Lady Star Dust

THE FALL of 1967 was to be the last fall Kimberly Roth would spend in Troy. Autumn makes no mark on this new Detroit suburb. Trees have not had time enough to grow as have the elms of the inner city. And the air, sulphurous and choked as always, has brought blight to the few infant trees, imported and sculptured in thick rows between the yards of the condominiums to impart exclusiveness. They look siliconed, as do the laws which are sod carpets purchased ready-made and transplanted by unrolling.

The Rath place is distinguished only by boxes of geraniums set outside the second story bedroom windows, a gold bronzed door knocker the size of three fists of shaped like a gargoyle, and a wooden scroll with Welcome All Ye Who Enter etched in red, tacked upon the molding. Inside a chandelier, tear-shaped bits of glass strung together in the form of a globe, dangles in the hallway; the walls are bumpy, like just dried mud plaster, broken by an oil painting of a girl in a red equestrian's uniform astride an auburn thoroughbred in a forest. The living roomis furnished in imitation gold-leafed Louis XIV, with mustard velvet upholstery and matching floor length drapes. There are three six-year-old portraits of the Rath children above the fireplace and a bust of Andrew Carnegie on the mantle; the opposite wall is all mirror. National Geographic, Readers' Digest and Businessweek lie on a coffee table along with Mechanics Illustrated and a Bible. There are no ashtrays to be found.

In the fall of 1968, Kim, a well-possessed 18 year old, left home for Kalmazoo College--with its quiet main street and parochial ways--was not the place to hold her for long. She left not four months after she came.

Disillusionment and dropping out of college are by now so familiar, the experiences bear so much resemblance, that you could probably read this story like the rest. A friend recounts Kimberly describing hers: "Like they made me take this psychology course, the whole shebang, Introduction 1, rats in cages and schmuck cosmic questions. Like this exam I had to take. The first question was 'What is up?', can you believe it, what is up! What is up!" At this point Kimberly broke into a wildfire cackle that became a screech. She continued, "Well, I sat there for three hours and couldn't do it. So I turn this blank paper and they let me sit there for three more hours and I still can't do it. So they tell me to come back in a week and so I come back and sit in this empty classroom with the doors locked for six straight hours staring at that stupid question trying to figure out if maybe I'd gone crazy, zoned out. So they flunk me, but by that time I just couldn't see any point in any of it."

Thinking over this part of Kimberley's life Edward and Rose Rath merely shrug, tiredly. "I don't know what she wanted," Edward says, "she just wanted more. I didn't know why she left, but I wasn't going to object. Rose and I never went to college and we did all right; anyway, it was expensive. Kimberley was old enough to take care of herself. I told her to keep me posted on her whereabouts, and I told her I'd give her money when she needed it. She did call a few times, told me she'd found a job in an office in Ann Arbor. So we didn't worry."

But Kimberly Rath, as it turns out, was far from all right. Her story comes from Harley Coulter, a Dead freak, who runs a head shop in Ann Arbor. He went to the funeral stoned--"She would have like that," he said. He had known her well enough, he thought, in the times when no one else seems to have, to make some sense of her death. And he told a story, or rather, the ending of a story that is rooted in Detroit.

THE STORY is of a search, of course, of someone always heading somewhere else. "Kimberly always had to go overboard," Harley says. "She kept trying to get into the center of life and kept getting let down by it." The winter of 1968-69, Kimberly was in Ann Arbor, and it was there that she lost herself if she had not sometime before.

Certainly there was plenty happening in Ann Arbor that winter, planty to hang on to for identity, or for the feeling of identity. "Everybody," Harley says, "was running around like their heads had been cut off and the apocalypse was coming." The Arboretum, once the place where "you could kick a bush and it would kick back was loud with demonstrations; there was rioting when The Mothers of Invention opened a concert yelling "Up against the wall, motherfuckers"; Tom Hayden was running the Michigan Daily, Hare Krishna and Seventh Day Adventist freaks panhandled in the streets and fought with each other for converts, storefronts were going psychedelic and the graffiti bespoke anarchy.

