http://http://blog.myspace.com/blownawaytheidahoway"Where's my Dad?" I demanded.
I was losing my freedom. This was the first thing to happen. To me. Something was happening to me and I never saw it coming. What I did see was an off white sedan. Driving away. A long, dusty wake in the driveway cowardly waved goodbye- a bumping- dry as bones- trail of dust, flicked out behind the bouncing back wheels of a rented Mercury. The off white vehicle that I had been sitting in an hour before, was leaving me behind. It wasn't even 8 A.M.
My last words were dry in my mouth as it snapped together in my mind. I began to turn decisively toward a threatening sound but I was too late. I tried to prevent the attack with a hand. Raise it. Dammit! The silvery bear had my wrists. My wrists were immobilized! Long mustache hairs of a graying variety reached triumphantly from his nostrils and in an up/out direction almost meeting his red framed spectacles. The frames had little horns on them as did the bushy gray eyebrow hairs that peeked out from above the lenses. I remember almost nothing about what he was wearing in between his scraggly head and furry toes. It wasn't formal. He wasn't even wearing shoes. Instead, he wore enormous sandals. His toes were gigantic. I realized as I gandered at those stately dogs, that the big toe- the snout to my dog- was damn near as big as my whole foot. I began to get very scared as the threatening words and sounds came into focus.
Richard Anderson's peculiarly dull, rounded words floated around in my light head. "Program," "processing," "clothes off."
Whoa. Back up. Clothes off? I know I didn't hear that right. I can't move. I'm trying to but my wrists are unmistakably bound to this stranger though I am trying to back away. Simultaneously, he is telling me to take my clothes off. A woman I've never seen before stealthily comes out of the shadows with something sharp! I wish I had woken up- or torn away and was running and being chased and THEN woke up, but I didn't. I won't exaggerate. I will be as plain as I am able about my 'processing'. My 'orientation'- my admittance into Boulder Mountain Academy was on July 11th, 1988 when I was fourteen-and-a-half years old.
ONE
These are not the opening lines of a novel. These aren't characters that I made up. This is not something that happened inside my head. This happened to me. My Dad abandoned me in a sickening scenario. Starting from day one I would be way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere. Idaho! Close to the Canadian border was BMA.
I was woken up damn early in the morning by my father. I came along for the airplane ride. That, and we were going skiing. In July. To reciprocate the good intentions of my father, I agreed to look at a boarding school that was near the slopes. It was pretty cold at six in the morning, I surmised perhaps there'll be some snow up higher in the mountains. We had gotten in from the airport pretty late. I was still pretty much asleep as we made our way from the hotel that morning in a rented off white Mercury sedan from Bonner's Ferry's only Kootenai Inn.
The slowing of the rather ordinary car had woken me a few times before I felt gravel under wheel. I shook the sleepy cobwebs from my mind. Where were we? Was that a ski lodge? Wait. There were kids older than I walking parallel to the road we were driving. They emerged from three equal looking brown, wooden, one- storey dwellings. I put my straw hat on my head that nicely held back my long, brown, hair. It was so thick and wavy that I almost let my mother talk me into cutting it a few weeks before. I checked out some of the hotter female specimens.
I adjusted the straw hat as we slowed by a giant wood bay to my left. There was a lot to look at, the surroundings were strange and the trees were foreign. I had been to see other schools before so it wasn't that strange to be looking at a bunch of strangers who were close to my age. But like the trees, everything was different. Larger. This wood bay was gigantic. There was enough wood stacked up there to build a great pyramid. There were these magnificent, stringy, tamaracks gliding by to the right- these huge trees created a wall; a dense curtain prevented seeing beyond. I gazed up at mountains that were jagged and uninviting. They were a different species of mountain than mine in ol' Virginia. The Blue Ridge Mountains were rounding, luscious, and feminine. They were nothing like these masculine peaks, Clifty on one side and Katka Mountain on the other. These rose up like angry deities out of the clouds, daring and forbidding.
A couple of dogs barked as we slowed near some parked cars. The dogs were bigger too. We ignored the dry, bored barks and stretched our legs as we properly departed the automobile. Another dog had detected our arrival and came proudly bounding toward us. Impossible to ignore, so big and black was Sancho that even my father exclaimed out loud, as his dark, lumbering swagger approached.
