LEAP After Belgium I ended up in Orange. Of course through that time I had also been in Special Ed for most of my life and they were trying to figure out what my learning disability was but they never could figure it out. They gave me all kinds of IQ tests that I failed. I ended up in Orange county in Special Ed in junior high. When I came back to the States everyone thought I was an ALIEN because I had an accent. They thought I was weird. I think it got me into even more trouble. I was kind of a freak.
I didn't dress like everyone else, I wore Toughskins and green Ked tennis shoes and those wind-breaker type mod jackets and I had short hair because I cut it off myself. I was a tom-boy. I had a lot of problems with that. I wore my brother's hand-me-down clothes and stuff. I wasn't like your average everyday whatever. I didn't used to bathe much. I was told "WOW! You smell GOOD!" by my grandmother because I'd finally taken a bath. I had really greasy hair - it took me quite a while to bathe. I didn't want to bathe more than once a week. I think it was the Euro in me still. People don't bathe a lot in Europe, they just put perfume on.
CANDIDA It's true.
LEAP That's the European Bath. I remember when I was in the Herms and I'd tell Kali "Yeah, I'm just gonna take a European Bath," and she goes "NO! NO! NO!" I go, "It's okay, I got a lot of cologne." [laughing] I had a lot of complaints about my stench last year too because I was back to doing European bathing and I guess it doesn't go over well, it's not trendy yet, right?
ZANNE It will become trendy?
LEAP I'm SURE it will. It is with the hippies and the radical fairies, right? They bathe Euro style. In Europe they just don't have any hot water, that's what it's really about. It's really hard to get hot water, it's a luxury. You end up stinking. When I first came here - I didn't really watch TV in Europe, I had better culture than that, I was more fortunate. But when I came her I started watching really bad things like The Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family and I wondered how come my family isn't like THEM? I was very disappointed. [laughs] Then when I saw the Adams family I thought it was closer, and The Munsters.
ZANNE Pete and Alex and I were walking down a road on Staten Island and these Big-Hair chicks came by in their Camaro and yelled out the window "Look! The Adams Family!" And we were so happy! We thought GREAT!
LEAP That's such a compliment! That's so great. Baretta. I really liked Baretta. I loved the skeeziness from the show. It seemed to show the ugliness, the yellow smoky walls of his apartment, it was really raunchy, and the ugliness of the streets. It started getting me attracted to wanting to be in the ghetto, I wanted to ghettoize myself.
I like prison movies. That's what America did to me. I found out what the culture should be, definitely romanticizing institutional facilities, women's prisons is a big American fantasy. And You know, Baretta's skeezy life, skeezin' around in New York with filthy garbage and dirty stinky alleys. It can be kind of attractive. And projects. They don't really have that in Europe. I came here and I said "Oh, this is where I like, the projects." [laughs] I lived in the projects for a while, I rented a living room in Lameda. I lived in the projects for six months. they asked me what I was doing there it was not my neighborhood.
When I first came back to California I lived in a Holiday In for six months. I lived right across the street from Disney land and the freeway and Toys R Us and Beach Boulevard. Lots of SKANK. That's when I got attracted to shows like Baretta, because I was on a skanky street. I could relate it to a show like Baretta. All the crime and shit on Beach Boulevard, I loved to watch it, it was fun. I guess I was really attracted to TacoBell because there really wasn't such a thing in Europe. I was getting into American TRASH. "Oh, I like this garbage!" I guess I was like an ALIEN because of that. The excitement over Disneyland.
I used to jump up and down on the beds at the Holiday Inn until they broke, I used them like a trampoline. My goal was to watch the bed sink on the floor and to go swimming late at night when you weren't allowed, and to eat at the Howard Johnsons restaurant. They had a store that sold Mickey Mouse shit and a car that took you to Disneyland. Any way in California I ended up hanging out with girls from Continuation School.
CANDIDA Oooh!
