High On Arrival Read Online Free

was eighteen, a South African model, singer, and actor. Also there was my now-ex-stepmother Michelle’s daughter, Chynna, my new little sister, who was only a year old, so it couldn’t have been an easy time for them, but as far as I was concerned the shift was subtle. I watched my father’s lovers and wives crisscross paths: involved, broken up, jealous, mellow. As far as I knew, love and lust ebbed and flowed and my parents and their lovers were just splinters of driftwood bobbing along with the tide. Michelle and Chynna were still always around the house, so I never felt like I lost them. Half the time I wanted to play with Chynna—she was like a little doll—and the rest of the time I wanted to strangle her for dethroning me as Daddy’s little princess.
    For the birthday party, my father screened Dumbo on his movie projector, though at ten we were too old for it. It was probably a stoner favorite. Then, oddly, he screened the Monterey Pop Festival. I guess he was showing off. Dad was proud of having organized the festival and introducing not just Hendrix but the Who, Janis Joplin, and Otis Redding to the American public.
    Not long after that party I started hitting puberty. My dad and his friends were sitting around rolling joints on a Saturday morning when, in front of ten adults, my father said, “Look at my little girl. She’s poppin’ tits.” It was the kind of thing that some men of that time used to say—“Look, she’s becoming a woman”—not lascivious, just oblivious to how sensitive a young girl is about her development. I felt horribly exposed. I wanted to disappear. To this day the word “tits” creeps me out.
    Anyway, maybe it hooked into my father’s head that I was getting older, because later that day he gave me a new, adult responsibility. That afternoon his friends were … still sitting around rolling joints. I was bored and bouncing off the walls: “What can I do?” “I want to plant flowers.” “Can we go get sea-shells?” “Can we go to the store?”
    At loose ends, I tried to find ways to occupy myself, but you can only make so many sand castles or expensive covert phone calls. So on this particular day—the same day he outed my blossoming womanhood—Dad said, “I’m going to give you a project.” Dad had a job for me! This was exciting. I was in. He took the top of a shoe box and put a bunch of Thai sticks in it. Then he tore off the stiff cardboard top of a rolling paper pack. He showed me how to scrunch up the dried buds into pieces, shuffling the leaves with the cardboard so the seeds fell to the bottom. Once the pot was clean, he showed me how to attach two papers to make a fat joint. I had ten-year-old fingers, but in short order I got really good at rolling joints. I was the official joint-roller for all the adults. Sort of a rite of passage to go along with puberty, I guess.
    Parents have certain responsibilities. Most have an innate sense of what might be good for their kids, and what might be bad for them. They make choices based on those beliefs. They shelter their children from activities and influences that might harm them or lead them in the wrong direction. That feeling of protection hit me the instant I saw my newborn son, and it was so powerful and intertwined with love that I can’t imagine separating the two. My father was different. He loved me, but under ordinary circumstances he didn’t see himself as my protector and guide. He saw himself as a very cool person who loved to hang out with other cool people, including his own cool children.
    And so it was that my father and Genevieve, while hanging out in their new part-time digs—the penthouse suite at the Chateau Marmont—had no qualms about dipping into a cereal bowl filled to the brim with white powder and inhaling it in front of me and my brother. We watched them, fascinated, until they went to “take a nap,” which seems an unlikely thing to do after snorting massive quantities of cocaine,