Samantha Geimer - The Girl - A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

And yet he could be a terror and he was controlling—and I was never someone who liked being controlled, even if it was for my own good. He wasn’t stupid; he would get exasperated with my life goal, which, at that point, was to do as little work as possible. There was a lot of drinking and screaming and hitting—and I gave as good as I got. It had to end, and it did, several times. But we kept coming back to each other. I couldn’t help myself. He was the man to me.

I’m astounded that in the next few years, nothing truly horrible happened. Nobody got arrested, and there were only two car accidents. Well, three, if you count the time I visited my sister, Kim, back in York and set her car on fire. (I’d run out of gas and found some lawn mower gas and poured it into the carburetor to get the car started and—well, all I can say is, don’t do it. But… could have happened to anyone, right?)

Was I acting out? I never thought I was. Would I have chosen a more straight-and-narrow path if it weren’t for the Polanski incident? Possibly. My mother and Bob, so riddled with guilt, were only able to say yes to me. I remember one July Fourth in particular, when Bob overheard our plans to drop acid and watch fireworks. He insisted on chaperoning us because he was concerned. (He knew that even if he stopped us that night, we’d just go and do it some other night.) He drove us in the back of his truck up to the hills above the house to watch the fireworks, and made sure we got home safe. Little did he know, we were dropping acid all the time. This just happened to be a particularly festive night to do it.

You could call Mom and Bob enablers, but that’s sort of like calling forest rangers who start a controlled burn before wildfire season “enablers.” No; the rangers want to minimize inevitable damage. So did Mom and Bob. As outrageous as I could be sometimes, I always felt cared for. I think I would have gotten into a lot more trouble without them.

My father had been the only person who cared about my academic performance. But by this point even he had given up on having an academically inclined daughter. “You should go to college to meet a man who’ll take care of you,” he said. I didn’t listen, but he was right. Over the next ten years, if there had been an Olympics for job-quitting, I would have won the gold. I was extremely adept at getting jobs, because I was smart and capable. But then, generally, I quit before I got fired. Our relationship gradually deteriorated. He could be particularly cold and mean when he was drinking. In an effort to dissuade me from an acting career he once said to me, “There must be a hundred girls within a twenty-mile radius of your house that have more talent and are better-looking than you.”

Craig and I had moved in together in 1980, when I was seventeen. By the following summer I’d had enough. I decided to make a break from California and from Craig. I packed up my stuff in my Camaro, unloaded it back at Mom’s, left a note on my desk at work, and got on a plane back to York. Staying with Dad wasn’t an option at that point, so I went to stay with my sister at her farm, outside of town. It was another summer of partying, getting high, watching the band practice in the abandoned skate park, staying out all night, sleeping all day, and trying to find the odd job to pay for beer and food. I wasn’t making it work, so I finally headed back to California again. After I got back, I did various jobs—bank teller, payroll clerk, clothing retail—and I was bored out of my mind with all of them. During that time I began seeing a ruggedly handsome boy named Rex, who, I decided, was my ticket out of everything. Or more specifically, Rex and the baby I was carrying—because very soon after we began seeing each other I got pregnant. It would be fine, I thought; Rex would take care of me and the baby. I walked down the aisle in my gunnysack dress on May 8, 1982; my dad gave me away. Jes was born that November. Ten months later, after one too many incidents where Rex wasn’t where he said he’d be, we separated. Many years have passed, and Rex has turned out to be a great man and great father. But at the time he was nineteen. He was stuck with a pregnant wife, while the other guys were out having fun. Now that I had a baby, I wanted to stay home, but I had to find a way to take care of Jes and myself. So I did babysitting for neighbors in my home until he was old enough for preschool.

And here’s the thing. As immature as my thinking was at the time (Hey, I know what will be easier than working—a baby!), having Jes really did save my life. My life began to have responsibility and purpose. At the same time, my friends were beginning to use harder drugs. Free-basing was the latest thing, and that had consequences. Consequences like arrest, addiction. There are some things no girl should have to do to fund a habit. I knew people who did those things.

Having a baby was not really compatible with that lifestyle, so I stopped everything but the occasional joint or beer. After Rex and I split, I lived at home with Mom but more or less spent every night with Craig, whom I’d gotten back together with and who only lived a mile away. Jes was like everyone’s new toy; he was a sweet and easy baby, and people wanted to be with him. I was with him during the day, and went to sleep at Craig’s at night.

Rex spent two or three nights a week with Jes; he may have still been a kid himself, but he wanted this child and was not at all happy I’d wanted to get a divorce. But I thought—I knew —Jes was better off with Rex or my mom than Craig and me. Craig didn’t really want to be a father, so even if I was addicted to him, my rational self knew in the long run this relationship was a bad idea (not that I wouldn’t have some even worse ideas later…). Craig and I couldn’t even agree on how to raise a puppy, never mind a child. It was better Jes didn’t become attached to him. I knew our relationship wouldn’t last forever.

For the next few years, I alternated between living with Mom and Jes and living with Craig, and doing whatever job I managed not to quit. Life didn’t have an interesting trajectory, but I had my son and my boyfriend and my weed and my beer, and I was okay. When Jes was old enough to go to school, I decided I’d join him, sort of, by going back to college to become a legal secretary. I wasn’t particularly interested in being a secretary, but I felt that between being raised by a criminal defense attorney and being immersed in the details of my own legal case since the time of Polanski’s arrest, I was practically a lawyer myself.

I was itching for change, and 1985 and 1986 gave me plenty to want to change from. First, life off and on with Craig was becoming increasingly insane. And then Nana, who had come to live with us a few years earlier, was often off her meds. For Mom, bringing anyone to visit was dicey. Nana would sit there, smoking and drinking her Chablis, flirting with Bob’s friends. That behavior might be adorable when it’s a snappy Betty White in an episode of Hot in Cleveland, but Mom found it cringe-inducing in real life. She was impossible to live with. Mom finally moved her to an apartment a few blocks away, but she’d still come to hang out every day. Her mind became more and more detached from the rest of her until it abandoned her entirely, and I came home to find her body lying on my bedroom floor. By the time I got home, the ambulance, recognizing she could not be resuscitated, had already left, and Mom was kneeling next to her, and had started chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum,” urging her to Go Toward The Light. I think she was pretty much at the light at that point, so I told Mom I thought she could stop now. It was not a good moment. The paramedics had declared Nana dead and called for the coroner, and we had to wait over four hours. I was like, “How busy is the coroner? Did the entire population of Woodland Hills keel over today?” I’d never seen a dead person before. Nana was only sixty-two. Forty years of sedation and psychotropic drugs had taken their toll. But this woman had been an anchor in my life, always at the house to help with Jes, berating Craig if he treated me badly. I loved her. Mom was in shock for days. I learned soon what it was like to pick out a casket, trudge through a muddy cemetery in the pouring rain—things my mother could barely bring herself to do. This was the first time I ever had to care for my mother—which is not a bad thing to learn how to do.