Waving goodbye to Beverly Hills from the back seat of Mom’s Studebaker Hawk, next I found myself living on a dead-end street in Canoga Park among Hispanic neighbors. Ethnically diverse, the population expanded the range between poverty and wealth. The house my mom and her newly minted husband rented had a swimming pool, plus I got my own room. The long-neglected pool required lots of work to make it safe to swim, but soon after cleaning and repairs, a few neighborhood kids claimed rights as if it was now a community pool. The kids were all younger than me.

The cultural shift felt dramatic. I now lived in the part of Canoga Park that was the Hood––the end of some street on the wrong side of invisible tracks. However, this Los Angeles suburb wasn’t scary then. I walked everywhere, even at night. Canoga Park segregation mirrored the movie Grease––where well-defined cliques organically sorted classmates, and breaking in was hard to do. Differences in home life were not apparent at Christopher Columbus Junior High. But this move affected more than my education.

“Cloud illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all” Joni Mitchell

Walking to school past the diner Bob’s Big Boy, I used lunch money to buy a brownie from the front bakery case. Before long, I became a regular customer and the woman who served me put more in my bag than I had paid for. Which I did not need. But her kindness and brief conversations endeared her to me, as if I had made a friend.

The contrast between the wealth in Beverly Hills and the working, middle class population in Canoga Park actually helped me fit in, even as my waistline expanded. I tried to hide in plain sight, both from unwanted attention from certain boys and the creepy feeling I got around my stepdad. While I was extremely modest, wearing a bathing suit to swim in our pool made me feel exposed. Much later, finding out that my mother suspected her husband could not be trusted, I believed she at least trusted me.

Before leaving Canoga Park, my mother learned that he had paid the next door neighbor’s kids to tell her that the two holes she discovered in the bathroom wall were bullet holes made by previous residents. Upon investigation, she figured out how he used those holes to watch me, alternating between the bathroom and my bedroom whenever she was away. He denied everything. (She didn’t tell me this until going through her divorce five years later!)

While Mom had her suspicions, I had no idea. The following school year, my first realizations came that I was being stalked by a predator. After his initial attempts to win my trust, he scared and disgusted me. Even the memory of his unwanted attention churns my stomach, a knot forming after a gut-punch. While I sensed danger, I did not know what to do or who I could turn to. My mother was pregnant and I could not be the reason for trouble between them.

But I have gotten ahead of myself. Where did he come from? How did he disrupt and nearly destroy our lives?

On to Simi Valley

At the end of that school year, Buddy had taken my friend and me over the hill to see our new house in Simi Valley. “Over the hill” described Simi Valley because the only road from the San Fernando Valley to Simi Valley wound around a hill. Two-way traffic made for slow going in places, and coming around some curves, drivers would honk the car’s horn to alert oncoming traffic. More cautious than most, my mother drove slowly and honked the horn a lot!

I could not have imagined then that freeways would one day serve as main arteries to bedroom communities that exploded in population. “If you build it, they will come.” Highways, streets, subdivisions, and houses turned all of Los Angeles County, the San Fernando Valley, and Simi Valley into a sprawling metropolis––a web of throbbing connections like spider veins.

Going over the hill was an outing, and my friend from Canoga Park wanted to see our house too. Once inside the new, unfurnished house with a swimming pool in the backyard, for some inexplicable reason, my friend darted out of the bathroom and held the door shut, trapping me inside with Buddy. I screamed at her to let me out. She laughed while Buddy used the occasion to press himself against me. I could watch the scene in the mirror, horror on my face as he nestled his head against my neck and rubbed his body against the back of mine.

“I could kill you,” I said to Donna afterward, though sparing her the details. She just laughed as if she had pulled off such a joke. She enjoyed teasing older men. I feared older men.

After we had moved in, I awoke one morning, turned from my side to see Buddy on his knees next to my bed, his face inches away and his hands on my chest. Horrified, I sat up. He bolted from the room without saying a word.

My mother had gone to the doctor because their baby was sick.

