Lips Unsealed Read online

  We worried about whether he was going to make it home, and if so, what kind of shape he was going to be in. We only let ourselves think of two choices, bad or worse, though all of us knew there was another possibility, a drunk-driving accident. But that was too terrible to consider.

  After doing the dishes, my mom paced the living room, chain-smoking cigarettes and listening for the sound of his truck. The TV was always on in the background, but somehow she could hear his motor from half a mile away. I waited in bed, listening for the same sound. Every so often I tiptoed out of bed and spied on my mom through the hallway door.

  I had to bite my tongue because more than anything, what I wanted to ask was “Do you think Dad is coming home soon?”

  By this time I referred to Walt as Dad—and still do to this day. But I resisted saying anything and always made it back into bed before my mom sensed my presence. I continued to wait. Sometimes it was hours, and other times I lost track of how long I waited in bed. Then when I did finally hear him, I braced myself for the inevitable fight he had with my mother.

  She was ready, too—not because she liked to fight or had contentious fiber in her body, because she didn’t. But he came in angry and short-tempered and put her through such worry every night that she needed to yell back at him or she’d go crazy. Their voices ripped through the nervous silence that had settled over the house, and no matter how tightly I squeezed my pillow over my head, it wasn’t enough to block out their back-and-forth.

  My dad’s tirades never carried into our room, thank goodness. If he did open the door, it was only to poke his head in and make sure all of us were asleep. My eyes were squeezed tight.

  In the morning, I climbed out of bed and looked for my mom in the kitchen, pretending that none of the yelling the night before had happened. She pretended the same thing. My way of communicating that I knew what had happened was trying to help her as much as possible. I spent all day attempting to get that message across to her. I fed the babies, changed diapers, and helped in the ways I could.

  My dad wasn’t drunk every night, but it was often enough that it left me with the impression that it was more often than not. Nor did he and my mom scream at each other every night, but they did it enough of the time so that I expected it to happen. Each day was a walk through a minefield. Even when there was calm, I didn’t trust it, and as much as I hated it when they fought, at least it relieved the stress of anticipation.

  With his quick temper, my dad lacked certain basic parenting skills, such as patience. He was of the old-fashioned school that believed in spanking children, and not only that, he seemed to think children should be spanked regularly. My mom looked the other way as we screamed. I don’t know if she condoned such punishment, but once, after I complained, she said that she had read that a popular TV talk-show host also spanked his kids, as if to say that made it okay.

  Butch and I made light of the beatings we received by comparing the red marks on our skin or the number of lashes. It was our way of surviving. But beneath the jokes and the half smiles were lots of pain and tears. Butch came into my room one night with red, puffy eyes and a crooked smile on his face. He sniffled.

  “Twenty-seven,” he said.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Yeah. He hit me twenty-seven times—a new record!”

  Deep down I resented my mom for putting us in a situation where we were subjected to Walt’s volatility and violence. I don’t know what I expected her to do, but I didn’t think the way he treated us was right, and I wondered why she didn’t say anything to him. Maybe she did in private. I just wished she had done more.

  There were good times too. We would pile in the camper of my dad’s truck, all of us kids crammed together, and we would go on weekend camping trips to Santa Barbara and San Diego. We enjoyed both the beach and the forests. There were so many of us and we were so poor that between the lack of space and the scrimping, we were either fighting or laughing hysterically. I remember more laughter than anything else.

  It was always a relief to be away from home and setting up a tent in the outdoors. My dad was usually sober, and I loved having space of my own, something that was in short supply in our small, crowded home. It was liberating to run around. It felt good to exhale, and I swear to this day I have tasted few things as delicious as the bologna sandwiches my mom made on Wonder bread smeared with French’s mustard.

  My mom was a good sport and she knew those trips brought out the best in my dad. He was able to loosen up and relax. It was as if he left all of his demons at home. My mom was a very religious woman, and I wonder if, as she went to sleep on those nights when we were under the stars, she felt like God was answering her prayers.