LEAP I know, they were GREAT! I went to Continuation School, that was my high-school. That's where you get kicked out of all the public schools and they send you to this one school for the BAD kids and it's one step before Juvenile Hall. If you can't make it in Continuation School you can't make it anywhere. They let you smoke on campus, they don't care if you're drunk. Everything's at your own pace but you're not allowed to bring drugs and alcohol on the premises and if you get caught with drugs you're told - I remember this punk rock boy, he was told by a cop "Well, if you can EAT the drugs, then I won't take you to jail." And so the dumb punk rock kid ate about FIFTEEN REDS and he ended up in the hospital instead. You know that cop just let him.
Most of these people were - they call them 'troubled teens', you know, teens in trouble. And they had the pregnant side, too. And they have hardly ANY other girls on the other side, it's almost all BOYS and there's FOUR girls, and they're always really good looking girls and they're like - they were fucking beautiful, just beautiful girls! They were party animals and they were sexy and they were beautiful and they were really hot. Hot girls. They were mature. Very mature. I think that's how they ended up in Continuation School, you know. They were mature.
When I was fourteen I was hitch-hiking back from the beach, it was a normal thing to do, instead of taking a three hour bus, it was much more convenient. Me and my friends, Lorena and Selena, they were sisters, hitch-hiked and we got a ride from this 16 year old guy in a clunky old blue oldsmobile. We were lucky it didn't fall apart on the freeway. He was just some juvenile delinquent type and he gave us a ride back to our house and he said,"Do you guys want to party later tonight?" We said, "Sure," you know, he had a lot of pot and beer in his car, so we went and partied with him that night.
He came back in a different car. It was a cream-colored car. This car was a really NICE car. We said, "Where'd you get THIS?" He said, "My Grandmother lent it to me for the night." We went to the river bed with him and smoked some pot and then on our way back we heard some sirens and the police were chasing us. There were two cop cars. I said, "Gotta pull over becasue the radio's gonna catch us. There's gonna be a 'copter over us soon. Then there was another cop car and they pulled us over and cornered us in the seven-eleven and then they said, "So, you've been out joy-riding." And I had a blanket over me and a pair of shorts on and they thought I was screwing. I said, "No, I'm cold," and then they said, "So, you've been out joy-riding," and I said, "Yeah, so what, I'vwe been out joy-riding, what's the big deal?" The car was stolen. I had to explain to my parents that I had a little problem the other night, they might be getting a call from the police, but I didn't know that the car was stolen. [laughs]
After all of the Disneyland escapades and living at the Holiday Inn, we moved into these sleazy condominiums and then my parents bought a really ugly house and asked us if we liked it and it was in the middle of a cul-de-sac in Orange. That's just terrible. I just started hanging out at the beach because Orange was so boring. The only place to go was Big O skateboard park and the beach, if you were under age. I did go to the underage disco, a low-rider disco. There was nothing to do. There was parties. Agent Orange and The Adolescents played in a back yard in Orange. There was punk rock happening there, actually, which was good. The people who were radical there were really radical ad destructive, they really destroyed a lot of property and did bad things because they were really bored kids. They were very fucking bored. They had to do things like steal cars, go joy riding, you know, suburbs.
I never went to school, I ended up at Richland Continuation School because I was a dedicated beach person, I was NOT into school and I was a professional at ditching and partying. I use to crawl away from the bouncer at school that was trying to catch people for ditching, I would crawl right under her legs and go in my friend's car and go to the beach and I would only go to school on Fridays and Mondays, Mondays to talk about the parties I went to and Friday to find out where they were. I was into socializing. In school I thought that was the most important part of school was to learn how to socialize and communicate, that was more important than the academic part to me. I thought school was fun except I hated a lot of people there. I got kicked out of that school [laughs] In junior high I used to shop lift too, and I started a store out of the locker room and I took orders and I sod things until the principal caught me and opened my locker and found a full store in there! [laughs]
There was a history teacher there named Mr. Pitts, and I found out he was an ex-cop and I was the typical stereotype kid that was like "I hate cops! I'm going to expose them all." So I decided to expose Mr. Pitts to everybody. "This guy's a cop." So I drew a picture of him and it was a donkey's ass with his face on it and I wrote something weird like "Mr. Pitts is a COP;" and I think I had the donkey taking a shit too, it was a non-sequitur. I changed my writing on the picture but you know, he was a cop, so of course he made everybody do handwriting so he could analyze the writing and he caught me! He was a great cop. I was suspended from school, for exposing the cop. History teacher, cop, misogynist. He always had a twitch in his eye, and I always thought he looked like Hitler. I did very bad in school.
