Paris: The Memoir(38)
In the years after my CEDU experience, the roar of the Rap was never far away. I tried hard to drown it out, but I couldn’t party hard enough, couldn’t drive fast enough, couldn’t crank my music loud enough or vacuum up enough love to make it go away. Sometimes I fell back on that slay-or-be-slain mentality, and I’m not proud of that. I was fucked up, okay? And I drank a lot. Like, a lot.
The Rap was all about destroying people for who they are. People went for the most obvious target in the ugliest possible language. The N-word. The C-word. The F-word. (Not that F-word, the worse one.) I look back on some of the things I said in the years after I left Provo, in the throes of PTSD, and I’m mortified. Horrified. I’m grossed out, because that means those creepy people got inside my head. I never really left them behind.
Saying I drank to dull the pain—that’s an explanation, not an excuse. Sometimes I was just wasted and being a fucking moron. I don’t remember half the stuff people say I said when I was being a blacked-out idiot, but I’m not denying it, because coming out of the CEDU system, I had a severely damaged filter—except when I was buzzed and had no filter at all. My ability to trust people was systematically destroyed, so getting close to anyone made me feel vulnerable and raw. As a result, I said the worst things to and about the people I love most.
I’m a genuinely nice person. I try to help people whenever I can. I love to lift up my friends and fellow creatives.
Puffy and I were hanging out in our camp at Burning Man last summer, and he said, “We’re the OGs, and we’re killing it more than ever.”
He’s been there for me since those early hard-partying years along with a core group of good friends who always accepted me as I was in that moment: Puffy, Nicole, Kim, Brit, Snoop, Nicky, Farrah, Brooke, Whitney—looking at you, Allison and Jen—these people are family, and I’m grateful. I can’t regret those party years, because they’re all part of it. We lived for the nightlife.
My girlfriends and I had so much fun raging all around the world: LA, London, Burning Man, Ibiza, Saint-Tropez, Paris, Vegas. Sometimes they’d beg to go home. “Paris, please! Can we call it a night?”
I kept them out until dawn. I was afraid to be alone in the dark. No matter how far I traveled, in my dreams, I was back where I started, running down that mountain, slipping on mossy rocks, disappearing with the remains of the murdered boys.
10
After I tried to escape, I was seriously on bans: No one was allowed to speak to me or look at me, and I was not allowed to speak to or look at anyone else. I lost my phone privileges. Back in pinks. They took my shoes. Obviously.
Problem people had to sleep on the floor in the living room so a guard could watch us all night. The shower remarks were over-the-top filthy, and I got blown away every night during Rap. “Stupid spoiled bitch. You’re not even trying to work the program. They’re gonna send you to Ascent. You’re gonna end up at Provo.”
Kids who’d stayed at other CEDU sister facilities agreed that Ascent sucked. It was a military-style boot camp somewhere in Montana. Or Idaho. Montandaho. I don’t know. Hard-core, middle-of-nowhere wilderness. You had to sleep in a tent and do hard labor. They said all the kids were criminals and psychopaths and the staff people were even worse. The general take on Provo was a wide-eyed whisper: “Bad things happen there.”
I sat through a few more Raps with a frozen Stepford smile. I was dying a million times inside, but I wouldn’t let myself fight back; I had to conserve my energy. I planned to run again, using what I’d learned, but before I had a chance to try, the transporters came for me. Same as the first time, two people—a man and a woman—came in the middle of the night, grabbed me, and gave me the whole “easy way or hard way” bit.
This scene had already played itself out in my head a hundred times. I slept in my clothes, thinking about how I would handle it.
“Easy,” I smiled. “I’m excited to go. I love the outdoors.”
They were thrown off a little, but not really fooled by this. When they put the cuffs on me, they probably saw that I was shaking. The wife was a chunky middle-aged woman, not very tall, blond hair with gray roots. Her husband had a huge belly. I felt certain they’d never catch me if I could just make a break for it.
They gave me actual clothes to travel in—jeans and a T-shirt from the bag Mom packed. I’d lost a lot of weight, so the jeans looked baggy and sad.
On the way to the airport, I tried to chat them up and charm them, but Mr. and Mrs. Meathead sat in the front seat of the SUV, staring straight ahead. They kept the cuffs on me while we flew to San Francisco, where we were supposed to change planes. I was as sweet as I could be the whole way.
“Gosh, I can’t wait to get to my new school. Do you think it would be okay to take the cuffs off before we change planes? It’s just so embarrassing to walk through the airport like this.”
“No,” Mr. Meathead said flatly. “The paperwork says you’re a runner.”
But Mrs. Meathead sighed and gave him a look, so he took them off. At the gate inside SFO, I asked if she could please take me to the ladies’ room, and she agreed. I went into a stall. She folded her arms, standing right outside the door.
“Don’t try to lock it,” she said.
I smiled and shrugged. “There wouldn’t be much point.”