Riding in Mr Fartley's Firebird

I have two versions of this memory.

One is a photograph.

Five teenagers dressed up for senior prom, smiling into the camera like the whole world was waiting for us. Nate. Me. Rachel. Jenny. Brady.

The other is an unfinished oil painting.

It's a self portrait of me in my prom dress. I started it years after prom, but not because I was painting a happy memory. Before I could finish it, I moved, and somewhere in the process the canvas was torn.

For years I've stared at that tear, wondering how to fix it. I've thought about sewing it closed with thick thread so the scar would become part of the piece. I've thought about collaging over it or turning it into a mixed media painting. Every idea felt like I was forcing a solution onto something that didn't want one.

Nothing ever felt right.

Maybe because the tear belongs there.

The painting itself is ghostly and underdeveloped. My skin is pale and unfinished. Looking at it now, I realize it wasn't just the canvas that was damaged before it reached maturity.

So was the girl it was trying to portray.

The comparison is almost too perfect.

When I look at the prom picture today, I don't just see five smiling teenagers. I see five stories that hadn't unfolded yet. Five kids who had no idea where the next decade would take them.

Nate was my person. We were attached at the hip and almost as obsessed with each other as we were with Tori Amos. Our friendship was wonderfully uncomplicated. He was gay, so my mother treated him like one of the girls. He spent the night at my house almost as often as Jenny did. The three of us had countless sleepovers, listening to music, laughing until we couldn't breathe, and talking about absolutely everything.

Jenny and I were on the diving team together. We both earned four varsity letters. We were good. We were honor roll students. The kind of kids who did extra credit even when we didn't need it.
Ironically, there was a period when those extra credit assignments got done because we were awake all night on meth.

Life is strange like that.

If someone had looked at our prom picture, they probably would have guessed we'd all grow up to have successful, ordinary lives.
None of us would have guessed that only three of us would make it past our early thirties alive.

I didn't bring a date to prom, even though I technically had a boyfriend.

He just wasn't someone I could pose with for prom pictures.

He was thirty-five years old.

He was my manager at the movie theater where I worked.
For the sake of this story, I'll call him Mr. Fartley.

People sometimes ask how something like that happens. The truth is, it didn't start with him. It started with the world I grew up in.

I was raised in a strict Pentecostal church where almost everything outside the church was considered dangerous. Secular music was forbidden. Interacting with people outside of the faith was discouraged. Living by the rules of the church was demanded and questioning authority was not tolerated. My mother sincerely believed she was protecting me by enforcing those rules.
But when you've been taught that everything outside your tiny circle is equally sinful, your ability to recognize real danger gets distorted.

I remember thinking something that sounds ridiculous now.
"If I'm going to hell for listening to Green Day, I might as well try meth too."

I wasn't trying to destroy my life. I was trying to figure out where the real boundaries actually were.

Getting a job gave me my first real taste of freedom. I could use being at work as an excuse to spend time with people my mother normally wouldn’t have allowed me to see and stay out later than I otherwise would have been allowed, if at all. I loved having coworkers my own age. More than anything, I loved finally feeling like I belonged to a group.

One afternoon, one of them, Mike, asked if I wanted to come hang out after work. "A bunch of us are going over to Mr. Fartley's house." It sounded fun. Most of my friends were going. So I went.

That night I tried meth for the first time. I loved it.

It made me feel euphoric. Confident. Fearless. For the first time in my life, I felt like I completely belonged.

Mr. Fartley took a special interest in me.

I had never been very good at talking to boys. I was awkward, painfully shy, and never felt particularly pretty. I wasn't used to being noticed romantically, so being admired by someone everyone else seemed to admire felt incredible.

Looking back, I understand what was happening.

Predators don't usually look dangerous to the people they're grooming. If you'd asked seventeen-year-old me whether I was being manipulated, I would have laughed.

I thought I was making my own choices.

Our relationship became sexual while I was still seventeen.
He was careful. He kept me a secret and told me to do the same. Looking back, I realize that wasn't because he cared about me. It was because he knew what he was doing was illegal and wrong.
After I turned eighteen, everything changed.

Suddenly I wasn't hidden anymore. He started bringing me to different cook houses. I met people who manufactured meth. I even met his school-aged daughter. The legal risk had changed, so he acted as though everything else had too.

It hadn't.

Mr. Fartley already had a group of teenagers to manipulate around him before I ever showed up. We all played different roles.
At the movie theater, we figured out how to resell ticket stubs and pocket the cash. None of us kept the money. We used it to buy Sudafed because there were limits on how much one person could purchase. He needed us to buy it for him.

At the time, it didn't feel like stealing for someone else's benefit.
It felt like we were all part of something together. The free meth felt like payment enough.

I watched meth being cooked a few times. I remember standing there fascinated by the process while also thinking how unbelievably toxic it smelled. The odor was sharp and chemical, nothing like anything I'd smelled before. I knew it was made with Sudafed and solvents like toluene. I knew enough to understand I probably shouldn't be putting something like that into my body.

Somehow that wasn't enough to stop me.

