That was four days earlier and around the corner at 1311 Anacapa Street, in an unassuming little house that was the headquarters of Klein Bottle Crisis Shelter, an organization for troubled teens. Debbi had shown up there in the middle of July, a runaway on a bike with one hastily packed bag and a well-honed detection system for rules and how to flout them. But Klein Bottle was hardly a stern lockdown facility. The abundance of ferns hanging in macramé planters told you that. This was the peak era of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, a self-help bestseller that aimed to expose the subtle bad parenting that lurks in even the most functional-seeming families. Miller urged her readers to “find their own truth” about possible childhood abuse; in doing so, she helped ignite the talk therapy craze. Klein Bottle counselors drank tea from earthenware mugs and assured inarticulate adolescents that no feeling was too banal or shameful to share.
In addition to assigned chores, there was one house rule: the kids could come and go as they pleased, but they had to sign an agreement to participate in therapy sessions. The staff arranged for Cheri and Debbi to meet together with a counselor to help resolve their problems.
The Domingos must have seemed like an optimal case for mediation. Neither was a dull-eyed drug abuser exhibiting the ravages of stress and neglect. Far from it. Mother and daughter were both delicate-featured beauties. They sported matching beach-casual styles: easy on the makeup, huarache sandals, print tops, and jeans. Debbi adorned her hair with the occasional braid or side barrette. Cheri was thirty-five, a pin-thin Natalie Wood lookalike with a no-nonsense, pleasant demeanor, the result of working as an office manager. Debbi was more voluptuously built; her wide, blue eyes were attuned, as most teenagers are, to the short stretch rather than the long term. Both radiated good health and a core of self-assured calm.
The meeting time arrived. Cursory pleasantries were exchanged as everyone took a seat. As soon as Debbi and Cheri touched down on the couch, alighting like two birds on a wire, they erupted. Their battles were by then front-loaded with fury, a miserable lockstep in which the only changes in position were who was incredulous and who was aggrieved. They needed no coaxing. Boundaries. Rules. Boyfriends. Disrespect. Debbi can’t remember if the counselor was a man or a woman. She only remembers shouting and a vague third presence in the room; someone who’d presumably seen it all but who exuded dumbstruck ineffectualness. In the end, Debbi fled abruptly, as she had before, a dark-haired storm of a girl pedaling away with her belongings crammed into a bag. In two weeks she’d turn sixteen.
Cheri watched the city swallow her daughter and worried. Santa Barbara beguiled. It deceived. The promise of romance reigned, and the potential for danger was obscured. After a nineteen-second earthquake shattered much of downtown Santa Barbara in 1925, the city was rebuilt in a unified Spanish Colonial style—white plaster walls, low-pitched red tile roofs, wrought iron. Preservation-minded civic leaders continued to keep buildings low and billboards out. There was a gentle small-town feel to the place. Every day for thirty-two years, a Greek immigrant, “the popcorn man,” sold pinwheels and popcorn from his station wagon at the foot of Stearns Wharf. The smell of night-blossoming jasmine drifted in through open windows on hot evenings. The roar of the ocean rocked people to sleep.
But instability lurked. A raggedy undercurrent roiled. The recession had gutted a lot of downtown businesses. There was not yet an open-container law on lower State Street; at night weaving drunks shouted at each other between breaks to piss and puke. The music clubs were changing. Folk and disco were out, replaced by angrier punk. The local papers were reporting that an anonymous male caller was telling children ages eleven to fifteen who answered the phone that they were going to die. Another caller, maybe the same man, was telling women that he’d hurt their husbands if they didn’t comply with his demands. Local cops nicknamed the unidentified creep “our breather.”
There was a stoplight at State Street and Highway 101, one of the main north-south routes spanning California, and for more than a decade a colorful parade of hippies held up signs there asking for rides to places like San Diego or Eureka. It was such a Santa Barbara tradition that the Texaco gas station kept felt-tip markers for the hitchhikers to use on their cardboard signs.
But lately it was hard not to notice that, despite their Summer of Love robes and tambourines, the hippies weren’t young anymore. Up close, you could see they’d weathered not just wind and sun but gradations of defeat that had turned the light off in their eyes. There were fewer signs marked with destination requests. Some just paced in circles all day.
Santa Barbara’s magenta bougainvillea could distract you from its hairline cracks. Cheri hoped no harm would come to Debbi out there. Every mother’s brain cycles through the litany of terrible things that might befall her child. Rarely does the reverse occur. Why should it? Especially for teenagers, who between seeing their parents as God and then as human view them temporarily as an obstacle, a particularly cumbersome door that won’t quite budge.
No, it was Debbi who was, in the parlance of Klein Bottle, “at risk.” The story rarely ends well for the beautiful teenage runaway. This time it did.
Not being home saved Debbi Domingo’s life.
CHERI KNEW THAT HER DIFFICULTIES WITH DEBBI WERE JUST A rough spot, a bump in the road, and they would patch things up eventually. They’d laugh about it when Debbi had a teenager of her own. But in the meantime, she needed solutions. She was an office manager everyone described as a “mother hen,” who, it seemed, could neither mother nor manage her own daughter.
“How do you do it?” Cheri asked her best friend, Ellen,* as they sat in Ellen’s Jacuzzi in the backyard drinking wine. Ellen had three foster girls, all teenagers, living with her and her husband. Girls born drug-addicted. Abandoned on doorsteps. Cheri marveled at how well behaved they were.
“Discipline,” Ellen said.
The way Ellen saw it, Cheri’s attempt at disciplining Debbi had come too late. She’d been too permissive. Ellen demanded to know where her girls were at all times. The girls knew that if they cut class, either Ellen or her husband, Hank, would show up at school wearing a placard identifying themselves as the truant’s babysitter. The risk of social mortification kept them in line.
Cheri, on the other hand, had given Debbi a long leash. She was patient when Debbi broke curfew or didn’t check in. Cheri was by nature an optimistic, level-headed person; she believed Debbi was engaging in typical teenage behavior and was reluctant to bring the hammer down. The phase would pass, she said. Cheri was just nineteen when Debbi was born, and in happier times, when mother and daughter tried on clothes together at the mall or had lunch at their favorite restaurant, Pancho Villa, they delighted when strangers took them for sisters. They’d giggle at the assumption. The strangers would realize their mistake. Of course these two weren’t sisters. They were friends.
Which is why, in the months of escalating tension when Debbi would scream, “I don’t care about your rules! You’re ruining my life!” Cheri’s reply, while true, had a meek, uncertain tenor to it: “But I’m the mom.”
The starting pistol that began the collision course was the divorce. Cheryl Grace Smith met Roger Dean Domingo, an electronics technician in the coast guard two years her senior, when she was in high school. They married shortly after Cheri turned eighteen, on September 19, 1964, in San Diego. Debbi was born the following August. Almost exactly a year later, a son, David, arrived. Roger left the coast guard and became a Methodist minister, then a middle-school teacher. In 1975 the family moved to Santa Barbara.