My Roller Coaster Life ~ Part One

My Roller Coaster Life  (part one)

I was the first Kemper girl born in eighty years. That was fifty years ago. I call it my roller coaster life because of all the moving and starts and finishes I've experienced in my time on this planet. I've lived in Topeka, Kansas, all over Southern California, the Verde Valley in Arizona, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Seattle, Washington, and I've spent a lot of time in Portland, Oregon. I was born to a vagabond family and I've pretty much stayed one throughout my adult years. 

The first ten years of my life were spent moving between Topeka and Southern California. We never stayed in either place more than a year and I was constantly changing schools, which was hard on a painfully shy kid. We never had much but we were a close family and the first ten years were pretty happy. I'd usually just have one close friend and I was kind of a loner and a bookworm. 

At ten years old, we moved to the small town of Cottonwood, in the Verde Valley in Arizona for the first time and it was a turning point in my life. I fell madly in love with the place. At that time, the Verde Valley, Arizona was relatively undiscovered. It was so beautiful and wild. The whole valley was our playground. There was a river running through it and we spent a lot of time at different cool spots on the river. We climbed rocks and could ride a bike all the way through town without seeing a car. It was glorious. These days, all the places where we used to roam free, you now have to pay to get into and everything is tightly controlled. A lot of people from California have moved there and it's become a fast-paced, rapidly growing little city. I'm just glad I got to live there when I did.

We moved briefly back to Kansas after that first move to Arizona but then we moved back and actually stayed for a whole ten years. That's why I tell people I'm from Arizona. It's always felt like my true home. 

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, I was was quite the wild child, sneaking out of my bedroom window to go party with the boys at night and my mom would send me to California to live with my dad when I got too incorrigible for her to handle. At age sixteen, I met and fell in love with Jimmy Murray and I settled down. At age seventeen, we moved up the mountain to a little town called Jerome and the people in that town would play a big part of shaping who I would become. It was formerly a ghost town that was reinhabited in the 50s or 60s by hippies and artists and it was a very mind-opening experience. Unfortunately, soon after I turned eighteen, Jimmy and I broke up. 

When I turned nineteen, I was old enough to get into the bars and I began to dance. While the crowd was sitting out the first couple of sets, I would dance, with the whole floor to myself. Once the crowd got drunk enough to get up there, that's when I would mostly sit it out. It was too crowded for me. I never danced the same way twice. It was ever-changing, free-flow dancing. I was in my element. 

At twenty-one, I left Arizona to move to Kansas with my new boyfriend, Leonard. We stayed with my dad and Leonard worked until he'd saved enough money for a car and a move to Tulsa. I didn't really get to know Tulsa that first time living there. We both worked multiple jobs for a year to save money to move to Seattle. Leonard was sometimes abusive to me and I left him once, after he gave me a black eye, taking the cat and everything I owned to my mom's for a couple of weeks. My mom's new husband had a little chat with Leonard and he never touched me again. We moved to Seattle after all.

I loved Seattle. I've lived in quite a few cities and Seattle was by far the coolest. We only lived there for a year but it was a year with plenty of ups and downs. The first six months were full of great memories but the second six months were hell. 

First of all, Seattle is lovely. Secondly, there's so much to do! We both had decent jobs and really had our shit together. Leonard worked at the Space Needle and I had a job downtown, working in a little deli, which was walking distance from our tiny studio apartment. Life was good. We went out to hear music often. This was actually right before the big Seattle explosion and the music was free, with no cover charge. There was one street that had a dozen bars all in a row, all with live bands and we hopped from one to the other. To this day, I'm not really sure whom all I heard play. Could be I saw bands that later became famous.

This was also the time when I opened up to movies and became such a big fan of them. There were no less than a half dozen cool little theaters within walking distance from our apartment. Each one was uniquely full of character and cheap. We went as often as three or four times a week. There was a film festival once with preview openings. Many directors attended and spoke about their films. There were six hundred films played in a couple of weeks and we saw so many cool movies. 

Then there were the beer places, with every kind of imported beer imaginable, the coffee houses, and my favorite, the juice bars, where even the the ice was made of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and  bowls of shelled sunflower seeds were provided at no extra charge. 

I made some good friends from my job and would go out with them occasionally. I was cuter than kittens in my fake leopard fur coat, my 50s cat style sunglasses, and hair in a Pebbles pony tail. Leonard and I kind of stuck out in our wild, colorful garb while Seattle was still a sea of black-haired, black-clothed, pale-skinned people. It was the end of a goth period and the beginning of grunge. I would wear my big, purple hippie skirt with my converse shoes and a flannel shirt before it was fashionable. It was a really good time. 

Every other weekend, Leonard and I would drive to Portland to stay with friends and do drugs. We vowed to each other that we'd only do them every other weekend and never at home. Then came the day that Leonard brought them home. His excuse was that I was sick and he thought it would help. We got hooked. Days melted into days and everything slowly fell apart. My friends looked at me with worry on their faces and we never went anywhere except to cop drugs. Then came the day that we were apartment sitting for our landlord when Leonard suggested that we pawn some of his things for drug money. I said no fucking way! I was scared out of my drug-induced coma by visions of living behind dumpsters with our drug dealer friends. I called my dad and told him what was happening. He sent me a plane ticket, so my cat and I got the hell out of Dodge. Sadly, Leonard continued down that path but I never touched drugs again.