The WOW Zone: Where Tears, Laughter and Hope Collide

I ONLY MEANT TO WET MY FEET

“Beware of guys with matchbook covers torn off at the end,” my father warned me as he walked away.

“What exactly does that mean, Daddy?”

He turned and, with a smirk that seemed to question my intelligence, said, “It means that they use drugs!”

“Use drugs! With a matchbook cover?”

“Yes!” Offering no more as he went to his next task.

Our “talk” about drugs was apparently over. I shrugged it off and thought, How stupid does he think I am? Does he think that even at seventeen years old, I don’t know anything? After all, I knew drugs were injected. I had seen the movie, The Man with the Golden Arm. Plus, I had seen junkies on the corner in front of the poolroom. They shoot dope into their veins. Boy, to be considered such a smart man, he sure is dumb about the things of life.

It was clear to me that I was going to have to learn things on my own—just like I had learned through being raped three years earlier that men were not to be trusted; not even fathers. After all, they were men first, and fathers second—only out of a sense of duty.

Of course, neither my father nor mother knew about my being raped; but then there was a lot about me they didn’t know. I never got the sense that they wanted to know anything about my inner reality. I was their dream-daughter and I lived my nightmares in private, like a “good” Anderson was taught.

After graduation from high school, I started going out almost nightly to what we called the Go-Go’s: dances with live bands in rented halls. Usually beginning at 10:00 p.m. and lasting at least until 2:00 a.m., the dances were an all-consuming lifestyle that consisted of fabulous outfits, everyone trying to outdo the other, luxury cars, dancing to the point of near-exhaustion, and trying to “pull” the guys with the nicest cars and sharpest clothes. It didn’t matter that they weren’t about anything progressive and wholesome. Most of us had petty jobs that afforded credit cards to accumulate the clothes and most of the guys sold drugs or were involved with some other criminal activity. It was living life on the edge, which, for reasons I didn’t understand then, appealed to me.

After the Go-Go’s, I went to after-hours joints where the guys gambled and the girls watched, ordered bootlegged drinks, and shopped through the various “hot”—as in stolen—wares, especially the clothes that were needed to maintain the lifestyle.

By sunup it was time to go home and since I worked a day job, it would mean taking an hour or so nap, showering, and then heading off to work. By the afternoon break, I would be so sleepy I could barely stay awake. That is until I was introduced to NoDoz, a stimulant that warded off sleep. A few of those and I could get through the rest of the workday and then go home and get ready for the Go-Go again.

Soon I was taking NoDoz like it was candy and using credit cards to charge clothes like I never had to pay for them.

I felt discombobulated most of my life—long before my teen years, so I was ripe for what happened when I was twenty years old.

Early one weekday morning after the Go-Go, a group of friends and I went to another friend’s house for breakfast. There was a guy that interested me in the kitchen. I walked toward him and asked him to light my cigarette. He pulled out a book of matches. As he opened the cover and struck the match, I noticed that the cover was torn off on the end.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the matchbook.

“What?”

“Let me see those matches.”