But beneath the noisy surface of the city and outside the safe lives of the enrolled, was an Ann Arbor of precarious living--of streetpeople, young runaways and the dissolute, and of the more hardened and streetwise. It is here that Kimberly Rath had moved, not to an office job and a life with structure, but to this itinerant underground. And here, with time to kill, she began to hang out in Harley's head shop off South Main.

She had been in Ann Arbor five weeks when she met Harley. She told him, and she's still not sure she wasn't lying, that she had been picked by a man called "the Great" by those who dealt with him in Ann Arbor's drug scene, on her hitch in from Kalamazoo. The Great put her up "until she got settled," Harley says, in a left over row of dingy closed-out storefronts by the train tracks--in the center of the industrialized area off Route 23 just beyond Mr. Flood's Get Your Foreign Car Fixed garage and Super Gas at the bottom dip in Main Street. Behind the loft lies a fenced-in junkyard facing the Huron River and the rusted factory on the opposite bank. Harley figures that the Great turned Kimberly Rath on, but he can't be sure.

"KIM WOULD NEVER talk much about herself," Harley says. "Sure she talked plenty, she was funny as hell, but she'd shut up about everything personal. Maybe she was ashamed of something, of who she was, maybe. I knew she was rich right from the start. You see lost of them in here, rich kids. She was weird though, gutsy. First time I noticed her was when she takes all this real freak-show type stuff into the dressing room and spends about a half hour in there, and I'm getting ready to go in because for all I know she's shooting up or something. And then she walks out looking like this crazy turkey mama--feather boas on her arms and she's wrapped an Indian shawl around her for a skirt, and she's braided beads into her hair and painted her face in green and white diamonds. And then she just struts around for a while, singing to herself like she's trying to be Joplin. Well, I thought, she was pretty far out and we started talking. She came in every day after that, just horsed around and next thing I know she's moved right in, with me, I mean.

"It was nice, ya know. Sometimes she'd help out down in the shop or she'd clean my place. She was stoned a lot. After a while she was stoned all the time. I didn't notice it at first. I mean she seemed okay at first, that is. Probably because she always so gay, always dancing around and laughing, cracking up a storm, she seemed real happy, crazy happy. She never did anything straight, always dressed it up bigger than life.

"Like the drugs. After a while I was feeling something was wrong. I'd ask her about it and she'd tell me I was full of shit, she was fine, just let her be but don't leave her. So I let her stay, I cared, you know. But I just couldn't do anything. I'd tell her to lay off the drugs some and her face would get all hard and she'd yell at me to stop preaching at her. She just seemed hungry all the time, like she'd throw herself into every trip all the way. Manic. Then she'd come down like she'd been cheated. So she'd go back up again.

"I mean most people had their religious experience and dug it only as long as the trip lasted. But Kim made a religion out of it all, on you name it, hash, coke, heroin, speed, mesc, psylocybin, LSD, DMT. Once, on sunshine, she just danced in this slow circle around the room with this scary grin on her face, and then suddenly grabbed a pair of scissors and starts jabbing at her hair screaming about how the devil was inside her and she has to get him out.

"Another time she just up and hops on the back of this weird missionary-type freak's motorcycle and takes off for California. She's back in three weeks with a story about how he beat her up and raped her and left her for dead in a motel in the middle of Salt Lake City. After that she said she hated freaks--said they were mean bastards who'd steal you blind if you were stupid and kill you if you gave em' trouble."

The story reads so far of someone playing craps with the future. "I never knew what she wanted," Harley says, "maybe something she saw in the movies or something those fanatical parents of hers taught her to expect." Kimberly Rath, once safe and cramped in Troy, had left for a world less sure and then a world less real. Her story reads of reckless withdrawal and then of getting into the withdrawal. Memory is short in Dentroit, but Kimberly Rath seemed unable to forgive or forget whatever past she'd lodged within. Rose Rath's life promise held no promise for Kimberly--that center would not hold for her. The future could not look so good. So she drifted.

