No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (2 page)

He’s outside now. At the door. He opens it. Takes a few moments . . .

“I know you’re awake,” he whispers, addressing the

darkness. “I know everything.” I don’t move. I don’t breathe. He closes the door, cackling to himself, and moves off. I wait for his footfalls to fade before I take a breath. I lie there trembling. I am fourteen years old and I am going out of my fucking head.

I’m up at eight o’clock the next morning, a Saturday. I am in the kitchen making breakfast for my father. He’s upstairs, getting ready for the day ahead. My mother is still asleep. She’s on the night shift at the hospital and generally doesn’t get home before seven a.m. I prepare everything just so. His plate is perfectly centered. The utensils are laid out with military precision.

At 8:45 sharp, his eggs are ready. I wait, but not for long.

I hear the door to the master bedroom opening and I set the eggs on his plate and rush back to the sink and drop the frying pan into the suds. He’s on the stairs now, on his way down. I grab my stuff and rush through the living room and I’m out the front door before he reaches the kitchen.

I make my way down our street, already baking in the early morning sun. I have a ballet class to go to, then a long shift at the Orange Bowl, a local pizza parlor.

I look at the houses around me and think: One day I’ll go home to the wrong house and pretend I live there. And nobody will say anything. They might be a little surprised at first, but they’ll be nice people, and they’ll understand why I’m there. They will make room for me at the dinner N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 3

table. We will have a very pleasant time over dinner, making conversation and such, and after dinner one of them will show me to my room. I will brush my teeth and slip under the covers of my new bed and sleep like I haven’t slept in years and years. In the morning, I will wake refreshed and happy, a new Janice. And after a few days it’ll be like I’ve always lived there.

Before my ballet class I stop at a pay phone and call Bobby McCarthy. He is a senior at Nova High and has promised to try to score a pair of tickets to the Doors concert. The concert is tonight. I am in love with Jim Morrison.

Bobby McCarthy doesn’t answer the phone. I feel like crying.

I make it through ballet class and hurry out to catch the bus and take it across town to west Hollywood. I am anxious. I am always anxious. I should change my name to Anxiety Dickinson. I am anxious about my little sister. My big sister. My mother. Myself. Life. I am anxious about what to wear, what to eat, what to say, how to breathe.

I get off the bus two blocks from the Orange Bowl and walk through the minimall and I’m there. I change in back, in the storage room. I can see the owner trying to get a peek at my ass as I slip my uniform over my head. I don’t say anything. I go out front. It’s early yet, but in Florida people like their pizza at all hours. You wouldn’t think so, with the heat and all. But they do.

During a lull, I try calling Bobby again. I am on anxiety overdrive. If he doesn’t get those tickets, I’ll die. I know it.

I have been thinking about this concert for eleven weeks.

I’ve been living for this concert. It occurs to me that I don’t have much to live for. Then I remind myself that I’m fourteen years old and that things might change. They probably won’t, but they might. And it’s all about
hope,
right?

4 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

Bobby is still not answering the phone. If he doesn’t get the tickets, I’ll kill him.

At four o’clock, my shift ends. Bobby hasn’t called, and we have a long way to go if we’re going—all the way to the Dinner Key Auditorium, in Coconut Grove—so I figure it’s not happening. My life sucks worse than ever.

Then suddenly,
vrooooom
! The windows are rattling like crazy. Everyone turns toward the parking lot.

Bobby’s pulling up on his Harley. I can see him through the plate glass, which is thick with grease. He’s looking dead at me, but I can’t read his expression. He’s giving me nothing. He’s Mr. Poker Face. Then he smiles and flashes a thumbs-up.

I run to the storage room, grinning like an alligator, and put on my miniskirt and platform shoes; suede, with thick, cork soles. I look six feet tall. I am mostly legs, spindly legs and no tits. I’m in a red tube top—not that anyone would notice—and my hair’s parted down the middle, just like Cher’s. I look in the storage room mirror and I’m happy,
idiotically
happy. I am so happy I’m grinning
and
crying. I stop crying long enough to put silver glitter on my eyelids and then take another long hard look at myself and I tell my reflection,
You rock, babe.

I rush outside and climb onto the back of Bobby’s chopper and off we go. He drives like a fucking maniac. I don’t care if we die. Just let it be after the concert.

The minute we get inside the auditorium, I lose him in the crush of bodies. I look around for a while, but I don’t see him. I don’t care. I am here. Then the lights flicker and the curtains part and some local band is up on stage and the lead singer asks us, “Can you feel the love in the room?”

And everyone roars back in unison. Yeah! And then the band is rocking, warming us up, and people are passing N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 5

joints around and taking off their clothes and communing with God or the Devil (depending on what kind of acid they’re dropping).

And I’m working my way through the crush of bodies, toward the stage. Floating, effortless, as if it were my destiny. And then there I am and there he is: Jim Morrison.

Right in front of me. So close I can see the sweat on his brow, the veins on his arms. And I don’t know what happens, but suddenly everything around me goes black and deathly still. It’s as if the entire universe has fallen into some bottomless abyss, gone forever—every living creature wiped off the face of the earth, except for Jim Morrison and me. He is just so stunningly beautiful. That shoulder-length hair, that square jaw. He looks like an angel. He’s bathed in this angelic light, singing to me, looking at me, loving
only me.

