Odette Larson's Flying Sparks: Growing Up on the Edge of Las Vegas

At the end of Flying Sparks: Growing Up on the Edge of Las Vegas (Verso, 192 pages, $23), 12-year-old Odette, a runaway about to return home to Las Vegas after a cruel interlude in a mental institution and on the stoned nowhere streets of Oakland, reflects on the dullness of her life: "It was as if my soul's eyes and my innermost voices were connected by some kind of light whose source had been cut off...as if one foot had become jammed into an invisible magnetic track and I was being pulled foot and all along its downward spiral."

Odette will eventually "pull free from the downward track" and live to write the dreadful memoir Flying Sparks. The narrative is bald, featureless and unsentimental to a fault. This is an intentional homage to her imageless, impoverished desert home in the unseen parts of Vegas, I would imagine, and it's also a testimony to her status as a dry-eyed survivor of the horrors that fell on many kids in the silent 60s, kids who grew up dreamy and unsupervised on the outskirts of neon places where gentle-talking monsters sifted in.

Odette Larson is a survivor of precisely what, you must ask? Put it this way: her story is kind of an Exhibit A of why prepubescent girls should never stay overnight at the place of a family friend named Cowboy Jack. Never trust Cowboy Jack, girls. Especially if he tucks his pants into the tops of his cowboy boots. He's teaching you how to squeeze a goat's teat for a reason. I could see what was coming as Cowboy Jack showed Odette how to prepare fresh chicken for their early dinner, but she is a dumb kid, a pot-smoking preteen virgin, and reading much of Flying Sparks is like being coated in old man saliva. Sickening. Odette Larson, the writer on the other side of the experience, lets her 11-year-old self describe the molestation ("If Momma finds out she will spank me"), and without the protection of irony, age or happy ending the incident burns out like an ember. Odette rolls on, while other raptors and fellow prey blow in and out of her life with a suddenness that will ring true with anyone who has ever gone moment to moment on the lam. Or has ever, for that matter, had a family friend try to put "some big hard part" in their "little cave" and become a criminal innocent as a result. If punishment is ever meted out to Cowboy Jack, we'll never know, but Odette's life as a wide-eyed speck of dust in the wind tunnel is just beginning.

If the dour, staring Momma in Grant Wood's American Gothic had a strap in her hand and a clot of shadowy, vaguely larcenous offspring in the background trying to flee the frame, that would be the Momma of Flying Sparks. She's a domineering, bitter woman who tries to control her youngest daughter's disobedience via tough love and the lash. Eventually she has Odette committed to the state mental institution in Sparks, NV. "I never failed to notice that her anger held an aspect of embarrassment," Larson writes. "[B]ut it took me years to understand that the embarrassment had been the central issue to her, not the specific act I had committed."

Larson regularly deposits these healthy-other side observations into the narrative, and it all but kills Flying Sparks. Odette the child is a black hole, big for her age, treated like an adult by her various keepers, yet she's living an unexamined girly life in hell. It's compelling like a fatal bike wreck described by a damaged kid, but when the grownup Ms. Larson jumps all over Odette's clumsy tongue, I want to tell her to shut up so I can watch the kid drift and writhe without explanation, if only for my own peculiarly sadomasochistic reasons. Shit, I know the kid lives and heals, she's smiling her open, gummy smile on the dust jacket. It's the smile that draws strangers to the young Odette once she breaks out of the mental institution with two fellow patients who get snatched out of the story after a botched stickup gets them ferried away by the cops. Odette is left to drive the getaway car alone ("I followed a car into a tunnel that frightened me into tears") and after going the wrong way on a one-way street, she ditches the car and runs "with no sense of direction." It's one of the more powerful passages. Driving and weeping and being young, broke and utterly lost packs more wallop than Cowboy Jack's tender violence. At least he took her childhood on her familiar desert turf. Now Odette has no idea where she is (an alleyway in a city in California?) and the horror of this is reminiscent of Dorothy crying helplessly at the image of Auntie Em in the witch's crystal ball.

Well, it's got to get worse before it gets better, and every place is called home if you're 12 and polite to every wannabe massuh who approaches. Odette finds herself on the outskirts of Oakland, alternately protected and raped by a few awful black men with stinking breath who with some success try to keep her prisoner with shelter, greasy food, threats and pot. Eventually she is stolen from the squalid apartment of a fat pot dealer named Leon (who asked her to be his girlfriend at knifepoint in a crosswalk) and cared for by a kindly, older jazz buff named Henry, who "never saved a young white girl before. He had never even had one in his car, much less his house." She is then taken by Dante, a gentle hipster who tells her he is a homosexual after she freezes up in terror when he tries to make love to her. Eventually, Odette is aided in her plan to get home to Las Vegas by Dewolf, one of Dante's friends. Sherry, the girlfriend of one of Odette's older brothers, gets on a bus and goes to retrieve Odette.

Flying Sparks ends with Sherry and Odette taking mescaline before they leave Oakland. Naturally, Sherry is raped by one of the men they're hanging out with, and Sherry "spit[s] her disgust out" at Odette. "I felt an odd sort of relief accepting the blame," Ms. Larson writes. "[A]s if I had known all along that I was the cause of all bad things that happened to me and to those who trusted me."

On the bus ride home, Sherry forgives Odette by taking the blame for her assault: "It's not your fault. It's mine." Apparently Sherry, who is also a hardened runaway from her own unimaginable Cowboy Jack scenes, flunks out of Rape Recovery 101 as well.

If there's a happy ending, we won't be seeing it, for, as Ms. Larson writes in the final lines, "there would be no time to confront past mistakes; I immediately made new ones." We can only imagine Momma meeting her at the door with a cold face and a silent promise of a later beating; we can imagine years and years of therapy, of Odette breaking out of Vegas for real; we can imagine a skein of shrinks asking Odette Larson the well-worn multiple-choice question: Tell me about your childhood. Good, bad, indifferent? And Odette groping for the safest answer, and knowing that "indifferent," in all its coldness, in all its unsentimentality, is often the truest one.