Chapter Nine
While I’d been mixing Welcome Home, unbeknownst to me, Rick was becoming increasingly addicted to cocaine. He wasn’t snorting it recreationally; he was shooting it. Between work and my responsibilities as a mother, using any drug in any way was the farthest thing from my mind. I was hooked on the high of living close to nature—a high I had been reluctant to interrupt, but I had to earn a living. Working in the studio without Rick had restored my confidence. I stopped resenting L.A. and treasured whatever time I could spend with my four children. Every day was a gift, a joyous celebration of rediscovery.
I had asked, Who am I?
I was this woman. And this woman was slow to catch on. Before 1978 I had seen no evidence of Rick using drugs. As far as I knew, my husband had two addictions—cigarettes and coffee. Later I would learn that he’d had a history of shooting speed, and that prior to meeting me he’d been living in the red van with a woman from Utah and her young son. The day before the party at which I’d met Rick she had taken her son and gone back to Utah to get away from his drug abuse and the physical violence he sometimes visited upon her. True to form, Rick had never hit the boy—as if that made it okay.
Rick was smart enough to shoot up far from where I conducted my daily activities so I wouldn’t find out about his forays into that shadowy world. It worked. At first I was so grateful that he wasn’t hitting me and that I could see friends without him that I didn’t fully grasp the implications of the changes in his behavior. It wasn’t just the cessation of his jealousy and violence. Usually, when I came home after a mixing session, the first thing I did was check on the children. After determining that everything was as it should be, I would look around the rest of the house to see if Rick was around. He wasn’t often home, but when he was I usually found him in our bedroom pacing and muttering to himself. Sometimes I heard him preaching in a hoarse voice to a nonexistent listener about arcane spiritual and religious concepts. Other times I found him writing furiously, filling notebooks with colored-pencil drawings of spaceships, flames, and elements of American Indian design. He wrote copiously, covering pages with what he believed was visionary poetry and art.
As Rick’s bizarre behavior intensified it reminded me of my previous experience with the mental illness of a loved one. I had just made the decision to consult a medical professional and was going to do so the following day. I never got to make that call. The night I completed the final mix of Welcome Home I parked the car and came into the house in a celebratory mood. Rick wasn’t there, but the babysitter was with the children, and thankfully all was well. The next morning I woke up very early. Rick wasn’t in bed. I checked all the rooms upstairs, but he wasn’t in any of them. With all three of my kids still asleep, I went downstairs, put water on to boil for a cup of tea, and looked in every room downstairs. No Rick. I went back to the kitchen, put a teabag in the cup, and poured hot water over it. While it was steeping I entered the bathroom next to the kitchen and saw several drops of dark red blood on the white tile floor. With the flash that comes when something has been right in front of your eyes the whole time but you’ve never really seen it, I understood that not only had Rick been injecting cocaine, but he had come in during the night and had shot up in the house where my children lay sleeping.
At that moment I made the decision I should have made the first time he hit me.
Not knowing how soon Rick would return, I woke all three children. Levi and Molly, still sleepy, dressed themselves while Sherry and I hastily packed a few bags, and we all left the house. We drove to Louise’s to let her know why we were leaving and make the necessary arrangements from her phone. Though Louise was living on her own and didn’t interact much with Rick, I made sure she knew that she was not to go to our house under any circumstances until further notice.
My impulse was to get as far away from Los Angeles as possible, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to go to Welcome Home. I saw my options as either New York or Maui. I have no idea why Maui came to mind, though warm weather and sandy beaches may have been factors. Probably I thought that a faraway island would be the safest place to go to figure out what to do next. A few hours later, Sherry, Molly, Levi, and I were on a plane to Hawaii. I didn’t have more than a few days of figuring before a definitive decision was made for me. Using the phone in our rented condo, Sherry called a friend of hers who also knew Rick. After listening in silence for what seemed like an unusually long time, she handed the phone to me with a horror-struck expression on her face and uttered one word.
“Mom?”
Rick had been found dead of an overdose of cocaine in a location believed to have been the shooting gallery where he’d been buying and injecting the drug. That’s what my husband had been doing while I was recording Welcome Home.
Richard Edward Evers had been born on January 6, 1947. He died on March 21, 1978, nearly three months after his thirty-first birthday. He was less than two years shy of the age of demise he’d predicted for himself.