  Her faith was extremely important to her. It got her through the worst of times. Every Sunday, she sat through sermons and found hope and strength in the promise of God’s love. It was a beautiful thing for her, something I didn’t appreciate at the time.

  To me, church was a big bother. Every Sunday morning, my mom dressed all of us kids in matching outfits that she had sewn, and she marched us like a mother duck with her ducklings into the little church around the corner from our house. I felt like I was on parade. Everyone went except my dad. My mom always had a reason why he couldn’t go, as well as a reason why we had to.

  When I think about it now, I am pretty sure my mom didn’t want my dad there. She was happy that he stayed home. She wanted those Sundays to herself, to be able to sit quietly with her children and feel the presence of God, hoping that He would steer all of us to salvation.

  I found it all a turn-off, starting when my mother had me baptized when I was eight. I didn’t want to do it, and I was doubly and triply repulsed after I was baptized Belinda Kurczeski. That was Walt’s last name, not mine. What was wrong with my name, Belinda Carlisle?

  Despite this, I attended Sunday school until I was in my teens and hated every minute of it. I always wished I were someplace else. I can still picture myself going home and taking off my Sunday school clothes as if I was shedding a skin. I also tried to forget everything I had heard. I didn’t buy those stories. I didn’t care about what was going to happen to me after I was dead.

  I wanted to be saved now.

  two

  COOL JERK

  ON THE PLAYGROUND at Burbank’s Bret Harte Elementary School, I looked like any other kid my age scampering around. But in fifth grade, I had one of those moments that changes some girls for a lifetime—I discovered style. My aunt gave me a box of hand-me-downs that a friend had given her. It was full of old sequined square-dance dresses and matching shoes, including an eye-popping hot-pink outfit that I immediately wore to school.

  I didn’t care if my classmates stared or made fun. How could they not stare? When I put on that dress, I thought I looked like a beautiful princess. It was better than being me.

  In sixth grade, I had only one so-called normal dress, a black and white polka-dot pinafore with a ribbon around the waist. My mom bought it on special at Sears and I loved it as soon as she brought it home. I wore it as much as possible, along with the colorful outfits that I got in the annual delivery of hand-me-downs. During recess one day a girl came up to me and put me down for wearing the same outfit nearly every day. I can still hear her high-pitched voice: “You only have one outfit! What’s wrong with you?”

  I walked away, hurt and humiliated. I felt like she had glimpsed a part of the reality I tried to hide, my family’s lack of money. The last thing I wanted was for someone to know the truth about me. As for the truth about the way I dressed, I was unable to express such complex feelings then, but slipping into those colorful outfits let me flee into a world of imagination, a place where I was freed from reality and kept from feeling like everyone else.

  I was also the class clown and one of those girls who was good at sports. I was built like a barrel, but with skinny legs that carried me across the ball field and track as fast as, if not faster than, most of the boys. I ignored m
y classmates when they referred to me as fatso and Belimpa. Ha-ha-ha, I laughed. You can’t hurt me. But they did.

  I signed up for anything and everything that would get me out of the house. Brownies, Girl Scouts, ice-skating, sports—I did it all. At age ten I developed an interest in music. It was another escape, maybe the best and easiest I ever discovered. I spend countless hours at my friend Christina Badala’s house, listening to music. We laid on her floor with our ears next to her stereo speakers. We tuned in to the popular AM radio station 93 KHJ, following it as if it was our religion. We thought of DJs Charlie Tuna, the Real Don Steele, and Humble Harv as evangelists who taught us about the Stylistics, Cat Stevens, and the Animals.

  The first album I owned was Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ classic. I won it at a bobby sox softball tournament. At the time, I liked the photo on the cover more than the actual collection of songs. I needed time to grow into the rest of Brian Wilson’s masterpiece. It was a little out-there for a ten-year-old. Now it’s one of my all-time favorites.