Richard Anderson and two burly students walked towards us. Richard introduced himself to my father- Richard- and to myself. Richard Anderson said these two boys would show me the campus. I hated that word. Campus. Ken Banger and Charles Wallman eyed me suspiciously and tried to peer through my sunglasses. They asked me if I liked my hair long and what state I was from. We walked.
As we walked, we passed other kids. I felt shunned, like I wore something that made me repulsive. The waking kids flashed quick, furtive glances in my direction, then their necks would snap back to carry them a quickened pace toward their destinations. We seemed to be the only people not walking quickly, Ken and Charles were letting me lead this tour without me knowing it. We didn't pass anyone in conversation, the only voices around seemed to be our own.
We walked down by a lake and a sauna, and into a building they called Camelot. There were six bunk-beds in each unit. I was dizzy and confused by the time we reemerged out into the July sun. The units had all been carbon copies of each other. There was almost nothing to differentiate the personalities of the people who slept in each bunk. I noted no music posters. No pictures of girls, or pictures of friends at home, not even photos of families much of the time.
As we walked down a different rustic dirt road they pointed out an obstacle course on our left. I had heard of such things. Rope courses. Swings, platforms, and a giant cargo net made from thick, braided strands were almost obscured from view by the forest. They called this big patch Merkle Forest. We were on our way to the farm by the entrance to the campus – near the place where smooth state road turned easily onto the bumpy driveway that had woken me earlier.
Here, in Idaho, the cows were bigger than the ones I used to irritate in France, while I was cultivating my rat- tail, the summer before.
All in all it was a quiet morning, and all the animals seemed happy to see us, even the ram they affectionately addressed as "Rambo." Both of my guides were from California and neither had been to Virginia before. Charles said he had to leave San Francisco on account of a drug problem. He had a tattoo of a cross on his arm. He seemed pretty cool but clearly was "assisting" Ken. Ken sort of sketched me out a little on that walk because he was so bland. Flimsy, like a puppet missing a hand, he seemed to be just…a shell. Charles was a little more sharp. I don't mean smarter. Just the way Ken seemed like the blue ridges, Charles was jagged like the peaks surrounding the campus. Charles then asked me if I knew that I was going to be coming here today. I said we were on our way to go skiing. There went that damn quixotic sideways glance. Both of them looked around this time. I was getting suspicious.
Finally, idiotically, another question sprang to mind. Why were they here? It was summer. There is no SCHOOL in summer? Right? There's summer school- I had become familiar with that. But a summer boarding school replete with ropes courses and a lake? I asked a direct question.
"How long since you were last at home?"
"I went on a five day last month" Ken replied in an even more vacant stare ahead.
"Five day visit, he means."
Charles was looking at me in that sidelong fashion to see if I was putting it together. I wasn't. I lit a cigarette. They said they would wait until we were up at the House. They could smoke there. I asked why not here like me? They just said that that was the only place allowing smoking. Whatever, I decided, taking another drag. We ambled that way. I looked down and puffed some more. I noticed they were wearing identical work boots. I looked up to say something but we were approaching the House. This was where the kids had been walking and where we had parked the rental. It was a giant building. Dreams, starting with a climb into the entrails of the building from one of the two staircases, still haunt my spirit.
Next to the staircase that my dreams take me floating was the small office where I was "processed." Cavity searching is not a proper way to end the tour of a facility, I insist. I don't want to make light of this, as it was with eery resentment that later learned most students were not searched like this. I did not have anything contraband; especially not IN my person. Apparently, Richard felt no differently about my exterior, because my clothes too were about to become history.
I was scared, and for the first time in years, I wanted my Dad. Being gently veered toward that doorway I finally asked aloud after him for the first time. The door opened and the top of Richard Anderson's head appeared. He stooped to get out the door as Ken and Charles disappeared. Richard's balding head- flecked with longish, black and white wisps, sweaty, and hanging on for dear life- rose back to a human position atop of the neck. He ushered me past him into the room and closed the door. Things darkened some as he stood between me and the window next to the door. He asked me how I like the school. I said it was 'alright' but that I wanted to talk to my father.
