Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [52]
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe that was still sharing a roof with my own, my parents were drowning in television and newspaper stories full of ominous warnings about drug use, sex, and disease among people my age. They saw my destiny forever ruined by hallucinogen-induced brain damage and unwanted love-in babies. And although I’d never so much as smoked a joint, as far as my parents could tell, I was right on the verge of being lost forever in the quicksand of heroin addiction.
“The only thing I ask of you,” my mother said during one particularly hysterical rant, which began after she read an issue of Life magazine about the growing popularity of cohabitation, “is that you never live with someone and not be married.”
In that one breath she not only mapped the course for my entire adulthood but also destroyed her own credibility, by having repeatedly “asked” many things of me even earlier that very day.
As time went on, my parents became increasingly paranoid. Everything I said or did seemed, to my mother, like an early warning sign of some kind of substance abuse. But the more my father used the phrase “beardo weirdo” to describe someone I had a crush on, the more I knew I was on exactly the right track. If they were against what I was doing, then I was for it. Whatever “it” was.
Although I had never done any of the things my parents feared, the way I saw it, my life with them was its own hellish torment. So the more they lectured me about drugs and pregnancy and VD, the more I resolved to prove them wrong. They didn’t know me. They would never know me. And the more they claimed to know me, the wronger they would be.
Therefore I turned my back on sex and drugs and decided to remain a virgin. This put me at cross-purposes with my carefully cultivated new image as a budding artistic visionary, dressed in purple and swathed in enigmatic beaded artifacts from San Francisco.
The irony was not totally lost on me. I worried constantly that the lack of sex, drugs, and depravity in my life was going to jeopardize my future as an artist. After all, the kind of unconventional rock-and-roll free spirit I was using as my model embraced all the things I was now rejecting. “I wonder if someone can come from a background like mine and still be a creative person?” I fretted in my diary during my junior year of high school. “Sometimes I look at my life and I say, No, Merrill … you can never become anything special. Why? Because you don’t fit the pattern of successful people. Look at your family. No one else in your boring normal life exhibits any great talent. Today I read about John Lennon and his precocious adolescent sex life and I thought, ‘I probably need to have a real love affair in order to become a real artist.’ ”
What was a girl to do?
My short-term plan was to continue to affect an air of jaded world-weariness and count on improper assumptions about me being made from the company I kept: a group of artistic kids—many of whom had already been busted for drugs, and most of whom were far more sexually experienced than I. So I kept my fingers crossed that, until I left home, I would benefit from guilt by association.
By the time I got to college,