What happened in Bombay, India during my year abroad was that instead of sending me back home, I was shuffled around until I lived with six different families and one couple I latched onto as a last resort. One exchange student had what I will call a “psychotic break” and was sent back to Pennsylvania. I insisted on staying put.

Jain Temple 1985

One of the families I ditched took me to Delhi, where they had a second home. I wanted to go to the Taj Mahal, so I split. A.J. Albany said, “Children are fearless, their courage boundless.” No longer a child at fifteen, my unsupervised recklessness turned to what is best described as feral. I was acting in cookie commercials and making about 2,000 rupees per day (about $180). I was studying Kathak Kumar (classic Indian court dancing) with a well-known dance instructor, Gopi Krishna. I got into cars with the Bollywood actors who plucked me off the street in Bombay and I was getting smashed and having unprotected sex with a lecherous Englishman who followed me around when I was in Goa.

Taj Mahal, Agra

From Delhi, I packed a bag and hired a wagon pulled by camels to drive me from Delhi to the Taj Mahal in Agra. We arrived just as the sun was rising in the gold, hazy light and it was the most magnificent thing I’d ever seen: a giant white marble tomb dedicated to one of the king’s wives with it’s reflection in a luminescent pool of water before the entrance.

My memory is hazy around Agra. I must have stayed in some hotel and been drunk most the time and then taken a train back to Bombay where I met up with the creepy Englishman just as my year abroad was ending. I’ve never been good at endings but I was sixteen and the gig was up, much to the relief of the Rotarians in Bombay, India. I was also the last student they would accept from California for many years to come.

The goodbyes all a blur, I do remember the plane ride home because there were some white people who looked like chattering Barbies in stiff shirts with rictus grins and pink cheeks. They were pasty dough people. I was between skins again, neither Indian nor American; I was foreign to myself, completely unrecognizable. A pale stewardess offered me wine, which I drank until I passed out.

When I landed in Sydney Australia, a white woman hugged me. It was my Mom.

“What happened to you?” She said. Her American drawl sounded country-hick compared to the English Indian accent I’d grown accustomed to. I couldn’t explain or even talk. I was like Sisyphus with his boulder: I didn’t cry, throw a tantrum or drop the rock. I held steady, frozen and overwhelmed on my cliff. And, I stayed that way for a long time.

Australia had been Mom’s idea. She wanted see a Sam Shepard play in the Opera House in Sydney, ride horses and snorkel by the Great Barrier reef in North Queensland, but I don’t recall doing any of that. What I remember about Australia was being sick. Crawling to the toilet. Inconclusive blood work. Protracted silences.

I can only imagine the disappointment that Mom felt, when I had left a bouncy, popular ding-a-ling and returned a quiet, troubled stranger. She didn’t understand why I was preoccupied with capitalism’s evil, why I gave homeless people all my clothes or why I’d shaved my head.

She was convinced she’d made a mistake, but I know it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I had what Susan Sontag referred to in Against Interpretation as “A dialectic of freedom that carries with it a new knowledge of the self.” My problem was the new self was unrecognizable to my peers, friends, relatives and town.

I was shaken, thrown down and told to “Get a job.” So, I did.

My one advocate, the Rotarian counselor for the exchange students in Eureka, John McCadden, died suddenly of a heart attack and I attended his funeral. I’d have to return to EHS and finish out my senior year. There was no way out-yet.

Twenty-four years later, it’s Christmas and my elegant friend said, “We didn’t know how do deal with you.” We were in a rathole bar in Eureka, sharing some memories about highschool and concerns about our parents growing older; we are growing older.

There was talk of how I’d left cheerleading and my gorgeous, Mormon, James Dean-esque boyfriend (who cross-dressed and loved Bowie as much as I did) behind. After India, I favored the most creative, charismatic guy in our school.

He knew all the words to The Cure's "Disintegration" by heart.

When Mom insisted that I return to EHS, I found my tribe: the kids who were alienated due to their interests, intelligence or sexuality. I befriended bisexuals, the Boy George impersonators, the madonna doppelganger, the ultra 80’s new wave fashion kings, the seated punk row rockers and the twin puppeteers. I took Shakespeare class, speech and drama and discovered Cat Stevens, Talking Heads and Thomas Dolby and all of it saved my ass.

“You made me uncomfortable. You wanted to talk about deep things,” one friend said about the transformation. I still do that, I thought.

One afternoon, I found my pictures from India cut up in little slivers on the kitchen counter after school. My step dad yelled at me a lot. My paternal Dad hired a counselor to shake the India out of me, but I folded my arms and stared into space during sessions.

That’s when I started running away, just like I’d done in Bombay. I moved into my Algebra teacher’s house and tried to blend in but ultimately I found shelter at my boyfriend’s house where there was an interest in art, music and other cultures. They harbored me for years until I had to exit their nest.