I could no more describe my jumbled emotions that night than I could describe the colors in the exquisite Maui sunset. That particular sunset was so spectacular that I wondered if Rick had sent it from wherever he was. I was filled with a deep sense of loss, not for the man Rick was when he died, but for the man with whom I had fallen in love. Before I had seen his dark side, I would have described Rick Evers as full of joy. How could that man have a dark side? How could he take himself out of this world? Had my saying no driven him to drug abuse? Was it because my work had taken us away from his beloved Idaho? Of course I wasn’t to blame for Rick’s death, but when we lose someone unexpectedly, we often ask what we had done that might have contributed to the death of our loved one, or what we didn’t do that might have saved him or her. Usually the answer is, “Nothing.” But still we ask.
The next day I flew back to Los Angeles with my kids. One question had already been answered: Idaho was our home, and Idaho was where I wanted to be. However, Idaho was not where Sherry wanted to be. When she asked if she could stay in L.A., I assented. It took several weeks to deal with the aftermath of Rick’s death and find someone to stay in the house on Appian Way. After that, Molly, Levi, and I flew back to Boise. As the plane took off and I watched L.A. recede from view, suddenly, silently, I began to cry. I had just lost someone close to me, and all the complicated parts of the story fell away. At thirty-six, I was a widow.
At Welcome Home, with spring unfolding and its abundance of life renewing, I was comforted and inspired by nature’s optimistic outlook. While Molly attended school in Idaho City, Levi played with friends at home. I did my utmost to keep happier times with Rick foremost in my memory and those of the children. Rick’s friends helped me take care of Welcome Home, and I continued to support them financially. I worked in my garden, rode and cared for the horses, hiked up and down Ashton Creek, and did mundane, necessary tasks such as washing dishes, doing laundry, and taking out the garbage. After everything my kids had been through, they seemed to be flourishing, as were the horses and garden. Rusty was the lone exception. You could see the question in his eyes and in everything he did: Where is he? At first Rusty stayed with us, then he moved in with another Welcome Home family, then another. He belonged to all of us, and yet to none of us.
Throughout the spring and summer I allowed myself to feel grief and, yes, anger. But I also worked diligently to replace such feelings with positive memories. It had been Rick who had provided me with the extra motivation I needed to get out of L.A. He had introduced me to the mountains, the beauty of the land, and the simple decency of so many people in my adopted state. And though I would rather not have lived with an abusive person, doing so had given me compassion for people in similar situations and helped me reaffirm that if I exercised the will and determination with which I believe every one of us is born, nothing would keep me down.
It was a crisp morning toward the end of August when I walked up the hill with Molly and Levi to meet Molly’s school bus. The blue jacket on one of her classmates reminded me of the clear blue sky reflected in Rick’s eyes our first morning at Welcome Home. I remember him sitting on the front porch steps with a steaming cup of coffee cradled in his hands, watching the sunlight creeping down his beloved Idaho mountains.
That vivid image set off a series of recollections. As I made my way back down the hill with Levi, memory snapshots were flipping through my mind.
· Me standing on a big rock on the bank of a creek in the summer of 1977. I’m wearing a tank top and cutoffs and feeling the shock of icy-cold creek water splashing over me while Rick, his golden hair backlit by the sun, plunges his naked body into a swimming hole. Emerging dripping wet, Rick raises his arms to the heavens in a triumphant V.
· Rick carrying a chain saw down Ashton Creek after cutting wood with his friends who live above us on the property. First smelling, then seeing his favorite person in the world, Rusty begins to bark ecstatically.
· My young son and daughter being scooped up by Rick. He swings them around, then embraces them both in a bear hug. As he laughs with delight at their obvious enjoyment of his impromptu display of affection, he looks over at me to see if I’m watching. (I was.)
· Rick strumming the guitar in one of his unorthodox tunings, seemingly oblivious to everything except the pure pleasure of making music.
We were approaching the double-wide. Tucking away my memory snapshots, I opened the door, took off my jacket, and got Levi settled with a bowl of cereal. As I sat in the kitchen with my son, my youngest child, the Benjamin of the family, I experienced one of those rare moments of peace during which I wasn’t thinking or doing anything. I was just being. It didn’t last long. Gently returning to the world, I recalled the tenderness that Rick had always shown to the elderly, animals, and very young children. Then I thought about the peace that he had experienced so rarely in life, and I hoped with all my heart that he had finally found it.