Nancy was already in the room but had such a diminished presence. It seems factual that without the display of her weapon of choice, she was perfectly invisible. Richard closed the door behind me as I walked in. I found Nancy in the room and saw her holding something. Something sharp? The sun glinted off. A magical, slow- motion moment ensued as then I looked to Richard. Richard was looking at Nancy. I looked back at Nancy. Nancy turned and willed me to follow her gaze through the window.
To say the air goes out of your lungs when becoming faced with something shocking, terrifying or outright surprising is an understatement. Here's how it goes: first the heart stops, drops, and rolls, like it and all of your blood is on fire. I've heard it called skipping a beat, but it's more like feeling an anchor drop to the bottom of your stomach. Then the steady- and often pleasant redundancy of the inflow and take of air by lungs suffers an incredible shock. Air escapes, "Where's my father," but the process to intake air anew is retarded by the brain because it is absorbed in that most exact and immediate sense. Sight. An off white Mercury sedan fled away from the scene.
I balked. I did try out of instinct to maneuver, but as I said, it all clicked into place simultaneously, who could really react? Nancy went bounding ungraciously out of my line of vision, accompanied by the sound of sharp metal edges grazing against each other. The flash. The corresponding image that I caught in my periphery was the opening of an enormous pair of scissors. Opening with one slick, wavering, metallic note while I gazed without comprehension at the off- white Mercury sedan. It was slithering and bouncing down that dirt road like some kind of insane, albino snake on treaded wheels.
The anchor in my stomach steadied me, and Richard Anderson held my wrists. My hair was cut off in an instant. A most unpleasant shift occurred in my body as a slanted line of freshly cut hair fell onto the floor. Compensating from the weight, I teeter a little towards the man whose pressing his fingers into the flesh on my arms. I wanted to be indignant. I wanted to fight. I wanted to escape. I really, really wanted to wake up. This grey beast stopped any movement I made. With his branch like arms holding me away I was both out of leg distance, and unable to summon any strength to use his weight against him.
My senses finally came back, and the blood started rushing around inside me again. This was indicated by the overwhelming thumping of my heart in my burning ears. I obeyed my adrenal glands primal urging, and pulling up the gastral anchor, I tried flight. No go. When these small phsysical exertions had transpired, I still hadn't taken in a breath. When I finally did, it was a beaten, sad, stale, defeated, and utterly foreign northwestern woody flavor. Disgustingly, it had been tinted by the breath of Richard Anderson, peppered and contaminated after coming through his mustache.
"Calm down!" Richard squeezed my wrists like a tube of toothpaste.
"We're just gonna do a quick search of your clothing so we can get out of here. You're not leaving the campus with your father. You don't want this fight, and I am not having any of that. YOU GOT THAT?"
So, I lost my clothes.
"Nancy, take his jeans. XXXX, take off your watch now. And put it with that stuff. Good. Take off your shoes. Socks. Hand them to Nancy. Check him. OK? Alright, good. Now turn around and take off your underwear, I want to make sure you don't have any drugs so bend over."
My face was flush and the remainder of blood in my veins drooled back into my ankles as I exposed my asshole to Richard. Shame. I was embarrassed, and frightened, and angry all at once, bent over like that. Richard briefly acquainted himself with my bunghole. Dizzy and weakened, I thought I almost sensed I wasn't in my body for a stint. I think I witnessed a smug smile while winking at Richard, I was viewing the room from above, or peeping into the scene from the window.
Nancy finally handed me some clothes. I had never seen duds like they handed me. The jeans were as hard as mica. They were shaped like folded brown grocery bags. Boxy, rough, and downright ugly, these jeans were already in the room before I had even gone on my tour with Charles and Ken. Two colorful flannel shirts accompanied the jeans. My jewelry, a small pocket knife, my cigarettes, my lighter, and my watch all disappeared from the corner of the desk, never to be seen again. I saw no stitch of clothing that I owned ever again. I think most fondly on some metal that was on my hands and neck, and my floppy, straw hat from earlier that morning.
maybe i'll see you at
www.myspace.com-blownaway
