Idiot Page 3

  Things got a bit more out of hand when Jack and I teamed up. We would go to the department store, take clothes into the dressing room, and then layer on everything we wanted to steal. We’d put our regular clothes back on over them and just walk out. Jack was the worst shoplifter ever. When he was nervous, he’d get these anxious, shifty eyes as he waddled out of the store with three different-colored jean hems peeking out at his ankles.

  But surprisingly, we never got caught there! We were invincible. It was possible that we felt so invincible because of all the weed we were smoking. When we were high, we were totally delusional. We thought we could do anything. But that’s just one theory.

  One day, my mom gave us twenty dollars to go buy baby clothes for the neighbor’s newborn. Jack and I took one look at each other. Weed money! We went straight to our dealer’s house and spent the money, because—honestly—you do a better job when you don’t have a backup plan.

  After that, we walked inside Gymboree like confident, unremarkable adults. I even had Jack wear a pair of sunglasses to help with the shifty eyes. While Jack chatted up the cashier, I slipped a Winnie the Pooh onesie under my jacket. Then we were out of there, no problem. Brilliant! After a series of high fives, Jack and I absolutely had to smoke a bowl in the car to celebrate. We had talent.

  We arrived home very high and handed my mother the onesie, still on the hanger, with no bag or receipt. A bit of paranoia was starting to kick in. She examined the garment and eyed both of us. Oh shit. She knows she knows she knows . . . don’t make eye contact . . . she knows sh—

  “It’s too big, Laura.”

  “Huh?”

  “This is a six-to-eight-month size. I said zero-to-six-months size.”

  “The baby is going to grow into it, right?”

  “Do you want her to think that we think her baby is fat?”

  I was too high to even comprehend that last sentence. I stared at her, squinting my swollen eyes.

  “Just exchange it. Please.”

  “No problemo, mamacita.” I grabbed the onesie back, and Jack and I walked out of there.

  You can’t return a stolen item, so we’d just have to steal again . . . twenty minutes after the first time. Is this what they refer to as “spiraling out of control”? Perhaps!

  We made it back into the Gymboree. On this caper, there was no time to chat up the cashier. We had to get in and out, unnoticed.

  I lunged to pull Jack’s sunglasses over his eyes.

  “Stop—stop it! Don’t touch my hair!”

  The cashier spotted us. “Oh hey! Back again so soon.”

  Jack panicked. “Yeah, well! We had some second thoughts and we know our little diva is going to want a selection of—”

  “I’m hungry let’s go!” I interrupted, onesie already in my purse.

  “Byeeeee!” Jack waved and we were gone.

  The cashier watched us leave, confused. This whole debacle just confirmed that we were geniuses. Maybe our teachers didn’t see it, and our grades didn’t reflect it, but we were fucking smart and we were going to smoke another bowl to celebrate. But then the bowl was clogged. Good thing we had the wrong-size onesie to clean it out!

  In our super high state, we totally forgot to discard the resin-covered onesie. My mom found it a couple days later in the back of the car. Or more likely, she probably smelled the stale drugs first. Finding out that the source of the smell was a Winnie the Pooh resin-smeared onesie was just the cherry on top, I’m sure!

  That sounds bad, I agree. But I want to clarify that I wasn’t the “bad seed” in a perfect town. As I got older, the polished veneer of Downers Grove started to fade away, blemish by blemish. Suburbs aren’t immune from bad things! Some people there were just completely fucked up.

  At the high school down the road, the school librarian, (the mother of a friend of mine, I might add), fucked like seventeen different high school boys. She’d leave notes in the books for them, detailing when and where to meet. Honestly, it sounds like she got the idea from a terrible rom-com. People started to notice something was awry when all the boys at school started clamoring to hang out in the library. Like, how is there a line to get in? And then the boys started gossiping with one another.

  “Yo dude, don’t tell anyone, but I banged the librarian!”

  “Wait. I banged the librarian.”

  “Wait . . . but . . . so did I.” Aaaaand cue terrible moment of recognition that everyone had banged her.

