nice sized room for a little kid. she had a cat bed. she had tons of dresses, toys galore. and you had none of that? no, and i said wow, this is nice! an alien world to rene, the most wonderful thing she had ever seen. and while the little girls played in the bedroom, shirley was with bobby in the living room, talking. and then she read rene. it was time to leave, i did not need to go. i said, can we stay longer? no, but your new friend is coming with, us said is surely. i said oh, okay. so you know, she came, and that is how everything started. so it did. it was to be an overnight, the girls were told. a little fun. they would stay with shirley in her los angeles motel room, returned the next morning. that was the plan, said shirley. but shirley lied. we got in the car, and we waited for her to get back. and my life completely changed from that point on. completely this woman took you away? enough was enough. i talked to an asthma specialist and found out my severe a
way. frightened, compliant rene. eager for a mother s love. even if that mother figure was shirley. i never wanted to do anything wrong. i felt like if i did something wrong she wouldn t love me. she would give me away. wouldn t love me? shirley told her that she was born to a prostitute drug addict named jerry. that surely save baby renee, race or as a doctor. but kept renee in line by threatening to abandon her. did she ever threaten to do that? yes, many times you would do something wrong and she would say, you stop doing that or i m going to send you off to jerry s house. and so they lived a life of packing up and fleeing state to state, one flop house to the next, searching for the cheapest place to stay. hunger constant. medical care, nonexistent. when money ran out, as it often did, shirley drove to the nearest truck stop. the girls would bend down in
what about the birth certificate? never gave me a concrete answer, you could not get anything out of her. the lies stayed with her. shirley of course knew the answers, knew the whole bizarre story, but she looked pepper in the eye, through her obvious pain, and told her nothing. she left the lies behind and took the truth to her grave. on july 29th, 1986, at the age of 63, she was buried here, in this cemetery, in an unmarked grave. rene, now at 19, got on with life, moved in with her boyfriend. soon, pepper showed up at their apartment, homeless and nowhere else to turn to. and everywhere pepper went from then on, shirley s poison gift followed, because of that woman, and what she did, pepper was officially at least a non-person. so it took a little while for determination to come back. she was in her mid twenties, a single mother by then. if only she could find her birth certificate, that could lead her to her parents. anyways, she needed documents to live.
and then normal teenagers. all i wanted to be is loved. that s it. and i never got any kind of love. that i wanted. instead, they were trapped. truck stop nomads in the care of women who had seem clear had kidnapped if not one if not both of them. and they drifted one dump to another, across any number of state lines for years. and then, sometime in the early eighties, they settled down. here. shirley pulled up to this motel in los angeles county, and took a job as the motels cleaning woman, in exchange for a free room. and if it wasn t much, at least give them some measure of stability. and they signed up at a little school school, junior high for pepper. high school for renee. much to shirley s disapproval. i shirley will tell us, girls don t go to school, they get married. why do you want to go to school?
her was renee and renee was 6. a little older then. didn t matter. they dashed off to her bedroom to play. this is renee now. that room is stuck in her memory, too. her room was gorgeous. a nice sized room for a little kid. she had a canopy bed. tons of dresses. toys galore. and you had none of that. no. and i was like, wow, this is nice. an alien world to renee. the most wonderful thing she d ever seen. and while the little girls played in the bedroom, shirley was with bobbie in the living room talking. and then she called renee. so when it was time to leave, i didn t want to go. can we stay longer? no, but your new friend is coming with us, said shirley. oh, okay. so she came, and then that s how everything started. so it did. it was to be an overnight, the girls were told. a little fun. they d stay with shirley in her los angeles motel room, return the next morning. that was the plan, said shirley.