IN THE ELEVENTH GRADE I’d hit a bit of a snag. I was sixteen. I had an ulcer. I was sleeping all day. I was falling apart. I needed help but I didn’t know how to ask for it. I needed to tell my parents what was going on, but I had no idea how to do that. Plus I didn’t really want to face up to it myself. I guess that’s what all the drugs and partying were all about. My mom knew something was up, and she was covering for me at school a lot. She was being the kind of mom she and I both thought we wanted—the cool mom. This is how cool she was: One weekend when she went out of town, my friend Vickie and I stole some Quaaludes from her stash of sleeping pills. She came home early and found us all luded out, and all she asked was, “So, you girls having fun?” We were. But what I really needed her to ask was, Kelly, are you sure you’re okay? You’ve seemed a bit lost lately. I needed her to stop being the cool mom and start being the mom.
My snag came in the form of a boy—a boy I’ll call Terry. Terry was a wild boy. I first met him just after he’d broken his collarbone by jumping—or should I say throwing his body—over ten chairs lined up in a row in the school auditorium. He was a walking and talking episode of Jackass twenty-five years before it was even a glimmer in Johnny Knoxville’s eye. I was never sure what Terry might do. He wasn’t stupid, he just had this reckless, unbridled spirit that made being around him thrilling. That, and he had the most gorgeous blue eyes. I was a sucker for blue eyes. Still am. And he was funny. Wicked, wicked funny. I was also a sucker for funny. I still am. But mostly he had a magical charisma. He would walk into a room, and the air would crackle. All the girls felt it, and every one of them had a crush on him.
I was doomed. The gravitational pull I felt toward him could not be countered. I could barely think in his presence.
The first few years I knew him, I never let on that I liked him. In December 1978, Vickie and Peter’s parents, Jud and Carole, took all four of us teens to Aspen for a ski trip. We drove there in a big camper that Jud borrowed from my dad. You read that right—borrowed from my dad. He’d bought this camper (it was a big beige GMC thing Dad called “the Big Turd”) with the ambitious intention of the Carlins actually going camping someday. Yeah, right.
It mostly sat in our driveway, just like a big turd, going nowhere.
As Vickie, Peter, Terry, and I sprawled out on the back bed of “the Big Turd” through Nevada and Utah, we listened to the only two eight-track tapes we could find at the truck stop in Barstow—Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small and Best of Bread. Heady shit for a fifteen-year-old girl. Between the combination of Steve Martin’s revelatory comedy, Bread’s perfect articulation of the longing of every cell in my hormonal body, and the proximity of Terry, I was done for. I fell head first and headlong in love. But I didn’t dare share this information with Vickie or Peter, and certainly not with Terry. I didn’t even display a word or a gesture or a hint. I didn’t know how. I may have been already experimenting with drugs by the age of fifteen, but I was not experimenting with boys. I’d never even kissed a guy. Somehow I had avoided spinning a bottle, playing “doctor,” or whatever other childhood games kids find to explore the opposite sex.
My one and only chance to kiss a boy came and went on the last day at the Montessori school when I was twelve years old. I’d had a huge crush for the whole school year on a boy named Todd. He was blond, blue-eyed, and a surfer. All the girls knew I had a crush on him because I had revealed it during one of our many games of fortune-telling (with one of those origami folded thingies). But I was too terrified to do anything about it. As we were all saying our tearful final good-byes, someone yelled out in front of Todd, “Todd, you should kiss Kelly.” I panicked and ran into the girls’ bathroom and hid. He came in looking for me, and I would not come out of the stall. I’m not sure what I thought would happen if I kissed him. So here I was now, three years later, wanting to be Terry’s girlfriend more than anything, and pretending I had no interest in him.
By avoiding my chaotic hormones for most of my adolescence, I had become like a white-knuckled binge dieter resisting the ever-powerful allure of the dozen chocolate doughnuts for as long as possible, but then succumbing and eating the whole damn box in one fell swoop. One night, in the late spring of 1979, in the attic of Peter and Vickie’s house, I went from never having kissed a boy to fumbling my way through all the bases with Terry. It was a drunk and stoned blur of lips, hands, skin, ouch, and finally sleep. As it goes for most of us, it was both anti- and nonclimactic.
But it ignited a storm in me. Every cell in my body had awakened, and it wanted more. I wanted to possess Terry. I wanted to run away with him and let the world fade. Yes, I wanted to fuck his brains out night and day, but really, I just wanted him to love me. I wanted his attention and his being to revolve around me, and only me. I was sure that the moment after we “did it,” we would now be boyfriend and girlfriend—holding hands in public, making out at parties, calling each other pet names like couples do.
None of that happened. He clearly had other ideas. There was no hand-holding. No PDA. No cute pet names. We kept fucking, but that was it.
I had no idea if we were a couple or not. All the people we hung out with had no idea either. Peter and Vickie figured it out because the first few months Terry and I were together, we were having sex in every available room in their house—the attic’s twin beds behind the TV room, where I lost my virginity; the basementlike downstairs with a bed ensconced in a niche—the perfect place to fall asleep hoping that Terry would find his way down to me, which he did on many a night. And pretty much any other available flat surface. The secrecy of it all was maddening and heartbreaking, and the most exciting thing ever. Maddening because it was so illogical—Terry and I were already attached at the hip as friends, so why not just show our affection in public? Heartbreaking because I already felt less than most girls, and his refusal to announce his affection for me in public just underlined my unworthiness. Exciting because I was Terry’s secret lover—at parties there were glances from him, surreptitious brushings up against each other, and quick make-out sessions in bathrooms. It was electrifying. The not knowing and the suspense kept me off-kilter. I never really knew where I stood with Terry. I was in love. I was insane.
