by Cindi Pearce (Fri Feb 05, 2010)
My friend Lucy was a wild child. I am older than
she is and was in college during her reign of teenage terror. Lucy was a
late-in-life baby and she was hell-bent on hastening her elderly mother's
demise with her bad girl shenanigans. She was the topic du jour of many bridge club gatherings that my mother's
generation attended.
I was very much aware of her colorful antics, some
of which were legendary. Word travels fast in this tiny town and, even though I
was away at college, I heard about Lucy and her brash ballsiness. If there was
a taboo, she broke it. I admired her spunk from afar.
It wasn't until years and years later that we
established a friendship. I suppose it was inevitable. We'd always been aware
of each other yet hadn't 'known' each other. We clicked. Two odd ball
ducklings: Always going IN the OUT exit.
We both had f--k you hair and corkscrew brains. She
was, and is, incredibly smart, articulate and wickedly funny, but she wrestled
with life and didn't seem to be winning.
Early on, Lucy had committed the ultimate and
unforgivable faux pas: She got pregnant as an unwed teenager. ‘Just what she
deserved,' smirked the smug biddies, whose own daughters had made it through,
unscathed - meaning they didn't get caught. That's what happened to bad girls. Thirty-five years ago, there
was no way even a savvy chick like Lucy could swing that one in her favor.
When she finally kicked into gear, realizing that
she had better make some decisions, it was too late for an abortion. So she lay
low, temporarily dropped out of school, and had her baby. In a blink of an eye,
the baby was gone. She cried for three days straight.
After high school, she went to work for Larry Flynt,
the infamous publisher of ‘Hustler' magazine,
who was later shot and paralyzed. When she told me this, I just shook my head.
Only Lucy. By this time, she had already begun the process of shoving the
memory of her lost son into the dark, cavernous recesses of her troubled mind.
By God, she would go to work for a seedy albeit successful pornographer and
that would show ‘em.
The only way to survive what had happened was to
completely dissociate from it. A total disconnect. Otherwise, she said, she
never would have survived.
She married relatively young, and had another child
who was stricken with cancer when he was seven. For years, literally, she and
her husband and child were like hostages in ‘Children's Hospital.' Her kid's
life hung in the balance. Ultimately, she was able to give him a bone marrow
donation and he recovered. But the treatments he had endured, which saved him,
created calcium deposits in his brain and he developed a raging case of OCD. He
couldn't attend regular school. He had, and still has, monumental issues. It
wasn't a picnic.
Over the years, Lucy had (as I liked to tease her)
transformed into the epitome of the almost-high-class matron, with her crisp
cotton shirts, her diamonds and coiffed hair. She was a member of an uppity
ladies' club, the only qualification being that your husband has a title - Mrs.
Doctor So and So or Mrs. College President So and So. The members were old
enough to be her grandmother. She was well read and sipped wine in the
afternoons. She had arrived, I guess. There was nary a semblance of the untamed
rebel, who threw convention to the wind, and then paid for it.
But then, as she told me recently, there was always
a missing piece of the pie: Her son. The one she left behind in December of
1974. She couldn't forget him, and so she had decided to do something about
finding him, after more than 35 years.
Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.
