UNCONDITIONED CHAPTER 27

Dodging

My parents expected me to follow in Viv’s footsteps, which meant attending a state college in a safe suburb, pursuing a career in teaching, buying a car, commuting from home, obeying curfews, disclosing my whereabouts, and working full-time in the summer and part-time during school to pay for all expenses other than tuition. They never asked me what career I wanted, and if they had, I don’t know how I would’ve responded because all I cared about was getting away from them. Years earlier when I told my mother I wanted to be an artist, she snapped, “No you don’t.” I was interested in college only if I could go away to study art, which my parents refused to allow because making art was not a job and they’d never pay for room and board when I had a perfectly good bed and plenty of good food in their house.

I didn’t know what it meant to be an artist, but I’d spent a lot of time imagining my father’s late sister, Agnes, painting at an easel. As I sketched the faces of the Beatles from album covers, I’d daydream about the life of an artist and their conversations about color and light. There’d be no mindless gossip about dirty houses or slips showing. I’d seen pictures of landscape painters in beautiful scenery and longed to experience that rich solitude. I had a friend in high school who planned to go to art school. By the time I started hanging out with her at sixteen, she had been working on her portfolio for two years. I’d never heard of a portfolio and when I saw hers, assumed it was too late for me.

While my mother exhibited no curiosity about my thoughts or feelings, she spent a lot of effort trying to control them. After my first week at Friendly Restaurant, she confronted me with, “Now that you’re workin, I want half your paycheck.” Astounded by her audacity, since she’d complained so bitterly and often about having to hand over her paycheck to her mother, I said, “I’m not paying to live here.”

“Vivian gave me half of her paycheck.”

“That was her loss.”

There was no way I’d ever relinquish my pay to her. I would’ve quit the job or run away before being charged to live at home as an underaged child. By this time, I was taller than my mother. She looked up at me through the bottom of her bifocals, gaping and speechless. She backed down. I hadn’t been this defiant since biting her bedspread and it felt almost as good.

While waitressing at Friendly Restaurant, I met Wolf. A group of older, funny, cute guys frequented my section the summer before my senior year of high school when I turned seventeen, the summer of Woodstock. Silly and irreverent, these guys were a welcome relief from the dirty old men with lame jokes. The most exotic one, Wolf, who had recently returned from a cross-country tour on his motorcycle, asked me out and I accepted. He had long wavy honey-colored hair and rode a Honda 305. He was skinny and wore a leather jacket and knee-high motorcycle boots, played guitar, and smoked pot. He was two years older and had dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year, which meant his draft status would change. His father was a doctor, and his mother wore white go-go boots and drove a red sports car. I was hooked.

I was graduating from high school in the spring; my bank balance was growing. I didn’t have an escape plan yet, though Wolf’s draft status predicament conveniently coincided with my desire to move far away. We talked casually about the possibility of moving to Montreal if his number came up. When it did, we began secretly planning in earnest.

During the Vietnam War, men were drafted based on lotteries which were televised on Special Reports, the first one in December of 1969 interrupting “Andy of Mayberry.” Every man born between 1944 and 1950 watched in trepidation. Three hundred sixty-six dates encapsulated in plastic balls were chosen randomly one at a time from a barrel, the first by an old, white, barrel-shaped congressman, the rest drawn by young delegates from across the country who were part of the Selective Service’s youth advisory committee. Each date chosen was posted in order on a large board. For instance, every male who had a birthday on September 14th was awarded first place in line and those born on April 24th, second, and so on. Wolf’s birthday was one of the last chosen, which meant his induction notice would arrive by the spring of 1970.

Once I made the decision to go to Montreal with Wolf and the reality of blowing off college and moving far away seeped in, I felt recklessly untethered, eager to jump into the big world unencumbered by parental control. I abandoned the pretext of making any effort in school and went so far as intentionally filling in wrong answers on my SATs. To keep my mother in the dark, I went through the motions of applying to colleges but never sent in the applications. Eventually I realized an acceptance letter was needed to work my scheme until I was legally old enough to leave. I applied to the least challenging of institutions, Massachusetts Bay Community College, and got in. My parents assessed colleges based on tuition costs and Mass Bay was one of the cheapest, so they were thrilled when I told them where I was accepted and assumed that meant I’d go there in the fall. I never corrected their assumption because I felt justified in misleading them. Had I revealed my plans, my mother might have seized my bank account claiming it was for my own good and I would’ve ended up in the secretarial program at Mass Bay.