At some point that spring the devil in Kimberly Rath's high began to bother her. The highs were black most often. And she latched on to another dream that spring, this one of the Natural Life, of life on a farm with time and fresh air and smal pleasures. She talked, tiresomely so, Harley says, of the "simple things, man, the simple things, you've just got to cut out all the crap, man, get down to where your soul's at."

But soon the dream turned upon her as if to mock her--Nature kicked her in the head. Kimberly was complaining of fearsome headaches. She laughed them off at first as migraines, and plowed herself with more pills, heavy doses of mild downers, and, as the pains grew persistent, barbituates. She was fighting them in bouts of up to two hours, once clutching a twisted face to her chest in a rigid fetal position on the floor. "She would have done anything, anything at all, to make the pain stop," Harley says. "The doctor couldn't tell what was wrong, and for all we knew the pills were making it worse." And the pains beat on like bolts in her brain until "one day she met this dude who turned her on to macrobiotics."

This was 1969 when the macrobiotic wave was still gaining momentum, especially in its midwestern stronghold of Ann Arbor. The stories that had been appearing frequently in the newspapers, of people starving on the diet, of dying from salt poisoning and malnutrition, would hardly signal caution to Kimberly, who had a habit of extremism. And soon enough, macrobiotics had become her new gospel. Following Regime No. 7, no more than grain and tea, she cut out all drugs and stopped having sex. She stopped talking and living everything but the new found religion of macrobiotics. She would, of course, located in the system what seemed a salve to her pain. For someone whose trips had turned into nightmares could not be threatened by a philosophy that placed the source of health, not in the inner self, but in "the absolute justice and infinite wisdom and Order of the Universe." Kimberly Rath, sold on this surefire system for spiritual peace, donned it like a straightjacket upon her life.

Four weeks later she had lost 25 pounds, her skin had sunk into sallow caves in her face. After five weeks she had strength only to fix her daily grain and tea, and she had lost muscle control so she would scatter the food in spasms that shook her as she prepared it.

She muttered ceaselessly of sanpaku--of the time when the whites of the eyes are visible beneath the iris. Sanpaku is supposed to indicate grave illness and a destined tragic end. Kim would drag herself as if on rickets to the bathroom mirror to examine her eyes. Her face looked glazed, her talk was high-wired, near frenzied with shame and self-doubt. And, not only for the sanpaku, but for the hair, yang of her body, therefore male and ugly, attributing the yangness to 22 years to meat-eating she stuck to the diet and clawed at the hair on her stomach. Macrobiotics had become self-hypnotic: Kimberly would purge herself of the poisons of a lifetime by starving her flesh.

A WEEK LATER Harley drove her to the hospital after he discovered her in a coma with her legs swelled to twice their size.

"She said when they let her out that she was gonna go straight," he says, "but she'd changed. Like I'd come in and she'd just sit there staring off. She used to be so high, you know? All that was gone, finished, caput. She was zombied out. The one time I saw any life come into her was when I asked her if maybe she should go see her family. And she turned on me like a witch and told me to get the hell out--what was I doing trying to screw up her life. She split that day and that's the last I heard of her. I figured she'd make out. She'd grown more serious."

Kimberly Rath stayed in Ann Arbor and adopted another life and style. And this one not too different from the one she had fled in Troy two and a half years before.

In 1973, at the end of the summer she takes a job as a waitress in the Purple Pickle, part of a psuedo-delicatessan chain in the midwest. It is a low-priced quick-service place lit by art deco lamps, with oaken booths against rough panelled walls, plants slung from the ceiling and sauerkraut served while-u-wait. She is working eight hours a day in a starched white uniform and a red-checkered apron, and she lives above the restaurant with the manager. He is 45 and divorced, a Methodist believer who neither drinks or smokes. He is balding with a budding paunch, he likes the movies, reads little, and drives a shark blue Dodge Dart. She cleans his place and cooks for him after work when they tire of Purple Pickle fare, and she rarely leaves the building. She seeks out no one from her past.

