children from Korea. And then, when Leslie was fourteen, the carefully constructed life crumbled. Her father left the family. There was, of course, another woman.
Before the divorce, Leslie was active, high-achieving, and socially successful. She’d been a Bluebird, a Campfire Girl, and later a Job’s Daughter. She sang in the church choir. She was a talented seamstress and started designing and sewing her own clothes when she was in junior high school. In high school she was elected Homecoming Princess and student body secretary.
Once her father left, her mother, who had been a stay-at-home mom, went back to work and could no longer greet her kids when they arrived home from school. One day, instead of her mother greeting her with brownies fresh from the oven, Leslie came home and found her older brother and his friend drying marijuana leaves in the oven. She said she wanted to try it. He said no. “I blackmailed him. I said if he didn’t let me try it, I’d tell Mom he was smoking dope. He relented.
“From almost the first hit, I was a goner. I loved getting high. I didn’t have a take-it-or-leave-it response. I now know better than anyone the terrible toll drugs can take but as a teenager, fun was my priority.”
At school, she’d always been part of the college-bound elite, but her newly acquired drug use separated her from the friends with whom she’d grown up. While they governed the student body, rallied at football games, and studied for their SATs, Leslie got stoned. Another factor separating her from her old friends was a boy named Bobby Mackey, who transferred from another schoo1. Bobby, a bit of a bad boy, was just enough of an outlaw to appeal to the newly discovered thrill-seeking part of her. She and Bobby smoked grass, they took LSD, they had sex, and they soon decided that they had outgrown the boring blocks of Monrovia.
They managed to borrow a car and ran away to the Haight-Ashbury. This adventure only lasted a week. They had no money, no place to live, and they knew no one. Sobered, Leslie returned home to face her parents; though they were no longer married, they presented her with a united front. Sometime during the recriminations, the family talks, the beginning of a new plan for Leslie to get her life back on track, she discovered that she was pregnant. The news was traumatic. “I was really upset. I was crying. I reached for my mother. I wanted her to hold me.”
What happened next, Leslie recalls, was a pivotal moment in their relationship. “My mother recoiled. She physically withdrew from me and said, ‘Don’t touch me.’ The look on her face reflected how contaminated she thought I was.”
Her mother arranged an abortion and this, too, was traumatic. As a result of all this anguish, she and Bobby decided they were through with drugs. They got involved with a group called the Self-Realization Network, a semi-religious, philosophical organization whose members acquire discipline through Yoga and meditation. Bobby would be a monk, Leslie a nun. Both required abstention from sex and drugs, which is perhaps why she was able to complete high school during this period.
The discipline finally proved to be too much for her, and though it meant breaking up with Bobby, who was still a disciple, she left the fellowship. At home, the tension between Leslie and her mother continued to intensify, so she moved in with her father and his wife in their Manhattan Beach duplex. They gave her the lower unit and a car, and she took a secretarial course at Sawyer Business School. She learned shorthand by day and took drugs at night.
Meanwhile, her brother Paul, after reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac, took off for parts unknown on his motorcycle. Inspired by his example, Leslie and a friend drove to San Francisco in the friend’s VW Bug, eventually ending up, once again, in Haight-Ashbury.
She called her mother. “ ‘Good-bye, Mom. I’m never coming back.’ ” She believed that her mother’s reaction to her pregnancy justified cutting her out of her life.