I wasn’t the only crazy one. Terry was one of those tricky types. There were moments when he would flash me a glimpse of the real, soft, damaged human that he was underneath. I could clearly see the lonely and wounded parts of him that just needed to be loved, and I would run toward them, hoping to protect and heal him. Hoping that in return, he would do the same for me. But then he’d lash out at me, as if I were evil, diseased. The first time it happened we were hanging out in my bedroom, listening to music, taking bong hits—an average day—when his voice got sharp and low, and I watched his pupils suddenly dilate. He grabbed my wrist and twisted it, and said, “You—you—you drive me fucking crazy.” I can’t remember what I said or did to make him do that, and I’m not sure it really mattered. His reaction was such a non sequitur that I didn’t know if it had anything to do with me. It’s not like we were arguing or that there was even some tension between us. I thought at first he must be kidding, and let it slide, but more and more of these moments started popping up out of nowhere.
It was during this time that Terry was in a car accident with one of his closest friends, Steve. They were going to a party up Laurel Canyon when a drunk driver T-boned them, flipping Steve’s Jeep and killing him instantly. We were all confused and traumatized by losing someone our age. For many of us it was our first encounter with death. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for Terry. He survived the crash with only a broken arm, but something inside him had broken, too, and his lashing out at me escalated. It felt as if my attachment to him fed his rage, and he regularly struck out at me verbally—“You disgusting whore!”—and physically—a death grip around my arm or a bite on my face. Confused, I’d walk around with bruises on my body and my soul, and I’d try to use logic to understand the cause: I must have provoked him by wanting him too much; I must have said or done the wrong thing; if I just don’t do that thing again, he’ll come back and stay forever. I could never figure it out exactly. While most girls my age were worrying about what to wear to the prom, I was worrying about whether what I was wearing to the prom would cover my bruises. I didn’t tell a soul about this behavior of his. I had to tame him. I had to heal him. And I knew that if I could, I’d finally be worth something.
Then all the pain and rage that I could not or would not feel and express toward Terry, my family’s chaotic past, and even myself wound itself tight around me, and I couldn’t see straight. I began acting out. I stopped taking my birth control pills. Within a month I was pregnant. I told Terry. He was upset and, I think, scared. I told my mom. She was lovely about it, and I was glad I could turn to her. She took me to take care of it. But she didn’t do what I really needed her to do, which was to help me get away from my abusive relationship. Of course how could she? She didn’t know anything about it. I couldn’t tell her, and so I carried on as if nothing was wrong, and nine months later, I got pregnant again. My mom took care of me again.
This time Terry wasn’t scared; he was infuriated. I came home to a note on my bed reading, “You stupid fucking cunt. This is all your fault.” And it was. I’d played Russian roulette with my birth control pills and lost. I was hoping someone would stop me. I had no idea how. I wouldn’t walk away from Terry. I thought if I did my whole life would collapse. It was like the Three Musketeers—all for one, one for all. But instead of my parents being my protectors, it was my friends, and they were too young to protect anyone but themselves.
For most of those days in the eleventh grade, I couldn’t tell if I was coming or going. Who am I—the great rebel leader’s daughter or the Brentwood disco queen? What is important—finally owning my rage and sorrow or taking another hit off the pipe? Who loves me—my parents who are watching as I sink deeper into fear, or my friends who are the very weight pulling me down? I walked around in a constant state of confusion. There was no sense of self, and what little there was was all in service of keeping this monster, this boy, at bay so that I could have just five more minutes of validating love from him.
I know my mom wanted to do more to rein in my life—give me a curfew, control whom I saw, get me off drugs—but she was determined not to lose me the way her mother had lost her, by pushing her around like a pawn. And my dad was busy, busy, busy, and distracted, distracted, distracted. Not only were the heart attack and his career on his mind, he also had a new challenge—an enormous tax problem. Between his resistance to opening the letters from his accountant, a really bad investment in a movie that never got made, and the fact that—Surprise!—as far as the government was concerned, the horse ranch in Malibu was not actually a business investment, my parents owed more than a million dollars to the U.S. government.
Dad and I would pass each other in the hallway and he’d ask, “Are you all right?” not really wanting a real answer. And I’d say, “Fine,” not really wanting to give one. It’s not that we didn’t care; we just didn’t know how to do it any differently. Plus the last thing I wanted to do as a hormonally out-of-control teenager was talk to my dad. Mom hadn’t told him about anything that had happened.
And then I got pregnant a third time. This time I even kept it from my mom. I felt like a whore, a loser, an insane person. I knew I had to take care of it myself and figure out my next move. I briefly considered suicide. But in the end I confided in my horse trainer, Jill, who was like a surrogate mother to me. Because she was so worried about me, she immediately told my mother. And that’s when the ugly truth about all the abuse came pouring out of me. I couldn’t pretend anymore. I didn’t care if I never saw Terry again; I just wanted the pain to stop. My mom told my dad about everything. It was over.
A few days later Terry showed up at our house. I’m not sure why he came—to apologize, to charm me again, to tell me I was a whore? My dad saw him outside the gate at the end of our long driveway. He went inside his office and grabbed his baseball bat. As my dad marched down the driveway toward Terry, he said, “You come near my daughter again, I’ll bash your fucking skull in.”
It was the proudest day of my life—my father had finally fathered me.