“As long as you pay your rent, I don’t care how old you are.”
At barely 15 years old, I am pretty sure my signature has no lawful place on this rental agreement. But I need somewhere to live, and this guy is dumb or desperate enough to give me the keys to this apartment in exchange for $350 a month that, by some miracle, he trusts I am good for. (He is right.)
I ink my name onto the form in loopy, girlish script and hand it to him. Thank fuck. I have to move out of my old place in less than a week, and now I have somewhere to go.
For most of the past year I’ve been living on the top floor of a three-story walk-up next to the downtown movie theater. It’s a pretty nice apartment. A two-bedroom with lots of light and wall-to-wall carpeting.
The new place is a bit shittier — a dank, one-bedroom basement suite that smells like Lysol and sweaty boots. Looking out the living room window, I am eye level with muddy brown grass and the busy street beyond. Still, I am pretty damn proud of myself for finding it, and prouder yet for persuading the building manager to rent it to me.
Honestly, I can hardly believe he went for it. What was he thinking? I’m still in junior high, with no job and no parent nearby. I don’t exactly look like a fine, upstanding young lady, either, in my skintight jeans, heavy metal band T-shirt, and thick black eyeliner — the unofficial uniform of 1980s crime-curious mall rats. But I do happen to have a few thousand dollars of my own, and as I write a check for the deposit and first month’s rent, carefully tearing its perforated edge and peeling it off the checkbook, I feel myself grow a little taller. What could be more grown-up than putting a roof over your own head? I feel like a small-town, underage Mary Tyler Moore, making it after all.
I wasn’t expecting to have to find a place to live all by myself. One week ago I came home from a trip to find that my key wouldn’t turn in the lock. A piece of green paper was stuck to my door, headed “Notice of Eviction.” Under “Reason for Eviction,” the box beside “Noise Complaints” was checked, which seemed kind of unfair since no one had ever complained to me about the noise. I had 15 days to move out.
This might be a good time to explain how I came to be in this situation — living alone at 15 with money to spend on an apartment but no parents.
The short answer regarding the money is that I starred in a movie when I was 13 years old. My childhood neighbor had cast me to play the leading role in her low-budget indie film about her own life. For this, I won the Canadian equivalent of an Academy Award and earned the princely sum of $12,000, and two years later I still have a fair chunk of that left.
I’m hoping this will lead to a career as a famous movie star, which is why I was on a trip just before I got evicted. I’d flown to Seattle for a casting call for a big Hollywood feature film about a family that adopts a bigfoot. In the audition, I had to throw a hissy fit because the creature ate my 15th birthday corsage (not that I’ve ever been in the same room as a corsage). Don’t get excited. It’s a long shot, I tell myself. I am not rich or famous (yet!) but I also am not broke, a fact with material implications for how this story unfolds.
The answer about my parents will have to be a little longer. I’ve got them, just not in the vicinity. My mother lives with my little sister in Vancouver. I lived there with them too until the age of 12, when my mom and I arrived at the shared conclusion that we’d both be happier if I went to live with my dad.
So, at the start of seventh grade, I moved into my father’s bungalow in Red Deer, Alberta, a prairie town with one water tower, two shopping malls and not much to do for fun except drink, fuck and fight. My dad was the kind of gregarious good-time guy who’s always jingling his pocket change and striking up conversations. More of a roommate than a parent, he gave me free rein to come and go as I pleased, which made it easy for me to pursue my passions. Chiefly, these included smoking weed in my friends’ garages, hanging out by the Pac-Man machine in the 7-Eleven, and trying to find out where the party’s at and who I could catch a ride with.
For two years, my father and I coexisted relatively peacefully like this, moving in wide orbits around each other.
Around the time he was pushing 50, my dad got itchy feet. He bought himself a used Honda 650 Nighthawk, fitted it with saddlebags, and started taking weekend trips into the Rocky Mountains. He stuck a map of the U.S. on the kitchen corkboard and, with pencils and pins, plotted out routes that snaked past all the famous landmarks and national parks. “One of these days,” he said. Only one thing stood between him and this once-in-a-lifetime adventure: his parental obligation to me.
As a precocious 14-year-old, I harbored the common adolescent delusion that I was smarter and more mature than any adult. So once I got wind of my father’s easy-rider dreams, I campaigned hard to convince him that I was more than ready to live independently now. I mostly fixed my own meals already. I got myself up and off to school each day. I knew how to push a cart around a grocery store and pay a bill. What’s the worst that could happen?
He was sorely torn. On one hand, he must have suspected it was unethical and possibly illegal to leave a minor alone for months on end. On the other hand, he really wanted to go on that trip.
