One Wild Ride: A Review of Million Dollar Red, A Memoir by Gleah Powers

Reading Gleah Powers’ memoir Million Dollar Red is like going on an impromptu road trip with a smart, funny, but not always reliable friend. There were times when I wanted to step into the story and protect the narrator from the reckless decision-making of her vain, much-married mother; there were times when I wanted to jump between the narrator and her own bad ideas. But throughout, the lively writing and the speaker’s pure, admirable instinct for survival kept me hanging on her every word.

The book begins with the ten-year-old Powers and her younger sister, Kimberly, being retrieved from summer camp by their mother. Our narrator — who, we’ve been informed in a head note, went by the name Linda then — clearly admires her trim, glamorous Mom, and as both girls run toward her yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!” we might be deceived into thinking that there will be familial sweetness in this story. Instead, their mother reveals a troubling surprise: along for the ride is her new, third husband, Jack, acquired while the girls were away.

“It means you can call him Daddy because that’s what he is now,” their mother says. While Jack works to woo Kimberly, Linda stews. “If I hadn’t been at camp, I was sure I could have stopped this,” the ten-year old thinks, wrapping her arm protectively around her sister. That sense of responsibility, and that awareness that the presumed adults in the picture cannot be trusted to care well for the two girls, falls as painfully on the reader as it does on the writer. And yet, there is no trace of self-pity in this book. The young Linda is as tough as she is intelligent.

Like many such young women, Linda becomes a kind of counselor and protector for her younger sibling and for various friends, none of whom seem to have her gift for survival. In a particularly haunting chapter, “Abortos,” Linda and her friend, Arlene, newly graduated from high school, drive from Phoenix to Nogales so that Arlene can obtain an illegal abortion. It’s 1965, and Linda has a clear-eyed view of the dangers: “I tried to conjure up a good outcome, but couldn’t help tensing the muscles in my chest and ribs, armoring myself for the possible butchering of Arlene that I would somehow have to handle. Raised Catholic, she feared God would punish us, and though we were almost in Mexico, I worried that if God didn’t get us, the U.S. government would.”

What ensues is tragic in every sense — a messy abortion in a roadside motel room performed by a “doctor” whose insistence on partying with the girls afterwards is broken-up by the arrival of Arlene’s gun-toting boyfriend, Leonard. In a reversal that feels all too real, Arlene, previously determined to break up with the abusive Leonard, decides his pursuit of the girls means that his love for her is true. She decides to return home with Leonard, dismissing Linda by cruelly accusing her of “always” being jealous of Arlene’s ability to attract boyfriends.

As with every chapter in Million Dollar Red, “Abortos” is written to be read as a self-contained story. Aside from the obvious commercial value of this structure — the stand-alone nature of the chapters makes them ideal for promotional excerpting — it also allows Powers to pinball about in her life story. Instead of following a single linear path, the reader scrambles through Powers’ memories with her, alighting here and there for a tense and telling anecdote.  What is lost in such a form is the sense of perspective that a more linear framework would allow. But the book mirrors the hectic, arbitrary twists and turns of the writer’s life.

Chief among these is a chance meeting in a Scottsdale bar with Ray, a costume designer in town to work on the Michelangelo Antonioni film, “Zabriskie Point.” Ray and Linda become a couple, and before long she is traveling with him, meeting a series of artistic and cultural luminaries who she finds alternately intimidating and inspiring.  One of the latter is Kathleen Cleaver, wife of Black Panther co-founder Eldridge Cleaver, who powers meets when Antonioni is filming the group in New York. Cleaver provides the narrator with a powerful life motto: “Imagination is the most powerful weapon we have.”

As Powers makes her way from LA to New York, the pace pics up, along with her artistic aspirations. She paints, she acts, she takes voice and dance lessons. As with so many artists, the day jobs she takes to feed those aspirations are sometimes tedious and sometimes outright weird, as when she is hired as a personal secretary to a “law enforcement philanthropist” who spends his time and his inherited fortune researching the history of law enforcement in the United States, establishing a small private museum of related artifacts, and receiving award from various sheriff’s departments. The narrator begins pilfering money from her boss and then, out of gratitude and guilt, has sex with him on a holiday visit to his parents. Powers concludes the brief, cringe-worthy encounter with her trademark wit and sharpness.

Before he passed out, he told me it’d been a long time since he’d been with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute. His therapist had been encouraging him to start dating.
“I’ll never forget this,’ he said.
I drifted off, wondering which category I fit into. For the first time in months, I slept guilt free.

The author’s boldest move is her concluding one: for her final chapter, she switches from Linda’s pint of view to that of another character whose own story seemed a minor part of this particular book. This device, used in novels such as Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover and Don DeLillo’s The Names, gives the reader a brief jolt of displacement until the “ah” of recognition settles in. I will offer no spoilers here about the identity of this character, but as with the DeLillo and Sontag books mentioned above, what first comes as a surprise is, by the last page, such a satisfying narrative decision as to seem inevitable. Such a bold move suggests to me a writer who is still growing in ambition and range. I’m already looking forward to Gleah Powers’ next book.