  I didn’t have enough money to buy more albums until high school. But every so often I scraped together enough change for a 45. My favorite was the 5th Dimension’s version of “Aquarius.” It was the first single I bought, and I like it today as much as I did back then.

  In those days, I was into The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and Here Come the Brides. I wanted to be Marcia Brady, and I had crushes on David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman. What can I say? I rode around on a Sting-Ray bike and had pigtails. I wasn’t Miss Sophisticate.

  But all that began to change in August 1969 when Charles Manson and his followers murdered director Roman Polanski’s beautiful and young pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and numerous others. By the time they went on trial the following summer, I was hooked on the macabre drama and obsessively followed the headline accounts of their horrific crimes.

  At one time, the Manson family had lived in Topanga Canyon, which wasn’t too far from our house. Their Helter Skelter bloodbath also wasn’t that far away from us, maybe a twenty-five-minute drive. Both locations were close enough that my parents and our neighbors thought there might be more murderous hippies roaming the streets, or copycats, and they started locking their doors. Before the murders, they didn’t think about it.

  I couldn’t get enough of Manson and his so-called family. I was fascinated when I learned about Manson’s foray into pop music: that his evil had been inspired by the Beatles song “Helter Skelter,” and his life had also intersected with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson.

  I got out my copy of Pet Sounds and looked at Wilson, wondering how he could have gotten involved with Manson. Later, I learned he had picked up two girls who were hitchhiking, and they turned out to be members of Manson’s family. Soon Manson and a bunch of girls were living in Wilson’s house. He introduced Manson to the Beach Boys producer Terry Melcher, who rented his home to Polanski, and that was where the murders took place.

  It was weird, creepy, scary, terrible, and about the most interesting stuff I had ever come across. My mom scolded me when she saw me reading the stories in the paper. She didn’t approve of my fascination with Manson. She probably feared I was being brainwashed when I stared at his picture. His gaze was powerful; those eyes certainly did cast a spell, and I can understand now how he was able to lure weak-minded women under his influence.

  I especially got into the trial of Susan Atkins, a dark-haired flower child who was convicted of participating in eight of the murders. My mom forbade me to follow her story. She said it was too much for a child. But I snuck the paper into my room at night and read all the articles about her.

  A year later, another murder was in the headlines. It was New Year’s Day 1972, and Pete Duel, who costarred with Ben Murphy on the hit series Alias Smith and Jones, was found dead of a gunshot wound in his canyon home. I loved that show, and he was one of my favorite actors. Although his death was later ruled a suicide, I assumed it was a Manson-type slaughter of another actor.

  I wanted to see the scene myself, and without telling my mom, I took off on my bicycle, intending to ride to his home. I didn’t know that it was fifteen miles from my house, maybe more than that. It was also up in the hills. I pedaled most of the day, but never got close. I had no idea where I was going.

  That was one of the last times I spent all day riding my bike. All of a sudden it seemed like something a kid would do, and I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. I didn’t feel like an adult either. I didn’t know what I felt like, other than different. I was changing. My hormones had kicked into gear and were reshaping me in ways that my mom never took time to explain.

  I got my period, started to develop physically, and experienced moods when I just wanted to put on my headphones, listen to music, and be left alone. I traded in my bike and instead went over to my friend Christina’s and hid out in her guest house, where we burned incense and talked about which Beatle we liked best.

  I was walking across the street one day, heading to a neighbor’s house, when a boy who lived on the block and another guy whom I recognized from school pointed at me and yelled, “Hey look! There goes fatso!” A year earlier, I might have ignored them or run over and beat them up. Now those same words felt like a mortal wound. I stopped and nearly lost my breath, and when I caught it again, I burst into tears and ran home.

