Free Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon

leave me. Still, Danny opened up to me in a way he hadn’t to anyone before—one of the benefits, maybe, to meeting people before they’re fully formed—and he always encouraged me in my art.

10

    MICHAEL BYRON, an aspiring musician I had dated before Danny, lived close to school, and during senior year my friends and I would sneak out and climb over the tall wire fencing to get to his house, where we would get stoned, listen to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, and make out. I had another good friend, Willie Winant, whose older brother later created the TV show My So-Called Life, which was coincidentally filmed at my high school. Willie was a drummer, and none of the other girls in our class wanted much to do with him—he was bighearted but not especially attuned to his body. I used to choreograph dance pieces in our free-form modern dance class, with Willie always at the centerof the piece. To me it was a challenge to show the other girls, and my teacher, who knew nothing about dance, that body type didn’t matter.
    Outside of school I took classes at a Martha Graham studio from an eccentric French woman, but my mother didn’t want me to pursue dance—it was too showbiz for her. The dance teacher at my high school also taught gym, and to me those classes were the only truly creative classes I had. What was the most outrageous thing you could do and still call it a “dance” while not getting kicked out of school? I remember choreographing one performance to Frank Zappa’s song “Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague” from the album Uncle Meat . Willie mimed going to the bathroom, while my fellow dancers and I were the toilet mechanisms, tossing toilet paper out into the audience. A year later, Matthew Bright, who went on to direct the infamous Reese Witherspoon film Freeway, bragged that during his own dance performance he’d tossed chicken livers out into the audience.
    My best friend at the time was a girl named Marge. Marge and I would sneak out at night and meet each other halfway between our two houses. One night, a few of us stole some big ice blocks out of the school ice machine and snuck onto the Bel Air golf course at two A.M. We laid towels over the ice and slid down the dark slopes. Another time we drove to Beverly Hills and swiped flowers from people’s front lawns. It was a harmless thrill, we reasoned, because after all, Beverly Hills was too perfect in the first place.
    Marge also liked to drag me to peace demonstrations and love-ins. As the oldest of three kids, and a take-charge person, she was far tougher and more grown-up than I was. On the surreal, shocking night Bobby Kennedy was shot, Marge had gone to the Ambassador Hotel to see him speak. One moment she was talking about going over there, and two hours later RFK was dead—in L.A., too, that safe and beautiful place of movie-lot landscaping, shiny new cars, and tanned good-looking people, a city where thanks to the curfew laws no one was allowed to so much as loiter.
    I graduated high school as a midterm grad. I was glad it was over, and as a “young” high school grad who had just turned seventeen, I decidedto take a year off before starting Santa Monica College. My parents wouldn’t pay for me to go to CalArts, but I was bullheaded and had no interest in going anyplace else. Eventually I got bored waitressing and doing other menial jobs, and I moved in with a friend, Kathy Walters, a Santa Monica College student. If memory serves, the tuition at Santa Monica College was $30 a semester. Of course this was before Ronald Reagan wrecked the entire California school system, from the community colleges up to the state university level, with his brilliant ideas about freezing property taxes, thereby leaving no money for education. Next he would go after the whole country.
    The fall after high school, I was going out with a quiet, introverted, gentle guy named Rick, who was in his