Mr. Fartley always had a sob story to manipulate. Usually it was about his ex-wife. According to him, she was vindictive. She'd ruined his life. She'd taken everything from him, including his car. We believed him because we only knew his version of the story.
Looking back, I wonder what her version would have sounded like.
I suspect she wasn't the villain.

I suspect she survived him.

We stole enough money from the theater to buy him another car.
A Pontiac Firebird. I don't even remember the exact year anymore. Somewhere in the 1980s.

What I do remember is prom night.

When everyone else was heading off to celebrate with classmates, Mr. Fartley picked me up in that Firebird. That's why this painting carries its title. Not because the car itself mattered. Because it reminds me how completely two different worlds existed at the same time.

In one world, I was a seventeen year old girl posing for prom pictures with my best friends.

In the other, I was climbing into the passenger seat of a thirty five year old man's sports car that was purchased by teenagers with stolen money after the dance.

Those two girls were the same person.

I wish I could say the story ended there. It didn't.

Eventually, I brought Nate and Jenny over to Mr. Fartley's house too. That has been one of the hardest parts of my story to make peace with. I introduced two people I loved into a world that would eventually consume them.

I still carry survivor's guilt because of that.

At first, none of it looked dangerous. Jenny loved that meth quieted her eating disorder by making her forget she was hungry. Nate loved the confidence and energy it gave him. I loved feeling like I belonged somewhere.

We were still honor students. Still athletes. Still showing up for work. Being an overachiever on meth meant spending sleepless nights doing unnecessary extra credit assignments because I didn't know what else to do with all those hours.

It's almost funny. Until you know how the story ends.

Everything finally fell apart because Mr. Farley stopped being careful. Mike, the coworker who had first invited me over to the house, found out that Mr. Fartley had been sleeping with his fifteen year old girlfriend. Whatever spell he had over everyone shattered almost overnight. They beat him up. He lost his job at the theater. The parties stopped, and the group scattered.

I know now that I had been given a way out. I stopped seeing Mr. Fartley, and I stopped using meth. Not perfectly. In my early twenties, I still flirted with it from time to time. But I knew enough to fear it. Somewhere deep down, I knew that if I kept chasing that feeling, it would eventually take everything from me.

For Nate and Jenny, the ending looked different.

Addiction doesn't take everyone the same way. Sometimes it crashes through the front door. Sometimes it slips quietly into someone's life until, years later, you realize it's taken the whole house.

Nate fought it first. The funny, brilliant friend who slept over like one of the girls and knew every Tori Amos lyric gradually disappeared into addiction. He died one week before his twenty-seventh birthday from pneumonia related to AIDS. I don't know every choice that led him there, and it isn't my place to tell the parts of his story that weren't mine to witness. I only know that addiction took far more from him than any drug ever promised.

Jenny's road was different. Alcohol took hold first. Meth came later. We drifted apart, as people sometimes do when they're struggling to survive in different ways.

Years later, I ran into her mom. She didn't tell me much. Only that Jenny had died in her sleep. It wasn't until I was working for a recovery organization that I learned the rest. One of our volunteers had known Jenny through a nonprofit that served people experiencing homelessness. He told me her family had raised money to install lockers there so people would have a safe place to keep what little they owned.

They called it Jenny's Closet.

Only then did I learn that she had died from a meth overdose while living in a tent. There are moments in life when grief changes shape. That was one of them.

For a long time, I carried the weight of introducing Nate and Jenny to Mr. Fartley's house. I still carry some of that weight. Survivor's guilt doesn't disappear because you understand it. It just becomes something you learn to carry with more compassion for the younger version of yourself who didn't know where those choices would lead.

Not long ago, I looked Mr. Fartley up online.
I expected to find an obituary. Or a prison record.
Instead, I found a Facebook profile.

He would be in his sixties now. That is a long life for a meth addict.
For a long time, I thought I wanted justice. What I really wanted was understanding. I have that now, as I understand that hurt people are the ones that hurt people. I don't know whether he ever faced the consequences of the harm he caused. I don't know whether he's found recovery. I did see that his Facebook profile followed a peer recovery organization.

I hope he has.

Not because it changes what happened. Nothing can. But because I understand that we are all acting from unhealed wounds until we wake up and choose to heal ourselves and it's not too late for anyone.

For years, I thought I needed to finish this painting before I could tell this story. I thought I needed to repair the tear. I thought I needed to find the perfect words. Maybe that was just another version of perfectionism. Another way of waiting until I felt completely healed before allowing myself to be seen.The painting kept waiting.

So did I.

Today, I don't think the tear is the part that needs fixing.
I think it's the most honest part of the painting.
The girl in the prom dress was damaged before she had a chance to mature.

So was the painting.

Today, both of us are still works in progress. The difference is that now I get to decide what comes next.I can't change what happened to that seventeen year old girl. I can't bring Nate or Jenny back. I can't paint over the tear any more than I can paint over the past.

But I can keep painting.

I can keep telling the truth.

I can make something beautiful from what almost destroyed me.

This is a self-portrait of me in my prom dress.

Maybe it was never meant to be finished.