Now it’s Christmas in Humboldt and the rain’s been falling monsoon-style, the moon is a glowing tangerine in a clear icy sky and there’s crab to eat later- a local tradition. My Dad is ill so my tennis racket will stay in the garage this time. My friend, D and I talk about going to India or Beijing over hot chai as we plan to create new memories in other cities. He was another treasured friend who intervened during multiple nose dives and kept me laughing and reading. We all toasted to our friend who lives in Portland and a glass broke.

R said, “I saw you after high school. Your hair was fire engine red and shaved like a waffle iron and you said that art could change the world.”

Twenty-four years later, I still believe that.

*pictures to come-scanner problems*

When I was fifteen, the Rotary Club of Eureka, California sent me to Bombay India to be an exchange student for a year. Like my parents, I had no clue what I was getting into or how it would change me. At fifteen, I couldn’t tell you where India was on a map or do basic algebra. My math teacher met me every morning at 8a.m. to help me solve “x.” What I did know about India was on the glossy pages of a coffee table book on a shelf next to other books about Alaska and Hawaii. In the book were pictures of sandy temples and skinny men in raggedy white skirts walking barefoot in a city of ruins that reminded me of the Flinstones and women draped in gem tone fabrics, dunking dirty laundry into the murky Ganges. Two things were certain: India was as far away from home as I could get and there were camels.

Road in Humboldt

I was expected to attend college in a suburb of Bombay, though I was a junior in High School. The scene outside the Bombay airport when I arrived was shocking. My naive cheerleader grin was replaced with terror that I tried to hide to be polite to my host family. They greeted me at the airport along with crowds of beggars who swarmed me right off the bat.  Policemen in brown uniforms leaned on tall rifles that reached their slim waists. Death was routine, like brushing teeth. Dead bodies were carried through the streets on stretchers, covered in jasmine next to venders selling chickens from a bicycle. Huge, heavy bells rang. Sandalwood incense burned and the bodies drifted through the streets, lifted by family members while beggars went about their business of begging and rickshaws zigzagged in the road to avoid the procession.

Mossy Humboldt

It was 1986.  Bombay India was no vacation destination for holiday weekenders. Homeless families huddled together on the ground and cooked food from fires they made on the street.  Piles of garbage were beds for children who were missing fingers and toes from the leprosy epidemic that was rampant at that time. They traveled in packs with ravaged fingertips wrapped in gauze while they reached for my rupees. I was tennis-shoed, light-haired and from a hick town at the top of California. I never worried about money in my family. I’d never gone without food. A four year-old girl walked alone and shook a silver cup of change at me; the heavy clank of not enough coins in her cup banged against the tin.  She held her hand to her mouth to imitate eating and stared into my light blue eyes.  This happened fifty times a day for a year.

Then there were the men who followed me, flashed me and pressed against me on busses and trains. Men with tuberculosis rolled by on skateboards past junkyards that were shantytowns where they scrounged for scraps next to the most opulent five-star Hotel I’d ever seen. When I walked into the hotel looking to steal toilet paper, the icy arms of American privilege held me in a sturdy Air conditioned hug. The men didn’t follow me inside. I sat in the café and drank coffee and ate a croissant, but all I thought about was the clank of coins in cups.

There was a storage problem in my small California town brain.  I was supposed to be a role model. I was expected to be an ambassador. Instead, I smoked hash with the other exchange students who were two or three years older than I was. They were seventeen and eighteen, so I hung around with them and ran away from my host families who tried to enforce rules. I walked my rebellious American ass into every shanty house I could, and sat with people on their piles of trash and drank boiled milky tea from clear plastic cups. One of the rules was, I had to be home by dusk or else I was yelled at. There was some concern that a woman who came home after dark was an unspeakable monstrosity. I became that.

First, I shredded my blond American bulimic cheerleader identity for a new skin that was less problematic. I cut off all of my blonde hair short, then buzzed it off. I stopped eating and started reading Rumi, Tagore and Calvino. I rode busses and wandered into temples for a year and prayed to statues of Hindu Gods. I was escorted into the inner sanctums of temples by pundits (holy men). I searched for a new soul in the slums of Bombay and got into cars with strangers to see what would happen next.

Initially, I was supposed to be in school but my light skin and eye color was such a spectacle that it was too uncomfortable for the other students and for me to be there, so I stopped going. No one asked me questions about school. It was when I left college that my exchange program began. For example, I exchanged algebra for Turner Road.

