13. Illegal activities

Glitter, greed, and the masks we wear

Hello friends,

When I was about 32 years old, I met a man at a party who told me he worked for the government. He was reluctant to reveal what he did, and after some probing, he told me that he was an FBI agent.

I met his revelation with a stunned silence as a wave of stress washed over me. Was he going to arrest me? Certainly I was illegal somehow. My thoughts turned to the last time I smoked pot—I couldn’t remember. But I had been around pot at Phish shows and other concerts. Every month or more, I stood in clouds of pot smoke at the Shoreline Amphitheater, the Fillmore, the Great American Music Hall, surrounded by people on all kinds of drugs. I had already revealed to him that I was a fan of live music; certainly he knew what happened at these places.

As the awareness dawned on me that I had nothing illegal on my person, in my bloodstream, or even in my apartment, I was able to continue the conversation. My horrified pause was a lingering effect of growing up in a household marked by constant illegal drug use.

13. Stuck

The winter of 1984-1985 was a dark one. Scotty didn’t have steady work—he freelanced as a carpenter and started to trade in large bags of weed and boxes of white powder that came in the mail. The alcohol and drug use increased as the seasonal depression set in—the real reason he preferred to spend winters down south. New people started coming over for 20 minutes and leaving with little zip-loc bags containing the 1980s drug of choice: cocaine.

Behind Scotty’s constant peddling burned a desire to escape to a place like Grenada, where, apparently, there was gold to mine. He hadn’t given up on gold, but the inside of his drug-addled mind was filled with chaos that would last more than a year until the law finally stepped in (hence my visceral fear of the FBI agent).

My mother held us together. She worked behind the counter at the Swiftwater General Store three miles down the hill, ringing up beer, cigarettes, and snacks for the locals. The owners had two young children whom I sometimes babysat, making $2 an hour.

I used my earnings to buy stickers. I obsessed over the products of Mrs. Grossman’s Sticker Company (in San Rafael, CA, five miles from where I now live!), Sanydlion, Lisa Frank, coveting the latest Pegasuses, bunnies, and unicorns leaping over rainbows. The stickers connected me to popular culture, as we didn’t have a TV, nor was MTV even possible in our remote location without an expensive 8-foot diameter satellite dish.

By this point, we had an indoor shower in the basement Scotty built the previous summer, but going outside was the only way to get there. My hair would freeze on the way in from a shower. Using the outhouse, even with its stained glass window, heat lamp, and padded toilet seat, was an unpleasant reminder of our poverty—which at this point seemed to me a deliberate choice—even as Scotty dreamed out loud about riches to be found in other places.

The Boudreaults, who had traveled with us to Arizona, had moved to Sonoma County in Northern California, where Pat got a union job operating heavy equipment. Marian Boudreault and a pen pal matched to me by my 8th-grade English teacher at Haverhill Academy sent me stickers from California. I was entranced by the idea of a different life of living in a town with places to go and stores full of more stickers than I could imagine. I was being bullied (sometimes violently) by two boys, which sometimes made my life at school, or on the way home from school, a living hell.

Scotty saw my sticker collection haphazardly organized into envelopes, and suggested I put them in coin collectors’ pouches, which turned out to be the perfect size for stickers. I was so proud of my sticker collection, but no one else really cared about it. Tending to my stickers (and not sticking them on anything) was an obsessive-compulsive attempt to find evidence that my dreams could, and maybe would, come true.

My favorite sticker was the Lisa Frank clown mask on the top right of the picture above. In it, I could imagine all the sadness behind the smile, the depth of despair inside the attempt to put on a colorful, cheerful face, the escape into schoolwork and books as something finite I could hold onto that offered the promise of a better life than the one I was living. That clown said it all. Wear the mask as long as you need to.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one living a lie in the glitz of the 1980s: even the Lisa Frank company was reeling in its own shadows. Just watch Glitter and Greed: The Lisa Frank Story on Amazon Prime.

What’s a significant memory (or impression) of 1980s glitz? How did you grow past it?

Everything is just a phase

I take comfort in knowing that even when something like MTV seemed so big and important, the cultural moment passed. So too will our current moment. Looking at this Art Deco mural at the Smith Rafael Film Center last week reminded me that the present moment—things that seem right (or wrong) at the time—always pass into the archives of history and our experiences. The sisterhood of women will hold each other up.

May we learn the lessons from these times so that we can create a brighter future for all.

Love, Lee Ann