  My mom, rather than telling me that I looked wonderful the way I was and to ignore those nasty boys, suggested that I go on a diet and lose weight. She offered to help. She was always on a diet even though she didn’t need to be, and so she put me on the same program. She gave me a calorie-counter book and told me to keep my daily intake under 1,200. Thus began a ritual familiar to many girls—endless days of starvation, frustration, and disappointment in myself when I went off my diet.

  Around that same time, we moved from Burbank to a slightly larger place in Thousand Oaks. My dad had spent months building it. I was midway through seventh grade when we packed up—not a great time to change schools. But I tried to make the best of it when I entered Colina Junior High. I told myself it was an opportunity to get away from all the kids who called me Belimpa or fatso and reinvent myself.

  I stuck to a diet, traded my princess dresses for cutoff overalls and knee socks (think early Linda Ronstadt), and twisted my hair into braids. I lost about forty pounds by the end of the school year. My friend Christina couldn’t get over it. She saw me for the first time in months when I visited my grandparents, who had moved into our old house, and she just stared at me, amazed, impressed, and maybe a little jealous of my new look.

  “Oh my God, Belinda,” she said. “You’re hot!”

  At Colina, I joined the track team and ran the hundred-yard dash. I was interested in boys but never comfortable around them. When I did have a crush, I kept it to myself. I carried around too much shame and fear to ever share my feelings and risk rejection. Then there was another problem: What if the boy liked me? I couldn’t imagine bringing someone home to meet my parents. My dad’s drinking made life in the new house as unpredictable and chaotic as it had been in Burbank.

  I barely confided in my new best friend, Jean Olson, an outgoing, good-looking girl whose boobs had miraculously arrived a couple years before the rest of us were out of training bras. They gave her a personality and a presence. I was barely a year or two past believing that storks delivered babies. I’m serious. Even though my mom popped out a baby every couple years, I was ignorant of how it happened—that is, until Jean set me straight about that, and more.

  And some things I learned on my own. The following summer I went on my Girl Scout troop’s annual overnight camping trip to the beach. Every year we went someplace up or down the coast. This time we camped at Carpinteria, a surfing village just south of Santa Barbara. There was a boys’ camp down the beach from us, a pretty far way down, but not too far that we didn’t wander over to see one another. One boy took a liking to me.

  I enjoyed the attention. We chatted, flirted, and chased each other up
and down the beach. It was extremely innocent fun. We didn’t even attempt a kiss, though secretly I wished we had.

  After we returned home, my mom got a call from the troop leader. She said I had not conducted myself in the manner appropriate to a Girl Scout and therefore was not welcome to return to the troop. Not welcome? That was a strange way of saying I was kicked out of Girl Scouts. Apparently she went into a little more detail with my mom, but none of it was true.

  I was furious. Jean told me not to worry, and she was right. I didn’t care about being kicked out of the troop or that the leader had told an outright lie about me. It simply paled next to the realization that a boy had found me attractive. I was confused by the whole thing—but in a great way.

  I wished that had translated into self-confidence, but it didn’t. However, I did feel a certain something, a difference in the way I approached the world and felt about myself. Now I see that I was at that point in a girl’s life when she realizes she possesses certain powers that make her different, powers that will beguile the boys and turn even the strongest of them into jelly if used properly.

  In other words, I was slowly but surely becoming a woman. It takes a lifetime to figure out what that means and how to put that wonderful gift of fate to good use. It doesn’t come with an instruction book; at least it didn’t when I was that age. Instead, I gathered information from girlfriends and books. I went from Jean telling me where babies really came from to stumbling upon books about witchcraft and trying to conjure up powers without making a fool of myself—or at least too much of a fool.

  Jean was amused by my interest in black magic. Why wouldn’t she have been? Her natural gifts had already taught her how to cast powerful spells simply by wearing a halter top. Jean also taught me how to smoke. Along with another girlfriend, Bonnie, we snuck down to the far corner of the football field between classes and puffed away while listening to Carly Simon albums on a portable tape player.