When I went to Villa Park I was kicked out for not going and I was always late and I was drinking in class a lot, I would pour out the Cokes and put rum in it because my friend did that and I loved my friend, she was really cool and she was great looking and she wore tight pants and I liked looking at her and if I drank a little bit I liked looking at her even more! [lots of laughter] Of course I was the only girl who never had a boyfriend in that school. I did actually try to go out with guys from different schools but it was basically a bit retarded because they would always go "I've got to go out with somebody who will have sex with me." 'cause I didn't want to have sex.
CANDIDA Understandably!
LEAP Any ways I got kicked outta that school, for attending only for a month, if they had calculated all I attended for one year. So I went to Richland Continuation School where people could smoke. I loved that school, it was great! You could do anything you wanted and they had an animal room for the kids who were really bad they had to stay in this one room and they couldn't leave except for breaks because they were too bad to handle. They were terrible, terrible teenager boys. I remember when someone would break the vending machine and if you pushed the candy you'd get money out and we emptied the whole machine all through one class. I would keep going "I hafta go to the bathroom," until the machine was empty. Most people ended up with at least ten dollars and a bunch of candy.
During that time at Richland I decided that I was going to finish school in a year and so I took the history books home and I did a year's history in a month. It was at your own pace, you could just take the work home and do it at home. Do independent studies so I did that. My family didn't like that so I ended up locked up and then during that period of lock-up I got out and I ended up back at school.
ZANNE Where were you locked up?
LEAP I was locked up in La Harbera Community Hospital. They said I needed structure and behavior modification and the type of people that were there, this is a teenage facility. There was this guy Frank that they had in seclusion for four days and we all wanted to see who this was 'cause he came from Juvenile Hall, and he was a big drug dealer and so they had him in seclusion. Locked up in a rubber room! [laughing] 'cause he dealt drugs. He had long hair and he looked like he was into Led Zeppelin. There was my room mate Dawn that used to hyperventilate and try to strangle herself and she tried to put a pillow on me and I locked her in the bathroom and barricaded it with a dresser and put a chair on top of it and said "Don't ever do that to me again. Do not fuck with me or I'll lock you in the bathroom!" I got put in seclusion.
ZANNE How old were you at this time?
LEAP I was sixteen. I got put in seclusion because I locked her in the bathroom. She was younger than me.
ZANNE What is seclusion?
LEAP The rubber room. I was in there about an hour.
ZANNE Who put you in there, your parents?
LEAP In the nut house? My parents. One day my Mom goes "I want you to go to this psychiatrist," because she fired the woman psychologist that I was going to that though I should be an actress, that was her big thing, and my Mom fired her. She would tell me about her escapades on Hollywood Boulevard when she was an actress doing morphine and shit, she was this really far-our artist woman! Anyway my Mom fired her and hired this man, his name was Dr. Austen and he looked like Gene Wilder and I used to call him Dr. Austibutt or something. I didn't know the man and the first half hour that I spent in his office he asked me about what was going on with my family and me because I wouldn't follow the rules and then he sent me out and then I waited and then they called me back in a half hour later and he said "We're gonna send you to this place." He'd only known me for a half hour, so he didn't really know if I was crazy or not.
ZANNE That's right.
LEAP It was like, my mother, you know . . . .
