The children were lined up against the brick wall in the basement of the Lutheran Church on 18th Street, in Santa Monica, California. 1962. The school nurses were weighing and measuring the children and the kids were stripped down with shoes off. One little girl stepped up to the scale and was weighed and then height was measured. Then the nurse asked her to step to the side and to touch her toes, which she obediently did. She felt the nurse's finger travel up her spine from her pelvis tail to the base of her head. "Look at this," the nurse called the attention of her fellow nurse.
The scoliosis would change her life. She had always thought of her body as perfect but now, as they left the doctor's office, her mother was sobbing and saying that god was punishing her for her sins. "Why would god punish me for my mother's sins?" This is what the girl thought.
All the child could do was wait to see what this would mean. She heard slivers of conversations. Her mother said that the doctor wanted to put a rod up her spine but her father had the x-rays examined by doctors that worked in the hospital where he worked as a book keeper and the answer was no. The most beautiful no that she had ever heard.
She was taken from Lutheran School and put in Emerson Jr. High where they had a special physical education program. The children would lay down on mats and pretend that they were trees and that their arms were branches reaching deep beneath the surface of the ground for nourishment and water. It was here that she met Janie Mansfield, daughter of. They were rolie polie fat girls and they sat at recess eating chocolate cake with thick icing. Janie told her about living with her mother. And she would point to a teacher who ate bananas at recess and say, "It's just like she is sucking a cock."
They moved from Santa Monica back to Hollywood. The Lutheran School was just for punishment anyway. Although she liked it after all, even though she called it The Dungeon, she had even started going through Confirmation and thought that she would become a Lutheran. But she had to go to her Principle and say that they were moving and that she would be leaving instead.
At ten, when she moved to Hollywood, she attended Hollywood Professional School where she did well. She entered as a fourth grader and the class was split into two classes, fourth and fifth. She worked through both grades that year and was put in study hall to make up time, for some reason, but it made her mother angry that she was made to sit with nothing to do for a certain amount of time. She was then placed in a progressive school. She was tested and placed as a fifth grader and near the end of the year went to the new school on Franklin and Highland. So in the seventh grade when she horsed around in front of the progressive school and was expelled, her mother really couldn't put her back a grade, when she returned to her school, after Emerson, she was automatically restored to what she could do grade level wise.
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The child slipped out the door of her apartment and remembered to lock up. The apartment was empty, she wasn't lonely though, she was just on the loose. She would walk to the Broadway Hollywood from her apartment and the walk was 2 1/2 miles, one way. She walked it with her mother, they would walk it together when her mom was off work. This was her mom's exercise.
Not swimming, playing tennis, horseback riding or bicycling. Just walking. Walking long distances.
She walked passed the Grauman's Chinese theatre without walking to the side to put her shoes in the place of the actor's shoes. Or to place her hand's in place of the actor's hands, because it was dangerous for a child to go to a secluded place in Hollywood, and many children were found dead around the city and in the Hollywood Hills. There were many little shops and restaurants along the way. And one day something happened when she was just looking at the merchandise in one of the shops. She slipped something off a shelf into her purse and left the store without paying for it. It was so easy and so unexpected that she could do that and not be detected. She continued shop lifting that entire year. All of her Christmas presents or any other present she gave was shop lifted.
Usually she was alone when she did this but one day she was with her best friend and they entered an open market on Hollywood Boulevard. She slipped a package of Hostess Cupcakes under her jacket and they left the market. Her friend didn't even know what she had done.
A man started yelling at them. A huge man with a foreign accent. They ran as fast as they could with him shouting, "Come back, come back and pay for that. You didn't pay for that." He ran very fast for a man that was so very fat and caught up with the little girls. "You go right back to the store," he said as he turned them around and marched them down the street. It took them a while to arrive at the store, they had run a couple of blocks. She put the cupcakes on the counter and got in her purse for the 13 cents. "Now look at you, you had the money the whole while! Why do you steal when you have money?" He just kept going on.
As they left the market her friend said to her; "I was going to runaway to desert you, but I changed my mind. The 12 year old never stole anything again, that was the end of her criminal life.
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The twelfth was a rough year. Before scientists discovered teenage temporal growth, everyone thought that a teenager was just like an adult. That their actions were deliberate. She was very troubled, she would sob for hours and in her sleep cut her sheets and her doll's hair. She would only remember this because her grandmother was visiting one time and was aware of what was happening. "I was just dusting her things and her diary fell open on the floor and in it she had written that she hated god!" My poor mom was in hot water with her mother again.
After her grandma went home she and her mother packed up and followed her on the Southern Pacific, again. Her grandma had gotten rid of a renter. (She rented the upstairs of her house) And she sat in her mother's old bedroom thinking how really wonderful it was to look out over Morningside, the neighborhood where her mom grew up. But they didn't stay and returned to California.