I am a persuasive person, and he was easily swayed. Once I had put his parental reservations to rest, my dad moved our stuff out of our rented house and into the two-bedroom unit by the movie theater, handed me a stack of postdated checks made out to the rental company, and hit the highway.
I am not entirely sure how many months I lived in that apartment alone, but I know it was most of the ninth grade. Mostly, I was pretty good at living by myself. It felt like playing house but with real groceries. I fixed myself all the foods my mother would have never permitted in her health-conscious kitchen: brown-bag lunches of Cheez Whiz sandwiches on white bread, dinners of ham steaks fried up in the electric skillet, weekend breakfasts of smoky bacon and buttermilk pancakes. My cooking tasted like freedom.
I maintained a strict no-sleepover rule during the week and usually got myself to school in time for the first-period bell, even in the deep freeze of winter.
Weekends were another story — a time to cut loose and party. My apartment was everybody’s crash pad. We dropped purple microdot acid and drank vodka with orange Kool-Aid. We played euchre and crib around my kitchen table while hot-knifing hash off the stove late into the night to the sounds of Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper. I thought I was pretty careful about noise, but an apartment full of rowdy, drunk teenagers does not make for good neighborly relations, and here we are back at eviction day.
I have several problems to solve and no time to waste. I must find somewhere to live, pack up a two-bedroom apartment, and move everything to the new place in the next two weeks. I have no way of contacting my father because the year is 1986. All I can do is wait for him to phone home, and hope I’m around to take his call.
At no point does it occur to me to ask my mother, or any other adult, for help. I do not question the bare fact that I got myself into this mess and I alone must get myself out of it.
I can do it, too. I take a lot of pride in being mature for my age. I was babysitting infants and toddlers at 9. At age 10, I was delivering newspapers on my bike before dawn, and for the five weeks I spent on the movie set at 13, I was almost entirely unchaperoned. I feel I have already washed my hands of the embarrassing business of being a child, and am not about to backslide now.
Looking back, I can’t say exactly why I was so impatient to grow up. Youthful hubris? A lack of faith in the adults whose role it was to care for me? Maybe I was just born stubborn and headstrong, always so quick to insist that I knew what to do in every situation. To ask for help was a shameful thing, as though life skills are only legitimate if I acquire them without any assistance or instruction.
Of course, I don’t know what I don’t know about how the world works, and I’m about to discover there’s an awful lot I don’t know.
I carry cardboard boxes home from the grocery store and stuff them with my belongings, as well as my dad’s. There is one problem I can’t solve on my own: I need a moving van, and I’m too young to drive, let alone rent a vehicle. I ask my ex-boyfriend Sean to help me out and he agrees, even though we’ve been broken up for six weeks and I’ve already slept with his best friend.
On moving day, Sean brings some of his buddies to help haul my stuff down three flights of stairs, into the moving van and into my new basement suite. We are surprised to find there’s no electricity in the apartment. The building manager looks at me like I’m an idiot and explains, “You’re supposed to get your own utilities hooked up before you move in.” I feel about 4 years old.
I buy pizza and beer for Sean and his friends to thank them for moving me, and as the afternoon light fades to a dim gray, they leave me alone amid the stacked boxes and jumbled furniture.
I’m in for a long, miserable night. It’s cold and dark — I hadn’t thought to buy candles — and the apartment smells weird. I don’t like being on the ground floor and I don’t like being alone. I curl up on my dad’s double bed trying to shut out the unfamiliar lights and sounds of this gross little apartment. I hate it here.
In the morning I skip school to go down to the utilities office. They sign me up for electricity but, unfortunately, it won’t get turned on until the next day. My next stop is the phone company, where I get worse news. “You gotta be 19 to get a phone,” a woman at the counter says. I show her the rental agreement with my name on it and explain that my parents aren’t around. She just shrugs and lifts her eyebrows. “Those are the rules.”
A stiff wind is blowing as I walk back to my dark, cold apartment. At least I’ll have light and heat tomorrow, I tell myself. But I am wrong.
That night, Red Deer is hit with a freak snowstorm. Snowfall in May is not unheard of in these parts, but it’s rare, and this one is a doozy. More than 10 inches of snow falls in fat, wet gobs, taking down power lines and plunging big chunks of the city into a blackout, including my neighborhood.
In the morning, the foul smell in my apartment is much worse — a sour, yeasty stink. Pulling open the fridge door, the source of the smell becomes clear: I’d stashed a bag of bake-at-home dinner rolls, and they have risen in the now-warm freezer, bursting from their plastic confines and filling the appliance with a ballooning mass of sticky dough. Gross.