  But back to my story. I love my liberal hippie parents, and I love the values I was raised with, but looking back it’s clear I could have used a bit more structure. A few more consequences. Well, I guess they DID tell me to stop getting arrested. And the rest of the world DID try to slam me with consequences over and over again, whether it was my grades, or detention, or getting arrested for marijuana possession. Geez. Okay, maybe I just didn’t listen.

  When I was fifteen, a few of my friends and I rented a motel room so that we could party in PEACE. Also known as . . . a place we could get wasted and high without our parents finding out. Things started to get rowdy, and soon enough, the cops knocked on our door. GREAT.

  “We’ve received a noise complaint about your gathering here and we’re gonna need you to quiet down or disperse.”

  Now, I was wasted. At this time, I didn’t know liquid courage was a thing. I thought I was just really fucking brave all the time. I was going to save us from the cops.

  I’ll have you know that I did learn a few things in school. I found my psychology class particularly interesting. The better I knew how other people thought, the more easily I could steal and lie and get away with it.

  The cops were only there on a noise complaint, but I grabbed my purse and slurred at them: “You want to check my purse?? Go ahead! Check it! Check it! I have nothing to hide!”

  I smiled smugly. They were NEVER gonna check my purse, BECAUSE I asked them to. That’s what reverse psychology is! The two cops looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Okay.”

  They grabbed my purse and started to sift through it. The first cop lifted out a baggie of weed.

  “Aaaaand . . . You’re under arrest.”

  He enjoyed his job way too much.

  After that, they made me go to something called Self-Management Skills class. Have you seen that show Scared Straight? It was exactly that. A bunch of other bad kids and I did a full tour of a women’s jail. And—oh cool!—the librarian I mentioned earlier was there, serving her eight years!

  “Hey Mrs. Renworth! What’s up!” She didn’t respond.

  After the tour we were separated into prison cells in order to be screamed at individually by a prisoner. I got paired with an ex-junky with especially colorful language and not enough teeth to ably pronounce all the words she was yelling at me. I came out of that program with a detailed knowledge of the prison’s layout and a bunch of new drug connects and friends that liked getting into trouble. It was awesome.

  Through it all, I had a plan. I was going to graduate high school (although even graduating itself seemed a bit unnecessary at times), and then I was going to move to LA to be an actress. For me, it was written in the stars ever since the moment that I saw Maggie’s older sister in a high school play!

  I’ll have you know I was good at acting. How did I know at only age fifteen, you ask? It’s a valid question. Downers Grove was fairly small, and I had only done high school theater and speech. But I knew I had a knack for making people laugh and making people believe me. I just combined my desire to do illegal things with my ability to become anyone.

  In the absence of an actual agent or manager or sitcom to star in, the world was my stage, and I was casting myself.

  My friend Andy Junk and I did theater and improv together, and we shared the desire to take acting to the next level. One time we went to a real estate open house in town pretending to be a pair of southern newlyweds, complete with terrible accents. We stared at every aspect of the house, acting really impress
ed because it was so much nicer than our respective mamas’ houses.

  The bubbly real estate agent hopped over to us and started to chat us up.

  “Don’t you two love the house?”

  I smiled at her. “Yes, it’s so much nicer than Mama’s house back in Georgia!”

  The real estate agent hugged her clipboard to her body as she leaned into the conversation. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear that! What part of Georgia are you from? I have family in Atlanta.”

  “Down in . . . near the mountain—”

  The agent nodded. “Do you two have any kids?”

  Then, SIMULTANEOUSLY:

  Andy responded: “Nope!”

  While I responded: “Six!”

  We looked at each other, wide eyed, struggling to explain. “Um . . . I . . .”

  Andy stammered, “I . . . don’t have . . . per se . . .”

  I finally thought of it. “Sorry. It’s just a sore spot for us. The six are mine. I have six kids. From different men. Andy here is just recently in the picture.” I grinned.

  “Yes! She’s a bit of a whore,” Andy confirmed with a big thumbs-up.

