Free Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness by Mary Forsberg Weiland, Larkin Warren Page A

shampooed by someone else—scrub, rinse, repeat, condition, rinse—is unlike any other. I felt like a princess. In the studio the next morning, being photographed for our cover tries, I kept staring at myself in the mirror. That girl, braces and all, was beautiful. Not only that, they even liked my braces—they told me to keep smiling a big smile “until your cheeks hurt.” Who knew smiling could actually hurt?
    On our last day in New York, we met for breakfast in the Rainbow Room, on the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Center. The ride in the elevator made my ears pop; the view of the city from those windows made my eyes pop. On one side, the East River; on the other, the Hudson River. A ship on the Hudson looked tiny; the Empire State Building, twenty blocks south, looked like a toy. I kept waiting for somebody to wake me up and tell me it was a school day and if I didn’t move it, I was going to be late.
    All the top agents in New York came to meet with us that day. Representatives from top agencies like Ford and Elite talked with me, and once again, I spoke with Karen Lee from Pauline’s. After Washington, she’d kept in touch with me and Candy just as she’dsaid she would, and now, she said, it was time—I was ready. There was a comfort level with Karen. She took an obvious personal interest in me. I knew I was wading into big waters—I’d need someone to play the same role with me that Candy did.
    Ultimately, I was one of the finalists in the Seventeen contest. I didn’t make it onto the magazine cover, and I didn’t win the Geo Tracker. I told myself it was probably just as well—at that point, my mother couldn’t even afford driving lessons for me, what would we have done with a car? I won another JC Penney gift certificate (which I traded in for cash when I got home, and then went right to the Gap and spent it). Candy got me more local modeling jobs. And my Seventeen adventures made it into every publication in Southern California. This had little effect on my social status at school. Well, maybe in the boy department—the Mary in those pictures was not the Mary who sat next to them in class. If anything, it made me even more self-conscious. Modeling school, the work that came out of it, and my dreams for the future—all of that was very private, like something breakable, and I didn’t want anyone near it.
    The universe plays tricks. Had I won that car, I never would have met my future husband. That little Geo Tracker would’ve significantly rerouted the course of my life.
     
    My mother’s wild single days (which weren’t wild at all, of course) lasted barely a year. She met and fell in love with someone, and that someone fell in love with her. His name was Mark, he was a career navy guy—he worked on the flight deck of a carrier at North Island Naval Base in Coronado—and their decision to marry came (it seemed to me) very quickly. My father had remarried as well.Johnny had a bigger struggle with this than I did, since he’d been living with my dad (and had a much closer relationship to him than I had at that point), and the new stepmother came with two teenagers. My reaction to anything Mom and Dad did increasingly was, “Oh God, whatever.”
    I liked Mark. He steadied my mother, he loved her, and it was obvious to anyone who saw them. He, too, had gone through a difficult childhood, with most of the responsibility for his own siblings—to this day, the man won’t eat pancakes because they were a primary food group for him growing up. There seem to be two schools of reaction if you come from that world—you either get stuck in it, or you get up and run. Going back is not an option for us runners. With Mark, I knew that we were safe and that my mother would be cherished for the rest of her life.
    Soon after they were married, however, he learned that he was being transferred to Lakehurst, New Jersey (point of interest: this is where the Hindenburg went down). Predictably, I threw a fit,