Karina - Again

I've got a few more "Karina" stories from around the fall of 1971, but first I wanted to make a quick (or not so quick) observation about that time period:

As I've mentioned before, something happened in January 1972 that completely disrupted my life - and I'll get to that eventually... But what I didn't realize until just recently is how seriously it affected what I remember from the prior six months.
It's like someone filmed a movie but never got around to editing it. All the scenes are there but there's no indication of how they fit together. No flow, no plot line, not even a clue as to the significance of the individual scenes... Just a bunch of raw footage... I honestly had no idea that the brain spent that long post-processing (evaluating, correlating ... stitching things together)... Strange - and fascinating :-)

The point is that I find myself writing these narratives without much insight into what I was thinking (or feeling) at the time... They seem oddly "incomplete" to me...

And on to the stories:

Throughout most of 1971 Karina divided her time between being "home" with mom and me (wherever that happened to be at the moment) and staying in Dallas with Bernie (or whatever guy she was with at the time). Our place was like her home port - a rest stop - a place to recuperate before she was off on the next adventure...

I guess I'll start with the trips to the psychiatrist's office... Yeah - every couple of weeks I had to drive her down to Lake Dallas and wait in the car for an hour while she underwent "therapy"... Now, I honestly wouldn't have minded if she was actually seeking help, but she only went there to amuse herself... Karina had a collection of books on psychiatry and she was constantly devising new strategies to mislead and confuse the doc. Then afterward she'd laugh about it all the way home... Of course, it had to be a full-blown psychiatrist because it would have been no challenge at all to befuddle a mere psychologist... That was some really expensive entertainment...
Yeah - Karina never encountered a shrink who came close to catching on - she was always 3 steps ahead of them. (And 20 years later it would contribute to her demise...)

Next: One afternoon I got home from hanging out in Argyle and Karina wasn't there... That was kind of unusual because I was her only means of transportation. I started to wonder if maybe Bernie had come to pick her up when I saw the note on the table. I don't remember the exact wording but it went something like this:

Gone to New York.
Took $400 from the account.
Sorry... Karina.

Unfortunately, that $400 (approximately $2200 today adjusted for inflation) was almost every penny we had... She didn't care if rent needed to be paid - or if bills were due - or if we needed food... She felt like going to New York and nothing else in the world mattered... Needless to say I was more than slightly irritated :-)

Aside: I suspect she just wanted to meet up with an ex-boyfriend because dad had moved to Milwaukee by then... Yeah - he had an apartment in the same building as Kareem Abdul Jabbar. (There were only 8 units - one per floor - it was at the corner of E. Kane Place and N. Summit) But I'm getting ahead of myself :-)

It wasn't until Karina got back that I learned the rest of the story:
When she arrived in New York she fell and hit her head in the airport and ended up in Bellevue with amnesia for a few days. (Of course, the money disappeared from her purse.)
When her memory returned she decided she wanted to go to Germany so she called aunt Vesti to buy her a plane ticket... Hmm... I just now remembered that she had a boyfriend there too. He even visited us in Winnipeg one summer (he was her "first"). I wonder if that's why she wanted to go back? ... Regardless - she didn't stay there long enough to unpack before deciding to return to New York. So Vesti paid for another ticket...
I think it was on that flight that she met the Madison Avenue ad exec who handled one of the top two soft drink accounts (I won't say which one). He set her up in an apartment in Manhattan and they spent a few weeks clubbing and doing cocaine before she got bored and drifted back to Denton :-)

And one last story:

Early one afternoon I headed down to Argyle to hang out with one of the "non-church" kids, but before I left I promised Karina I'd be back at 4PM to take her shopping... So it came to pass that the guy I was hanging with asked me to take him over to his girlfriend's place. I explained to him that I was on a tight timeline but he assured me it would only be for a few minutes...

So - we got to the girlfriend's house around 3PM - plenty of time... And I sat in the car waiting, and waiting, and waiting ... Eventually I started honking the horn and he yelled out the window that he'd be out really soon and to just please wait for him...
Now - I would have left, except the girl's house was out in the middle of nowhere and her father (who usually got home around 4PM) had promised to beat the living shit out my buddy if he ever caught him anywhere near his daughter again.

I honestly don't know what took so long. (I didn't ask.) I figured that either she was a "good girl" and therefore always had to be "talked into it" - or he was the only teenage boy on the planet who couldn't finish in 5 minutes :-) Regardless - he finally reappeared around 3:50PM (putting his clothes on as he ran toward the car).
And that's when I found out that the Charger would go 130 MPH... I dropped him off at his place (I was so pissed off I never spoke to him again) and headed back to Denton, arriving home at 4:10 PM - 10 minutes late.

OK - this illustrates how neurotically punctual I was as a teenager:
When I got home mom and Karina were both crying and had already called the police. I swear I am not making that up... They were sure that I must have been dead or seriously injured... By then Karina was far too distraught to go shopping so I spent the rest of the evening comforting her...

Another aside: I didn't call because this was before cell phones, and there weren't any payphones around Argyle, and the guy I was hanging out with didn't have a phone at his place. So, I would have had to drive around hoping someone would let me use their phone... And I honestly had no idea mom and Karina would be that upset :-)

And here's the punch line:
Karina seemed to be having trouble getting to sleep that night, so after we said goodnight I sat by her bed as she talked and talked about how upset she had been... She babbled on for at least 20 minutes, saying the same things over and over again... And the next morning she didn't remember any of it... Yes - I had been sitting there patiently listening to her talk in her sleep :-)

Sigh - I've written and deleted 5 different final paragraphs for this post... I guess I'm at a loss for words... So I'll just say that she was truly "one of a kind" and leave it at that...