When dressed, I had to do the dishes before my mom returned home from her appointment. There, in the kitchen, Buddy confronted me with oaths and promises never to do such a thing again, and insisting that if I told my mother, it would ruin all of our lives, including their baby girl’s.

A wave of nausea overtook me; I stood with my back to him, my hands in dishwater, and all I could think of was Mom telling her Aunt Bessie about John Pennington attempting to molest her and Aunt Bessie refusing to believe her.

“feather canyons everywhere … and now they only block the sun” Joni Mitchell

While I knew I could no longer trust Buddy, I also knew that Mom, even if she believed me, would be hysterical to have to face such a crisis. An immediate defense tactic, I started putting the Kenmore sewing machine in its case up against my door at night so at least I would have the chance to wake up if he entered again. After that incident, I had trouble sleeping at all.

For a while, I believed the predator honored our truce. But then, one night the door pushed open slightly and he scolded me the next day, asking how I would explain to my mom that suitcase blocking the door to my room. I lived in fear, heightened vigilance and anxiety, a perpetual stomachache twisting my guts while not even understanding what he wanted or why.

I stumbled upon pornography set like traps, images seared in my mind of naked men. One guy wore only his shoes, as perplexing as it was graphic. When I showed that picture to my mother, she confronted him and he said some friend who had worked on his car at our house had left it in the garage.

Buddy was bad, and efforts to rehabilitate or redeem him from his past proved wasted. He was damaged, Mom would later explain, from the brutal beatings inflicted by his dad who beat him senseless throughout his incorrigible delinquent childhood. Not to mention whatever he did during the time he spent in prison.

Yet at some point, it doesn’t matter how people get damaged or who damaged their psyche, persons must be held accountable for their own actions.

Only I had yet to learn how seldom the wicked get caught or punished for their despicable acts. Too often victims of abuse tend to blame themselves, believing whatever happens is his or her fault.

Mitigation of guilt, a misguided sympathy for how Buddy got damaged, combined with her own “checkered past” (how she herself referred to her life), my mother took another sow’s ear, attempting to make a silk purse. It never worked out, though her intentions, she convinced herself, seemed noble.

Soon, their marriage showed signs of trouble. Drinking, fighting, and cussing. On top of that, Mom’s youngest sister, my Aunt Syble, showed up needing help. She tried to seduce Buddy, or so he said. Mom believed him because Aunt Syble always thought that men should pay her the most attention. But Aunt Syble’s hard life and hard drinking had drained her dazzle. Still, her vanity fed the idea that men wanted her above others, and she still craved male attention.

Following that ugly incident, I might have expected things to change. Once things started to happen, things would happen fast. A family accustomed to transience, the cousins were moving to Texas––Mama cousin, Daddy cousin, and Baby cousin. Back to Aunt Bessie’s.

No Change My Heart Will Fear?

Would I get to finish high school or have to drop out? What about college? I dreamed of going to UCLA. Would any of my dreams come true or would I keep waking up in a nightmare?

In Heavenly Love Abiding [1]

In heavenly love abiding, no change my heart shall fear.
And safe in such confiding, for nothing changes here.
The storm may roar without me, my heart may low be laid,
But God is round about me, and can I be dismayed?

Wherever He may guide me, no want shall turn me back.
My Shepherd is beside me, and nothing can I lack.
His wisdom ever waking, His sight is never dim.
He knows the way He’s taking, and I will walk with Him

Green pastures are before me, which yet I have not seen.
Bright skies will soon be over me, where darkest clouds have been.
My hope I cannot measure, my path to life is free.
My Savior has my treasure, and He will walk with me.

They left me in Simi Valley to live with another family, all of us thinking I would get to finish high school there.

Education mattered to my mom. She had instilled in me the importance of education. My mother had graduated from high school two months past her seventeenth birthday, utterly unprepared to greet life as an adult. She kept me from starting school too early so that I would not have that same disadvantage, hoping I would get the education she lacked.

Mom continued to read her books, nearly worshiped some books like Atlas Shrugged, but her intelligence failed to translate into making good choices. All I could see was how her choices affected me.

I had a lot to learn about forgiveness and redemption.

[1] poem by Anna Waring, published with hymns in 1850