  “Oh . . . kay.” She left us alone after that. Success, kind of!

  Another time, Jack and I wanted cigarettes, but we were both underage and had no money. Just a few hurdles there. I’ve always felt that where there’s a will there’s a way. (Is it still a positive attitude if you’re using it to do bad things?) Think, Laura, think: How are we going to get cigarettes without getting carded?

  I’ve got it!

  I drove us to the gas station and parked off to the side. I turned to Jack. “Walk into the store, and when I come in, pretend like you don’t know me.”

  I looked in the mirror and smeared my eyeliner down my cheeks to look distressed, as if I had been crying.

  Jack smiled. “Ooooh, she’s getting messy for this one!” And then, quieter, “Um . . . Is there a plan or—”

  “Go go go!” I pushed him out of the car.

  I waited three minutes and then sprinted into the gas station convenience store, out of breath, and started sobbing onto the cashier’s counter. Jack was at the pop machine, filling up a soda while he watched me, wide eyed.

  “I don’t know what to do! Oh my God, oh my God—my boyfriend just left me! He just drove away with my ID and all my money and everything I own!” I was bawling and hyperventilating.

  The cashier looked very taken aback. He leaned as far away as he could from my sobbing body, and reached out from a distance to pat me lightly on the arm. “Oh, ma’am . . . I am so sorry . . . Is there anything I can do? I’m so—please stop crying onto the counter, ma’am. What can I do?”

  I sniffled and looked up at him gratefully.

  “Well . . . I could use some menthol lights.”

  “Yes, yes okay, here.” The cashier grabbed them for me.

  “And a lighter. Thanks. No, no, the pink one.”

  The cashier grabbed that for me, too. I sniffled gratefully. “Bless you. I feel so much better.”

  “No problem, ma’am, I’m so sorry to hear about your boyfriend—”

  “Thanks!” I waved and walked away. He didn’t even card me.

  Once we were outside, Jack grabbed my arm. “BITCH, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? That deserved an Oscar!”

  “I know, right?” Then I lit up both our cigarettes.

  It’s true that I did things like this to get what I wanted, but I was also addicted to the thrill of it. The adrenaline, the risk. I think it’s my addict personality. It was dangerous, high stakes, and there was always something appealing about that to me. It’s most people’s worst nightmare, but it was what I thrived on.

  Many years later, in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, I met a woman who worked in the ER of a children’s hospital. She said to me, casually, “Yeah, children come in every day, age twelve and attempted suicide! And I have about five minutes to save their lives, if that.” She sighed dreamily, “I love my job!” I just stared at her, dumbfounded. Holy shit, right? How can a person live with that kind of pressure, let alone love it? But she thrived in those life-or-death, high-stakes situations. At least she channeled her addiction to that thrill into something positive. Saving lives is a slightly more productive use of that energy than stealing menthol lights.

  Theater was my only source of relief at high school. I loved it and I tried hard during that class. I had the opposite perspective of most of my fellow classmates: the ticket to my future was not in chemistry or math or science—it was in theater rehearsals and the plays we put on. I took these seriously. Because of that, my theater coach, Mrs. Heiteen, was the only adult at school that liked me and saw potential in me—even when my GPA was falling down faster than a freshman doing shots.

  During my senior year, when all my friends started getting into college and making plans for their futures, Mrs. Heiteen took a look at my grades. She approached me, very angry.

  “Damn it, Laura. You fucked yourself out of 90 percent of the colleges in the country. And is that weed I smell in your purse?”

  She was correct on both counts. No college was going to let an idiot teenager with a multiple-arrest history, failing grades, and a penchant for drunken idiocy onto their campus. And there was a lot of weed in my purse.

  I truly didn’t care, because I was going to be an actress—there was no plan B! Luckily, I was very good at it. Because of that, it was the only thing I put effort into, besides finding drugs and places to do drugs. Let’s just say it was my only positive obsession.