This much is gleaned from heresay, for the manager has disappeared and the help has been overhauled. In a place as ragged and permissive as Ann Arbor the affair was not one to attract notice, and no one knows who might have known Kimberly Rath in these last months. It is difficult to picture Kimberly, the daredevil mischief maker, the enthusaiast and extremist, the wild child living high and happy with a madness holed up in this middle-aged hideaway. Perhaps she needs this, a steady straight place, that could impose a predictable order on her days and restore a semblance of control to her life. Perhaps she was playing for quiet time to wire back the straws of her intentions.

Kimberly Rath failed until now to make that traditional truce with the self where you are resigned to cropping both your hopes and losses. Failure had brought pain--with acid bummers riding her mind, with a bad trip to California, with sanpaku and Harley, who cared--maybe in the wrong ways. Kimberly must have felt scared, and something in her fear drove her to the place of this old and settled man.

THIS LIFE of monogamy and restaurant management, so close to the one she had been born and bred to expect, could offer at least the illusion of security. Anchored here, she could persuade herself that she'd outgrown the drug scene as a passing affair, a heady flirtation. She would deny it all by welding her life to another, lived twice as long. She could even borrow upon the example of her parents' marriage to tell herself that she had found love at last and place a magical efficacy in the crowd.

The dream had only brought her full circle. So she turned on Harley when he told her, baby go home, because home was what she wanted and home, the home she knew, was wanting. The only dream is displaced, not discarded. She is letting it feed her soul and teach her how to live.

And so, as she displaces the future for which she fled Detroit and looks for it in a bed above a deli instead, she finds this conventional a fair reaches its conventional impasse--where tensions of love and freedom and security and money wear thin the nerves of the relationship and it dry of softness. And she reaches that point of disillusionment when little looks bright or graceful any longer. And this time, because the other routes have failed, she breaks.

We know nothing about the course of this affair--only that something in Kimberly Rath shattered when it ended. For she came back finally, to the house on Novak on December 6, 1973. And she asked her mother to take care of her for a while. She needed a rest she said, and then she would look for work again.

December 9 was a hard sunny day in Detroit, the sort of day that is neither fall nor winter but all crispness and cutting surface glare, when the cars seem to float across the vision and the long cold winter looks like it will never come. A young black man emptied two pistols through the window of a house on Grand River killing both his mother and his sister. A man in a Santa Claus outfit was robbed and beaten in the alley behind downtown Hudson's by a gang of four teenage boys. A fifty-year-old man crashed his car into the walls of the Windsor Tunnel, killing three people but not himself. And farther north on Novak Street, Kimberly Rath washed her hair and left on her long last walk.

Only two months have passed, but the Raths seem used to referring to their daughter in the past tense. The tone of Mr. Rath's speech is often retrospective, tinged by musing and tending toward generalization. Rose Rath seems more comfortable with the whys of her daughter's death. "Kim never did anything halfway," she says, "that's why she went wrong." Neither admits to blaming themselves; they seem to have tidied the matter in their minds, they seem almost disconnected from it. As perhaps they must if they are to live with it.

On Novak St. sleds lie sprawled on condominium steps and a few snowmen deck the lawns. Sometimes the children point at the Rath place and whisper about her--while the adults are busy with the New Year. The Rath's new neighbor, Mary Beth Twyman, aged 19, was married two days ago Saturday in Holy Cross Chapel in a waltz-length white peau--de--soire dress and a crown of pink pearls, and as she drove off with her husband in his new model Camaro, a St. Christopher's charm dangled from the rear view mirror. December saw 25 houses finished in one arm of the Troy development and a turnover of almost 100 people. It's a place in transition where the past is short and easily forgotten