Read Online Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography by Rob Lowe - Free Book Online
Authors: Rob Lowe
Tags: Autobiography
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school parking lot, I saw the blonde surfer girl who’d had the birthday party with the amber bottle. She was the one who had been crying. The rest of the surf gang was skittish and ashen faced. What the hell was up?
By second period everyone knew. As usual, there was no adult or authority figure stepping up to give guidance or information, so the news spread kid to kid. Peter, the golden Surf God, was missing. There were dark rumors that he might have been in some terrible accident. By lunchtime, sheriffs were taking members of Peter’s gang to the principal’s office for questioning. By the final bell that day it was clear: Peter had disappeared and no one knew where or why.
Bad things happen to kids every day. It is the core-shaking truth. We don’t like to face it. We will do anything to avoid it, and we attempt to find comfort in the knowledge that it is, mercifully, fairly infrequent. But in the beautiful idyll of Point Dume, above the forgotten Chumash burial grounds, there was a savage undercurrent running through the lives of the boys and girls of those endless summers. Some of the blame falls to the parents, the checked-out, live-and-let-live generation who came of age at Woodstock. Some of it falls to the kids themselves—unformed, undisciplined, unsupervised, and wrestling with all the promise and angst of their tender possibilities. But some of it, and maybe a lot of it, came from environment. And Malibu, with its beautiful facade covering its complex, dangerous underbelly, was an environment with the energy field of seven supernovas. Peter was the first one to be sucked into the vortex.
They had all ditched school the day before. Surf was up, sun was out, and the party was on. At Zuma Beach they laid out their towels. I probably could have seen them out the bus window if I had been looking. Peter, his girlfriend, and the others of his group stripped off their clothes. Some of them swam. Some of them baked in the Southern California sun. There was pot. One of the kids pulled out a bottle of Quaaludes. Soon darkness was upon them.
Under questioning late the next day, the order of events became clear. They had all fallen asleep or passed out on the beach. All except Peter, who, high on Quaaludes, went for a swim. When they awoke, he was gone. They searched for hours. The kids would have to be home soon and they began to panic. Peter’s clothes were lying on his towel where he had left them. In an effort to avoid getting in trouble, they dug a hole. They collected his clothes and towel and buried them. Their plan was to deny any involvement in whatever might have happened to Peter. And the plan held together for twenty-four hours, until someone cracked.
Peter was never found. Later, they created a small park in his honor in front of the Malibu Cinema. His friends marked their loss by creating a touching and profoundly creepy ritual: The cool crowd held “Peter’s seat” empty on the bus each day, preventing anyone from sitting in his spot in back by the window. He was fourteen years old.
* * *
Although my mom’s health seemed to be much better, she and Steve dug into her obsession with alternative medicines and holistic treatments. She devoured medical books and self-help books and began to delve deeply into analysis, reading everything from the otherworldly ( Seth Speaks ) to the scholarly (the entire canon of Carl Jung). Our dinner-table talks were peppered with phrases like “the collective unconscious,” and Steve and my mom deconstructed their nightly dreams like another couple might rehash a good movie. Mom redoubled her journal writing and her dream diary, and began writing short stories, novels, you name it. She was now spending at least four hours a day, every day, behind closed doors, writing. If there was ever any finished project to read, we didn’t know about it or were not allowed to read it. Once, when I asked my mom why she worked so hard at writing, but (from my
By second period everyone knew. As usual, there was no adult or authority figure stepping up to give guidance or information, so the news spread kid to kid. Peter, the golden Surf God, was missing. There were dark rumors that he might have been in some terrible accident. By lunchtime, sheriffs were taking members of Peter’s gang to the principal’s office for questioning. By the final bell that day it was clear: Peter had disappeared and no one knew where or why.
Bad things happen to kids every day. It is the core-shaking truth. We don’t like to face it. We will do anything to avoid it, and we attempt to find comfort in the knowledge that it is, mercifully, fairly infrequent. But in the beautiful idyll of Point Dume, above the forgotten Chumash burial grounds, there was a savage undercurrent running through the lives of the boys and girls of those endless summers. Some of the blame falls to the parents, the checked-out, live-and-let-live generation who came of age at Woodstock. Some of it falls to the kids themselves—unformed, undisciplined, unsupervised, and wrestling with all the promise and angst of their tender possibilities. But some of it, and maybe a lot of it, came from environment. And Malibu, with its beautiful facade covering its complex, dangerous underbelly, was an environment with the energy field of seven supernovas. Peter was the first one to be sucked into the vortex.
They had all ditched school the day before. Surf was up, sun was out, and the party was on. At Zuma Beach they laid out their towels. I probably could have seen them out the bus window if I had been looking. Peter, his girlfriend, and the others of his group stripped off their clothes. Some of them swam. Some of them baked in the Southern California sun. There was pot. One of the kids pulled out a bottle of Quaaludes. Soon darkness was upon them.
Under questioning late the next day, the order of events became clear. They had all fallen asleep or passed out on the beach. All except Peter, who, high on Quaaludes, went for a swim. When they awoke, he was gone. They searched for hours. The kids would have to be home soon and they began to panic. Peter’s clothes were lying on his towel where he had left them. In an effort to avoid getting in trouble, they dug a hole. They collected his clothes and towel and buried them. Their plan was to deny any involvement in whatever might have happened to Peter. And the plan held together for twenty-four hours, until someone cracked.
Peter was never found. Later, they created a small park in his honor in front of the Malibu Cinema. His friends marked their loss by creating a touching and profoundly creepy ritual: The cool crowd held “Peter’s seat” empty on the bus each day, preventing anyone from sitting in his spot in back by the window. He was fourteen years old.
* * *
Although my mom’s health seemed to be much better, she and Steve dug into her obsession with alternative medicines and holistic treatments. She devoured medical books and self-help books and began to delve deeply into analysis, reading everything from the otherworldly ( Seth Speaks ) to the scholarly (the entire canon of Carl Jung). Our dinner-table talks were peppered with phrases like “the collective unconscious,” and Steve and my mom deconstructed their nightly dreams like another couple might rehash a good movie. Mom redoubled her journal writing and her dream diary, and began writing short stories, novels, you name it. She was now spending at least four hours a day, every day, behind closed doors, writing. If there was ever any finished project to read, we didn’t know about it or were not allowed to read it. Once, when I asked my mom why she worked so hard at writing, but (from my
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