And suddenly I remember something I once read in a

book, how there’s supposed to be this moment in childhood when a door opens and lets the future in. And I think:
This is it. This is my moment. That’s what I want.
No, not Jim Morrison. I want to be up there, on stage, bathed in that otherworldly light, looking like an angel. I want to be adored the way Jim Morrison is adored.

And then they’re playing “Break On Through” and I

lose it. Tears just streaming down my cheeks. And I’m thinking:
Please God. Help me break on through. I can’t
take it anymore. I can’t take another day of this.

MEET THE

PARENTS

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

My father was a tall, slim, handsome man with a thick head of silver hair, buzzed flat, and gunmetal gray eyes.

People liked Ray. He had an easy smile. A pleasant laugh.

He was a good storyteller, a good listener, popular with the neighbors.

But I didn’t often see that easy smile. Or hear that pleasant laugh. I saw, instead, the way his eyes changed color when he got angry, the whites glowing red. Or the way he balled up his big, freckled fists when he came after me, like a bull in heat. I hated him. I hated his eyes; his hair; that acrid breath; the wife-beater, Fruit of the Loom T-shirts. I hated him with every fiber of my being.

I hated my mother, too; hated her because she was

numbed into oblivion with the pills she’d been prescribed for an old back injury. She would come home at the end of the day,
floating,
and she stayed aloft with the help of those lovely pills. She would glide through the house on a cushion of air, in slow motion, unaware, unseeing, her voice soft, her mind elsewhere, always smiling this benign Hare Krishna smile—like she was At One With God or something; which she was, I guess, at least chemically.

Those were my parents. So I ask you: My two sisters and I—what fucking chance did we have?

* * *

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 7

They met, appropriately enough, in a bar. My mother, Jennie Marie Pietrzykoski, was the eldest of nine children. Her Polish-born father owned a little pub in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, right next to the railroad tracks, and I guess she felt comfortable around booze. She went to nursing school in Manhattan, and at night she’d hit the elegant nightclubs with her fellow nurses.

One night, at a Midtown watering hole, some asshole came by to harass Mom and her fellow nurses. Ray Dickinson intervened, decking the guy and tossing him into the street. My mother and her friends were so grateful they asked him to join them. He looked good in his Navy uniform. He was a radioman. Mom couldn’t stop staring at those gray eyes. Three days later they went down to City Hall and got married.

The following week they ran into the “asshole” from the bar. Turns out he was a friend of Ray’s;

they’d set the whole thing up to make

my father look like a regular hero. My

mother thought it was funny. I would

have had the marriage annulled.

They got an apartment in Brooklyn,

and I guess those first few months

were pretty hot. My mother was a

looker. She wore stylish pumps and

blood-red lipstick—not particularly original, true, but it worked.

She loved the camera and the

camera loved her back.

MY MOM,

JENNIE MARIE PIETRZYKOSKI.

WHAT A SET OF PINS!

((((((((((((((((((

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

NEWBORN ME, MOM,

AND ALEXIS IN 1955.

Alexis came along

a year later. She

didn’t
love the camera. There’s a picture of her I’ll never forget: She’s about five

years old and sitting stiffly on my father’s lap,

and she has a look in her eyes that’s a caught-onfilm cry for help. He was already into her. I guess five was old enough. I don’t know where that picture is today, but I’ve got it imbedded in my brain. I wish I could erase it.

I came along five years later. My mother was working as a nurse in Manhattan, already dabbling with prescription drugs, and my father was grumbling about his nowhere career with the Navy.

Now there was more bad news: another daughter. Ray

was devastated. He’d been hoping for a boy and made no secret about it. I swear to God, I remember him hating me when I was barely a few weeks old. I know that seems unbelievable—I was way too young to be forming memories—but his hatred was the air I breathed from birth.

When I was just eighteen months old, in 1957, the family moved from Brooklyn to Florida. “Ray dear”—as my

mother called him—had been tossed out of the Navy for assaulting an officer. He was going to start again, in sunny South Florida. Become Captain of His Own Goddamn Ship.

Only it never quite happened for him. He got a gig

with the Coast Guard, but he didn’t think much of those

“pussies,” so he ended up with the U.S. Merchant Marine.

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 9

He hated taking orders, but he loved the sea. And he loved the long trips he got to take. So did we. Life was different when he wasn’t around. At night I’d kneel next to my bed and pray that the Seaman’s Union would call in the morning and drag him off to some remote hellhole, where he’d fall overboard in a storm and get eaten by a shark. Alas, all my prayers went unanswered. Ray always returned to the family. He couldn’t get enough of his family. Ray dear had a problem, see. He liked to be serviced. And with four women in the house, he felt entitled.

I was nine years old when he came to my room one

night and told me we were going to play the
lollipop
game, a special game for a father and a favorite daughter. And—

We have a winner!
—I was that favorite daughter.

“This is the way it works,” he said, his voice low, excited. “You see this? This is Daddy’s dick. You rub it like this. You see how it’s getting all rubbery and big? Watch.

Go ahead. Touch it. You see how hard it’s getting?” I was afraid to touch it, but I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn’t touch it. So I touched it. It didn’t feel like much. He came closer. “Now open your mouth,” he said.