ZANNE It was your mother's desire.
LEAP Yes. I was upset because I was a beach kid and I was in love with the beach and I remember going to the beach and having to think that was the last time I'd see freedom. It was close to the last. I was really into the beach, I was really into body surfing and knee boarding and the ocean and snorkeling and stuff because that to me was total freedom, because the ocean is like, not controllable, you know, you don't know what's going to happen in it. Basically you can't predict it. So, after I was in there, I ended up back in there two other times and I ended up being a ward of the court. My mom made me a ward of the court. And she became my public conservator, too.
ZANNE How long were you in each time?
LEAP The first time I was in six weeks, then two and a half months, and then another time two months. The time after that I was in this place called Charter Oaks for four months and then I became a ward of the court. The thing is I was fighting my father back, I was fighting back because he was really abusive. I didn't really let him punch me and if he did punch me I would spit in his face and he picked me up and stuff like that, so that's basically the rules I didn't follow. I fought back and I spoke back and I was rebellious.
ZANNE So basically they just wanted you out of their hair.
LEAP Yeah, basically that was pretty much it.
ZANNE So the first time you went in, were you really pissed off?
LEAP Yeah, I was very angry. What did I do to deserve this? I knew that I wasn't doing well in school. I also had the stigmatism of learning disabilities that they couldn't peg yet they would keep giving me IQ tests and these block tests and it would always be a man with a tie and it was intimidating. It was basically because the people that they chose to test me, they chose to give me men therapists up until a few years ago. My mom asks me if I'm going to therapy and I say, "Yeah, I do," and she goes, "What's he like?" and I go "What makes you think I would see a MAN?"
She didn't ever have a clue. That was part of why I was so bad. She was clueless and oppressing me, she was very controlled and she's very much like a Hindu house wife, and there was my father and he was a tyrant working for the government and my mom was always, "I'm a victim." I remember her in the bathroom, trying to slit her wrists, and me going, "No, don't kill yourself." When I was very young, probably six or seven, in Italy. She was crazy. She used to scream at night in the room next to me. Those sunken eyeballs are sunk in for a reason. She used to scream in the next room, "Don't do it! No! Leave me alone, don't do it!" I guess she was really abused, never got through it, she's really debilitated, that is my opinion of her.
ZANNE She was abused as a child, or as a grown-up?
LEAP Abused all the way round. I think that my father's abusive you know. I think that she was probably very abused as a child. She was a lot like Joan Crawford. She used wire hangers on us, wire coat-hangers, like she had taken the script from the movie because she needed a person . . .she had a personality disorder and decided to be Joan Crawford. When I was locked up she was watching Dynasty and decided she had her hair done just like the blonde haired woman in Dynasty and she wanted to act just like her. And she was visiting me in lock-up like this! And I was like "What is wrong with my mother? She thinks she's this woman from Dynasty!" [laughs]
Before she was Joan Crawford, at least she was doing a little better, it was more vintage, you know? Yeah, she liked Hoover vacuum cleaners a lot too, whatever you do, don't get my mother a vacuum cleaner for a Christmas present. She would come in my room at night and hit me and beat me up, but didn't really beat me up because she was not strong enough to really hurt me. And I had to just let her do it because she was my mother and she was little and I thought she was fucked up and fragile so I just let her beat me, you know. Finally one day I just got tired of it and I pushed her against the closet door and that's when that all started, when the lock-up stuff started, from that. I was fighting my father and my brother, mainly.
ZANNE You guys would get in fist-fights?
LEAP Yes, fighting them physically. I t was very hard, especially my brother because he's three years older and bigger than me and he would never stop until I would have to pick up objects. That was the only way to win. I did throw him down some stairs and over a coffee table. I learned how to fight. And my Dad used to wrestle me, pin me down to the floor, or pin me to a wall and I'd spit in his face. When he would grab my wrists and dig his hand in while he was driving me to school.
ZANNE What was lock up like for you?