Turner Road was the Red Light District. I learned this after I got off the train station and saw the soft wrinkled red saris and ribbon lips of young girls. Men leaned against tin shacks smoking and holding hands, a normal mannerism among Indian men. Gold earrings dangled from ear lobes and reflected light; chalky red dots like bulls-eyes were pasted at the center of women’s foreheads, a sign of pujah (Prayers). I didn’t understand what all of the women were doing and why they were gussied up and standing in line, only that they looked dangerous and enchanting, like they had a secret. I was looking at something I wasn’t invited to look at so I skittered away and hopped the next train and got off at Juhu Beach.

Later, my friend asked me where I’d gone. When I told him about the women standing around, he said, “Turner Road is where children turn tricks out of cages. I was told to stay away from there.” I didn’t stay away. I went back the next day.

Twenty-four years later, I was arrested for prostitution and thrown in jail in Los Angeles, California. It was October 14^th, 2010, the same day that 112 crimes were reported in Los Angeles. Among them:

1. Two men walked into a bakery, approached a patron and shot him before walking away. The bakery was bustling with customers when the men pulled out handguns and shot him several times.
2. The mayor of San Gabriel was charged with felony, robbery and assault after he allegedly took a woman’s purse and sped down a residential street with her clinging to the side of his SUV.
3. Two men attacked and raped a teenage girl walking home from a festival.
4. Augustine Calderon, 23 died after being shot.
5. The charred body of a female was discovered. No age, location or cause of death reported.
6. A 13-year old male was struck and killed by a hit and run driver. He was cycling home.
7. Jade, Rizo-Soto, a 41-year old Latina female died after sustaining blunt force trauma.
8. A sheriff’s deputy killed Jonathan Cuevas, a 20-year old Latino after he allegedly reached into his waistband as he started to run. Seeing this, the deputy fired several times.

The afternoon of Oct 14th, a man called Joe booked a massage. He said we should meet in Korea town at the Kortex hotel lobby, so he could make sure I looked like the girl in the ad.

Girl in Ad

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“A leopard print dress,” I said.

“I’m Hispanic, with glasses,” he’d said on the phone earlier that day. I’d insisted on the appointment, called him twice to confirm which I never do, but I’d packed for NY and was preparing to catch a flight at 7a.m. so I wanted some cab money and cat-sitter cash.

When I arrived at the Kortex hotel at 9:20pm. Joe was on his phone, pacing in the small lobby then he sat down. He’s jumpy, I thought. They’re always nervous.

He sat at a small table and nibbled Wasabi peas. There was a Beck’s with a tiny bit of liquid still in the bottle. He picked it up and swished it around.“Want a drink?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” I said. I’d just come from an AA meeting in the Valley. The beer was tiny compared to his plump long fingers. Everything about Joe was big. He popped the chalky white peas in his mouth.

“I’m married.” He showed me his ring.

“Lots of people are,” I said.

“This could be a regular thing,” he said.

“Great.”  Standard stuff. Small talk; the suggestion of a future meeting. I noticed his cell phone on the table, next to the bottle.

“So, you do fetishes?” he asked.

“I have some clients who are into that. I have equipment,” I said, wishing he’d told me this earlier, so I would be more prepared, brought my black and red custom flogger, my paddle, my hood, my beautiful strap on.

“Well I don’t want anything up my butt.”  I suppose this was meant to make me laugh, so I did.

“Okay. Nothing up your butt.”  I looked around for a clock but didn’t see one.

“So you’re going to give me a massage?” he asked. He reminded me of Phil Jackson, the Lakers’ coach the way he dwarfed the table and kept his jacket on. They can’t relax, these guys, I thought.

“Yeah,” I said, bored.

Now’s the time to move this along, be loose and soothing. Not impatient, I thought.

“And you’re going to give me a hand job?”

“uh-huh.”

“I have two hundred for you but I brought three if there’s more,” he said.

“Okay.” I wondered if I had time to extend the session before meeting  Kim across town for our doubles session.

“Shall we get the hell out of here then?” I asked.  I walked with Joe across the parking lot where two guys stood in front of a van.  I figured they were smoking. One guy had a receding hairline and the short guy next to him had lots of brown curly hair and glasses. They were talking.

“These guys want to talk to you,” Joe said.

“Huh?”

The receding hairline guy, asked me to turn around and cuffed me and put me in a van. Nothing about the van read, “cop.” The guys were in shorts and tennis shoes. I froze.

“Is this real?” I asked.

The receding hairline guy showed me his big sparkling silvery gold star badge on his chest, pointed to it, and said, “This is real.” I’m pretty sure they read me my Miranda rights in the van, but it’s a blur because I kept thinking that I was going to miss my flight the next day to meet my friend who had made several dinner reservations. Also, I was going to meet some writers in New York, But all of that melted away into panic that slowly unraveled over the next twenty-four hours.

Off 101 Humboldt