Viv helped Wolf and me plan our escape. She had moved to Montreal a year earlier when her first husband, Doug, went AWOL from the army. She had direct experience in becoming a landed immigrant, which was the status needed to work legally. Qualification was based on a point system with one hundred needed. The number of languages you spoke fluently, professional experience, trade skills, tangible assets, and how many degrees you held, among other things, were assigned values, which were then tallied to determine your score. Canada is a huge country with a low population, so reproductive viability was a substantial, though unscored, asset.

Wolf was a college drop-out who could ski and play the guitar. I’d have a high school diploma, waitressing experience, $440, and could play one song on the accordion. When we discovered being married accounted for 50 points, and we only needed a total of 100 points as a couple, we decided marriage was our ticket. Because married couples typically produce children, our ages and breeding potential made us hot immigration catches. I was too naïve to notice that the adjusted point system was a not-so-subtle indicator of a wife’s status.

I thought Wolf was cool and loved hanging out with him, but our marriage was a means to an end—there was no kneeling proposal or diamond ring or tears of joy, nor was I hoping for any of that. Because the decision came up in a conversation about solving a practical problem, I never considered it a real marriage, in which I had no interest. One of us said, “Hey, we need only 100 points if we’re married.” And the other one said, “Well, we could get married.” And then one of us said, “Great idea.” Wolf and I both were trying to beat the system and escape combat—for Wolf physical, for me emotional. At seventeen, still twenty years from knowing how to express myself or even how I felt, I never said out loud how I thought about our marriage. I assumed Wolf felt the same way. All that mattered was solving my problem and helping him. Talking about what it meant to embark on sharing our lives, however temporary, never occurred to me.

As my high school graduation loomed, my mother pressed for details of my college plans. While manipulation was necessary to survive, outright lying had never come easily.

“Christine, when is the first tuition payment due?”

“It’s not, Mom, I’m moving to Montreal with Wolf because he’s been drafted.”

“Ohhhhh noooooo, I can’t lose you that way,” she erupted in tears.

“We’re getting married.”

Pivoting instantaneously, she asked, “When?” I left out the part about the hundred points.

My parents didn’t like Wolf, which made him more appealing, but if we were not going to live in sin, we had my mother’s blessing—not that I was looking for it. They didn’t know Wolf. He hardly ever came to our house because I didn’t invite him. There was no point in trying to integrate him into a situation I avoided and planned to leave. When Wolf picked me up for a date, I watched for his car or motorcycle at the window and ran outside when he arrived. I’d figured out the best way to co-exist at home was to engage as little as possible, to appear as though I was following the rules, work often, to keep my head low and focus on the future. This strategy reduced the number of screaming matches and dialed down my mother’s vigilance.

As soon as the cat was out of the bag about moving to Montreal, I made plans to acquire what I really needed—a puppy. I had no professional experience, no education, and was about to move to a foreign country with a twenty-year-old hippie, but I’d saved some money and was itching to break out with a trusty dog at my side. I found an ad for a litter of six-week-old German shepherd dog mixes in the newspaper and bought a male for five dollars. I named him Guido.

Wolf’s induction letter arrived with his report-for-duty date earlier than my graduation, so he drove to Montreal alone and stayed with Viv and Doug. When I flew up to join him the day after I graduated, I sat in a window seat looking down at the blanket of clouds and the endless blue sky. Every muscle in my body relaxed as I breathed deeply in relief at achieving my goal of getting away from my parents. Six hundred miles per hour felt perfect for the freedom that I assumed was ahead.

Coming on August 13!

Chapter 28 Tripping continues the flight to freedom with adventures in heresy, rock and roll, and LSD.