LEAP The first lock up I was in, I was happy to get away from my family actually. I hated it but then I was like, 'But I'm away from them, so this is a little better than living with them." Because they were always screaming till four in the morning. My mom used to scream at me and sometimes she'd come in my room at four in the morning. I just did not know when she was going to come in and stuff, and I had to be ready for that. Here I didn't. Being on guard. It was strange not having to be on guard, it was strange for me for a while.
When I was in Landmark, the ward of the court place, that was pretty much my first day of real prison. That one was more prison-like. I was in a structure/behavior modification unit, that's what they would call it. They had sliding glass doors that didn't open to a patio but all you could see was four walls of cedar block, some planted trees, cigarette butt cans and a few benches in a square, put in a rectangle and a couple of people pacing. You slept in hospital beds, those metal beds, and the floors were waxed, sometimes with buffer, you know, it was a traditional set-up looking like a convalescent home. It used to be a convalescent home, in fact. One woman, Maxine, that was fifty-seven, had been in there when it was a convalescent home and they turned it into this nut-house and they left her in there. It was a sanitarium, basically. Most of the people were there for five years, ten years, fifteen years, she was there twenty, you know, that's quite a long time to be locked up. That's past the minimum. [laughs] That's a little bit overboard.
I didn't get a pass for nine months. I didn't see any light for nine months. It's kind of like jail. I was on a dress code, I was told what to wear, how to dress. I didn't make hospital corners right. So therefore I couldn't get off the east wing to go to the west wing where you get to hold your cigarettes. The east wing gives them to you once an hour and if you're not there in time you do not get a cigarette. You're watched a lot and you can't get off the east wing if you don't know how to make hospital corners on beds. If the penny doesn't bounce you can't get off that wing until you can make that penny bounce. That was my experience. I got off of the east wing when I had this girl do them for me. I couldn't do them. I said, " If you do me hospital corners I'll give you all my dessert." [laughing] And so she did the hospital corners and I got off the east wing after nine months. Then I had a pack of cigarettes to hold.
In the morning you woke up a six-thirty, seven was breakfast, eight was showers, you lined up for showers, there was three bathtubs, three or four showers in a room and there were seventy women lined up to take these showers. At nine-thirty or ten was calisthenics and then there was group and then there was school in the basement and it really was a basement. It was really below sixth grade level, like see dog and Jane Dick run, see the dog bite Dick, or whatever. You basically didn't hafta do a thing because it was just, I can't believe that they call this school. Only two people could communicate there. Two or three people could hold a conversation. Everyone else was drooling on themselves and screaming, Turettes syndrome. So I didn't have anyone to talk to except for the staff and two other people. So I did paint a lot of acrylic plagiarist paintings and I sold them to the nurses, staff. I went through art institute books and stole the paintings because I couldn't do my own work so I just stole work and I redid it. That's what I did in there. That's all that I did. Until they took my art supplies away. They confiscated them all for having a messy room.
I guess basically the feeling I had in there was "What is the crime that I've done to be in here? what's my crime? I can't figure out what the crime is that I've done. I just kept looking for the crime, for about four months I kept telling the counselor"I still haven't found the crime that I've committed, what did I do to deserve to be committed like this? I'm in HELL. I've been totally SENTENCED. And I couldn't have been this bad.
Z What would they say
LEAP Well, basically I was considered INCORRIGIBLE. I was very angry. I was explosive. I just cried for the first two weeks that I was there, and sleep. It made me so depressed that all I did was sleep and they had to put me on Elavil. That was when I met my first anti-depressant. [she laughs] I needed an anti-depressant to be in there. You could be lethargic and suicidal and bored but you didn't know what to do with it all because there's just nothing to do with it all. There's not a lot of hope. You're wondering, "Am I getting out? It's been a year."
Z How long were you in there?
LEAP A little over a year.
Z Damn!
LEAP And then I got out and I moved into a garage and I lived in a garage. I had five dollars.
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