All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [105]
At first, Dad seemed happy to have me back in his life. He had begun producing a syndicated cable TV show about horse racing called Starting Gate and was now splitting his time between an apartment in Lexington and the house in Ocala. I had no idea that in the meantime his recreational drug use had progressed into serious addiction, something over which he no longer had any control.
So my move to his apartment in Lexington was the equivalent of jumping from the frying pan directly into the fire. I enrolled in the Sayre School, the private academy where I had also attended fifth grade, in downtown Lexington, which was several miles from Dad’s apartment. He stuck around for the first couple of days, driving me to and from school in his Porsche 911 and nursing a strong cup of coffee as we listened to Morning Edition on National Public Radio. He seemed hung over and distant in the mornings and restless, irritable, and discontented in the afternoons. Soon he made the first of many business trips to Florida, and I barely saw him most of the time. He would put a few dollars in an envelope and leave for weeks at a time. I didn’t tell anyone in my family that I was basically living alone. And I didn’t complain to my father. I simply adjusted to the new installment of “normal.”
My school was populated, or so it seemed, by wealthy, happy kids from safe, nurturing families who lived on horse farms and had two parents at home. My home life, on the other hand, was steeped in shame. The school did not offer transportation, so once again, I never had a ride. It was too far to walk. I dreaded the daily humiliation of calling around to friends who had licenses, trying to be cool while actually begging for someone, anyone, to take me to school.
When one of my friends finally expressed her exasperation at my persistent requests for rides, I was so ashamed that my spirit broke. She had said no, I didn’t have a ride, and I was unable to think of another way to get to school. I stayed home. The next morning I woke up, dressed, and ate, but then the crucial moment came, and I could not bring myself to call someone for a ride after yesterday’s abasement. The moment passed. I watched the clock. Classes would be starting now. Defeated, I took off my clothes and lay on the sofa, watching TV. All that week, day after day at home, my shame mounted. When I finally pulled myself together and went back to school an entire week later, the headmaster passed me in the hall. I coughed, a weak attempt to suggest I had been ill. Mr. Grunwald said to me derisively, “Nice try, Ashley.”
I have a lot of blackouts in my memory of that year, too. I still don’t know how I ever paid for food, much less went to and from the grocery store. I sat in my room alone, day after day, drawing houses so large that I had to tape pieces of paper together to accommodate my sketches, homes that I pretended were mine. I went through a period of obsessively calling posh boarding schools in the Northeast, acting out a long fantasy of pretending I could apply to, be accepted at, and pay for such a school. I remember several occasions when the person on the other end of the line believed I was my own parent. How right they were! Once I admitted that I was actually the student, and the admissions officer was alarmed. But that is as far as I or anyone else ever went to address my sad situation—with one notable and lifesaving exception.
Colleen was one of my next-door neighbors in the apartment complex that year. One day when I was out of clean clothes and trying to figure out how to do laundry without