  I had joined the speech team during my freshman year. Speech is like competitive acting. You perform eight minutes of a play as one person or a duet, and then eventually compete with kids at other high schools in the area. If you’re good enough, you go to the state competition; and if you’re really, really good, you compete in nationals. It was a big deal, you guys. Especially to me.

  On the first day of speech, we did Humorous Duet Acting. Mrs. Heiteen paired me with Tina, this socially awkward girl with pants ever so slightly too short. Tina was one of the girls that The Twelve had chosen to bully in junior high. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to reach my comedic-genius potential with this dorky girl on my ass. We were going to have to rehearse together for months! So . . . fuck. Really, Mrs. Heiteen? Really?

  But I have never been more wrong. We worked together day after day, and I realized she was one of the most hilarious people I’ve ever met. She was sweet and witty and so smart. And I just fell in love with being her friend. We became so close after that.

  When I started taking speech seriously, it felt like I was working for my career to happen. I was memorizing the monologues I saw on television and in movies. I was trekking into the city with Andy Junk to take courses at The Second City. See? I knew how to focus . . . just not on US History. I tried my best in those Second City classes, but I still hated them. Even though comedy and acting were what I wanted to do, any sort of class made me feel stupid and not good enough to be there. Something about being in a class environment automatically made all my insecurities come out. I much preferred improv on the street with unsuspecting civilians.

  The annual speech competition came around. I wanted to be ready. There was a category called Original Comedy, where you play all the characters in a comedic eight-minute play that you wrote. This was MY territory. I wrote a piece called Pink Slip, about a group of oddball students who got detention. For the first time, I was doing well at something in school.

  I performed Pink Slip at regionals and won first place. Mrs. Heiteen ran up to me and gave me an awkward high five—the highest form of approval from her. I couldn’t stop smiling, holding my dinky medal. I remember thinking, Wait a second. Does . . . hard work . . . pay off????? Holy shit.

  At the same time, I was battling my need to get high. When I was winning speech, I was winning against my demons. I was still smoking and drinking, but I was balancing it with my work because I had something importa
nt to focus on.

  As the state competition got closer, Mrs. Heiteen became my personal coach—egging me on to focus, to practice, to stay clear. I could win this. She said I could; I knew I could. I was good, and people were finally going to see that. I would finally be on my way to the career I was meant for.

  And then . . .

  I won state. First place!

  There was only one more step. Taking on nationals.

  In the week leading up to nationals, I took a break from rehearsing and went out one night to dinner with Jack and our other friend, Kaylen. We were smoking cigarettes and chatting. Side note: Did you know smoking was allowed indoors in 2004? Maybe that was just a Midwest thing, but there was a smoking section at the Omega Diner.

  One of the teachers at my school was there, too. She saw me smoking and reported me to the school.

  The next day in theater class Mrs. Heiteen approached me, looking more angry than usual. Or maybe it was sad. She told me I was disqualified from nationals for smoking last night, in the fucking diner. Of all the substances to be disqualified for, it was cigarettes—the least illegal of my vices!

  I was disqualified from the one thing I had going for me.

  I didn’t cry about it. I got high with Jack instead.

  Mrs. Heiteen still made me go to nationals in Salt Lake City, Utah, just to watch. I saw every other student perform, wishing I was in their place, knowing I could have rocked this. Then I convinced some Mormon dudes to buy Tina and me beer. We got drunk with them in our hotel room.

  Speech was the one thing I had been holding on to . . . and I felt like it let go of me. So I let go, too. I began to spiral.

  I was fifteen when I got high and drunk and had sex with a guy who was eighteen, at least, and also high on ’shrooms. He was such an asshole.

  The room was pitch-black. It was his room. I told him to put a condom on, please. He said okay. He walked over to his nightstand. He opened the drawer and then closed it. He paused, putting it on. Then he had sex with me.

  A few weeks later I started throwing up in the mornings, and not because I was hungover. Fuck!

  At the same time, I was playing the pregnant Virgin Mary in the school play. No joke. At rehearsals I had to wear a fake pregnancy belly over my actual pregnant belly. Talk about too real.