bartender or waitress, but the jobs never lasted long. Ever since she was
a kid, she'd been looking for someone to take care of her. In Welch, the
Pentecostal neighbors provided for her, and now in New York, with her
long blond hair and wide blue eyes, she found various men who were
willing to help out.
The boyfriends never lasted any longer than the jobs. She talked about
finishing college and going to law school, but distractions kept cropping
up. The longer she stayed with Mom and Dad, the more lost she became,
and after a while she was spending most of her days in the apartment,
smoking cigarettes, reading novels, and occasionally painting nude self-
portraits. That two-room squat was cramped, and Maureen and Dad
would get into the worst screaming fights, with Maureen calling Dad a
worthless drunk and Dad calling Maureen a sick puppy, the runt of the
litter, who should have been drowned at birth.
Maureen even stopped reading and slept all day, leaving the apartment
only to buy cigarettes. I called and persuaded her to come up to see me
and discuss her future. When she arrived, I scarcely recognized her.
She'd bleached her hair and eyebrows platinum and was wearing dark
makeup as thick as a Kabuki dancer's. She lit one cigarette after another
and kept glancing around the room. When I brought up some career
possibilities, she told me that the only thing she wanted to do was help
fight the Mormon cults that had kidnapped thousands of people in Utah.
"What cults?" I asked.
"Don't pretend you don't know," she said. "That just means you're one of
them."
Afterward, I called Brian. "Do you think Maureen's on drugs?" I asked.
"If she's not, she should be," he said. "She's gone nuts."