My eyes burn with hot tears as I try to scrape it off with a scrap of cardboard. It’s not working so great. I don’t have any cleaning supplies and it’s hard to see what I’m doing in the dim morning light. Defeated and disgusted with myself, I give up and slam shut the freezer door, sliding to the dirty floor in sobs.
I’m not a grown-up. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just want someone to come and take care of all this mess — to take care of me.
***
If I could travel back in time and come to the aid of my 15-year-old self, I would rent her a motel room and let her warm up there while watching movies as I clean out the freezer and throw out the pizza boxes and beer bottles. I would take her to a diner, buy her a cheeseburger and fries, and tell her how proud of her I am.
I would tell her that it’s OK to ask for help, and if the person you rely on is not able to give you what you need, it’s OK to ask someone else, and keep asking. That enlisting support is not a weakness but a strength; one that she will grow into, not out of, as the years pass.
I would pull out my phone and show her pictures of her own future daughter at 15; such a tender, unready age, as she’ll come to see. How fiercely she will love this girl! How protective she will feel toward her. I’d tell her that when she is the mother of that 15-year-old girl, she will look back on this moment and, through her daughter, she will give her own adolescent self all the care that she was owed.
She will come to realize how much she missed out on in her rush to grow up. She will overcompensate for that, clinging to her rebellious attitudes and childish indulgences far longer than they serve her.
As the years pass, she will get better at all this life management stuff. She’ll move herself into and out of no fewer than 20 homes. She will have seasons of lack and seasons of plenty. In other words, she will grow up for real. And all of this will unfold just as naturally as snow melts in the spring.
Looking back on it now that I am north of 50, it perplexes me that so many adults knew that I was living alone at 14 and 15, yet no one batted an eye. Not my teachers or school administrators, all of whom knew my circumstances. Not the woman who evicted me, nor the building manager who rented the basement suite to me. No social worker came knocking on my door, though there were times I secretly hoped one would. Where was the social safety net? I mean, this was Canada in the ’80s, not Dickensian London.
What I’ve learned through a friend who teaches high school is that there are far more kids and teens living alone than we might realize, and they don’t all fit the stereotypical image of child neglect. Yes, some have parents who disappear on benders, or who are present but lost to mental or physical illness. Others are alone because their parents are wealthy, working or cruising or skiing abroad. To have strong survival skills at a young age is a mixed blessing. When you don’t pose a problem to the adults around you, your problems are yours alone.
***
A spring snow dump is the worst — thick, heavy and wet. I tape trash bags around my sneakers and wade into the deep slush. The tape comes loose and my shoes are instantly soaked, but I carry on.
The power is out at the Husky service station on the corner, but its little convenience store is packed with people stocking up on batteries, bottled water and candles. I’m just here to use the pay phone. It’s time for me to call my mother.
I place a collect call to Vancouver. I tell my mom about the storm and the phone company. She says she’s been worried about me, and her concern feels like a too-tight jacket.
She’s heard from my father. He’s on his way back to Canada. This whole mess is going to get sorted out.
That’s not all: She has some surprising good news. My talent agent in Vancouver has been trying to get in touch with me. Turns out, the fancy Hollywood producers — the ones I met in Seattle right before getting evicted — liked my audition. I got the part. I’ve been cast as the teenage daughter, Sarah, in “Harry and the Hendersons.”
Suddenly I don’t feel the cold in my feet anymore. A warm, gentle wind lifts me 6 inches above the ground and swaddles me in a soft, pink cloud.
Your Support Has Never Been More Critical
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
I’m still floating the next day as I board a Greyhound bus to Calgary Airport, where there’s a plane ticket to Seattle waiting for me at the Air Canada counter. I’ll have a wardrobe fitting as soon as I arrive, then I’ll go straight into filming for the next three months. I’ll spend six weeks on location, then head down to Los Angeles to film the rest of the movie on a soundstage at Universal Studios. Oh, and my mother and my little sister will be with me the whole time. The film requires me to have a chaperone whether I think I need one or not — because I am a minor, and that is the law.
I never set foot in that basement apartment again. I don’t even know what happened to it. I just shut the door on it and walked away, leaving it for the adults to figure out.
Maggie Langrick is a Los Angeles-based writer and creativity coach whose work has appeared in Human Shift magazine, Elephant Journal and her Substack newsletter, The Underwire. She hosts the “Selfish Gift” podcast, a series of conversations with writers and creators about what it takes to put your creative work into the world. She is a graduate of Martha Beck’s Wayfinder Life Coach Training program and the founding publisher of Wonderwell Press, an imprint of Greenleaf Book Group that publishes nonfiction books that help, heal and inspire. Find her at maggielangrick.com.
Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected].