“You’re either going to give up alcohol like you said we were, or you bring home enough for all of us!” she demanded.
There was no more pretense. No more submissiveness or piety. She wanted to get drunk and she wanted to get drunk all the time. Which showed that things had changed. There wasn’t as much talk about being God’s holy servants. Not as much talk about descending below all things in order to rise above all the sins of the world. Not that either of them had given up on the religion thing—the only subjects we ever talked about were religion, the impending end of the world, Mitchell being the “Davidic king,” and Barzee’s guaranteed place in heaven—but I think both of them just felt there wasn’t as much need of pretending as there had been when we were living back in Utah.
A couple of nights later, Mitchell came home with a bag of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a twelve-pack of Steel Reserve sixteen-ounce beers.
I was about to find out that the beer in California was a lot stronger than the beer in Utah was.
We started passing around the chicken and the beer. Mitchell forced me to drink, making sure I swallowed every ounce of my beer. Then he passed me another can. I was already thinking that I was going to throw up. Meanwhile, he and Barzee were having a jolly time. Beer and KFC. The perfect night. I sipped, hating every swallow. Mitchell kept forcing me to swallow more.
By the end of the second can, I was in really bad shape. He handed me another beer. I knew there was no way I was going to get any of it down. I stumbled to the ground, and crawled off to a corner of the tarp. I laid there, listening to Mitchell and Barzee talking about how much more they liked California beer. They didn’t even seem to notice that I was lying on the ground. After a while, Mitchell finally looked at me. Seeing I was sick, he threw me a metal bowl. I held it to my face. The metal was cool against my skin. It felt good. I waited, fighting to hold my stomach down. Mitchell must have decided either that I wasn’t going to throw up or that he didn’t want to get the bowl dirty, because he came over and took the bowl away. Almost immediately, I started throwing up. I wretched so long and hard that I thought I was going to die. Then I passed out.
I woke up late the next morning, facedown in my own vomit. It was the most horrible and disgusting feeling I had ever felt.
As a young Mormon girl from Salt Lake City, a young girl who had promised herself that she would never even taste alcohol, I had never imagined that I would find myself in such a degrading situation. If Mitchell wanted me to descend below all things, then surely I had done that. I was sick and devastated. Words can’t explain how humiliated and disgusted I felt.
I used what little water we had to wash myself up. Mitchell laughed at me as he watched me trying to clean myself off. “You know, this is symbolic of where you are spiritually,” he mocked with glee. “My little Esther, facedown in her own vomit! That is where you are now.”
*
For the next couple of months, Mitchell would go into San Diego and “minister” almost every day. I don’t know what he did with the money, I just know he never brought any of it home. He must have spent all of it on cigarettes and alcohol, because when he came back he always stank of both.
I do know that he didn’t spend any of his money on food. The only thing we ate for months was the prickly pears, old bread from behind the church, and whatever food we pulled out of Dumpsters and garbage cans.
My mother always taught me that we needed to finish everything on our plates before we left the table. But I have to say that I am grateful for those people who threw away their food. Their scraps helped to sustain me for many months.
28.
Thanksgiving
Time moved forward one painful day at a time. Late summer melted into fall. The weather in Lakeside was generally pleasant, and I could see the wisdom in having left the mountains of Utah, which I knew would already be draped in snow. But I always felt homesick in California. I hated being so far from my home. And everything about our camp had an eerie feeling about it. The dead trees. The dust and cacti. The brown things that were hanging from all the branches. And I thought it was odd that there we were, living just a few feet off the main road and only a short walk from a large high school and the center of the town, yet no one seemed to know we were there, or if they knew, they didn’t care.
As the days grew shorter, I realized that the change of seasons was under way. I thought back on the night I had been taken. June 4. It had been the beginning of the summer. I was young enough that three months of vacation felt like a very long time. I was looking forward to endless days of swimming with my cousins and jumping on the trampoline and summer parties with my family and celebrations on the Fourth of July.
All of it seemed so long ago. Another world. Another girl.
As Thanksgiving approached, I tried desperately not to think about my family. The only thing I thought about was that we might find a good meal.