Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-From Macbeth, William Shakespeare
I first started telling you about my origins a little more than a
year ago (“The Early Days,” May 12, 2005). That was when I explained
how I moved to Maui after college, leaving a now unfathomable existence
as hausfrau to a bullying lover in Santa Cruz. I told you about my
first two years here, with my new Neil Diamond-obsessed, bartender
boyfriend, a Jeep I didn’t yet know how to drive, working four jobs
simultaneously in Lahaina, and how I then moved back to San Francisco.
I followed that up (“The Early Days, Part II: Sex, Drugs and the
Hard Rock,” May 26, 2005) with glossed-over stories of how island fever
led to my stint back in the city, figuratively and literally leading
the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, having spanking orgies and smoking crack
with a naughty Hard Rock Cafe trainer.
Soon after, I curtailed my memoir (“The Paleozoic Era: Pre-Early
Days, Part I,” Jun. 9, 2005) with an even earlier tale of life in
Beverly Hills with my mom and her rock band manager boyfriend, leading
us on tours to Europe and Hawai’i with Van Halen and the like, before
said boyfriend ended up in some jail in Peru.
Then you learned of our move to Las Vegas (“The Mesozoic Era:
Pre-Early Days, Part II,” Jun. 30, 2005) and my many embarrassing
phases as a Durannie, a mod, a new waver, a punk rocker and after a
move to Palm Springs, a goth and a desert hippie/metal head.
But then I redirected my story to more recent times (“The Early
Days, Part 3: How I Got the Job,” Oct. 27, 2005), after the HRC trainer
and I moved back to Maui and I bounced around several jobs, including
serving peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and $1800 bottles of cognac
to the fabulously rich and famous at a Wailea resort. That was when I
also told you how I got this here job.
The part I’ve left out, probably with excellent subconscious reason,
is that last year of high school and up to when I left for college. You
see, it was somewhat turbulent times back then. My mother was going
through a rough batch of addiction and alcohol abuse, and I felt like I
was facing my teenage years alone and unsupervised. My normally clean
and responsible record as a good kid, as the daughter who “raised” her
mother, and as a teacher’s pet, hit a wall during my senior year of
high school.
Although I had seen it countless uninterested times before—a
mountain of white powder on a glass table at some weekend rental in
Palm Springs, lines of it cut with credit cards in the bathrooms
backstage—it proved to be too great a temptation to pass up as I stayed
up all night and, of all things, studied for my Shakespearean recital
in AP English.
Ironically, it was the girl I was tutoring who offered it to me and
I accepted, ambitiously memorizing (or so I thought) lines of prose
along with the stuff that went up my nose.
This is sounding like some cheesy after-school special, isn’t it?
Well, it could’ve been much worse, I’m sure. All that inevitably
happened is that I made a complete ass of myself in front of my AP
class, as I blankly repeated the same first line of Macbeth’s famous
speech—“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…. Um… Tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow… uh…”—over and over again. I simply couldn’t remember
anything else.
My sudden drug-induced, erratic behavior resulted in an automatic
failure—my first, but certainly not last—a suspension and up to the
very final hour, being told I would not be allowed to graduate.
Needless to say, the mom was not pleased. We had an ugly battle wherein
she warned me of becoming a loser and I coldly replied that she was
merely looking at a mirror reflection of herself.
You could say it was a turning point.
Luckily, I did end up graduating high school that year. And it took
a little while longer, but my mom eventually got healthy and actually
became one of the top businesswomen in the Coachella Valley—I think she
won an award. And she just celebrated her 20th anniversary with my
step-dad so that’s something.
As for me, I tooled around the desert for a few years, taking
classes at the community college, working at a record store, using fake
ID’s to get into the clubs where my boyfriend was DJ-ing, and
fantasizing about my future as a glamorous marine biologist making
documentaries with Jacques Cousteau.
And then I moved to Santa Cruz.
Samantha Campos believes the
pillow may be a better invention than sliced bread, but not as good as
those little skewer things you stick in the ends of corn on the cob so
you can eat it while it’s still hot and dripping with butter. MTW
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