Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (16 page)

“Ohmygod,” I whispered.

Vanessa looked at me.

I looked at her.

We didn’t say anything and stared back at Mick, whirling about the stage.

Then we both moaned.

From that day on, no one could hold a rational conversation with us. All we talked about was the Rolling Stones, and we didn’t so much
talk
as
shriek.
We prefaced just about everything we said with a hyperventilating, “Ohmygod” and ended everything as if it was followed!!! by!!! triple!!! exclamation points!!! The adults around us felt compelled to roll their eyes and inform us that our behavior was “really adolescent”—which only further encouraged us. After all:
Who the fuck cared what adults thought? If adults were so smart and hip,
we reasoned,
they would have found some way to avoid growing up and turning into adults.

Then Labor Day rolled around, and Vanessa got sent back to boarding school, while I had to return home to Manhattan and those two genetic albatrosses known as my parents.

Back in New York, I decided that the only way to survive such humiliation was to pretend that my parents simply didn’t exist— well, at least as soon as they forked over my allowance each week. I also proceeded to build a shrine in my bedroom.

I bought Rolling Stones records, Rolling Stones posters, Rolling Stones buttons, Rolling Stones books. When I trooped home carrying a Rolling Stones mural—a blow-up of the cover from their album
Black and Blue,
six feet long and three feet high—and secured it to the wall with industrial-sized two-sided tape because I swore
I would never, ever want to stop looking at it for as long as I lived,
my parents stopped coming into my bedroom.

Had there been an Internet in those days, I probably would’ve rotted to death in front of the monitor, clicking obsessively from one Rolling Stones chat room to another. But instead, poor, pre—digital age
moi,
I had to scavenge whatever “Stones fixes” I could find from magazines. This wasn’t easy. Insipid fanzines like
16
and
TeenBeat,
were ga-ga over teddy bears like Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson.
Where,
I wanted to know,
were magazines for fifteen-year-old girls in love with British bisexual cokeheads, thank you?
It was an outrage. I was an invisible, oppressed demographic. I had to make do with
Rolling Stone
and
People
magazine, scouring them for so much as a paragraph about Mick, or even his bitchy ex-wife, Bianca.

Alcoholics hate to drink alone. When my infatuation became so all-consuming that I almost couldn’t take it, I called up Michelle, my oldest and best friend, who lived in the same apartment building as I did.

After calling an “emergency sleepover,” I stayed up all night playing Rolling Stones music for her, showing her photographs of the band from their album covers, desperately trying to get her to see the world through my eyes, to hear it as I did: Listen to “Ruby Tuesday” I begged, playing it not once, not twice, but three times in a row. “Tell me he isn’t singing about us. I mean, ‘Don’t question why she needs to be so free.’ Michelle, is that not us? And Ohmygod, okay, you have GOT to hear ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ …”

The next day, I took Michelle downtown to PosterMat on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, a rock ‘n’ roll novelty store that sold stash boxes, rainbow-colored hash pipes, incense, T-shirt iron-ons, and little calling cards with phrases like “Methinks thou art a shit-head” engraved on them in elegant script, which we thought were really outrageous and funny.

There, in the back of PosterMat, past the lava lamps and concert jerseys, I’d discovered a treasure trove of drool-a-bilia. Hung on clacking, metal display sheaves were six different Rolling Stones posters! You could stand there, just stand there, and turn back and forth between them, staring for hours: Mick in black and white, wearing a “Palace Laundry” shirt. The Stones all together in a field with “Rolling Stones” written in lolling, psychedelic script. Keith with his guitar. Mick in heavy eyeliner. Glorious image upon glorious image—they were beautiful—it was almost too much to take. Looking at them left me flushed and breathless, desire boiling off my skin like a vapor.

The posters were what finally did it for Michelle. By the time we left the store, she, too, was a fanatic.

After that, the two of us went about constructing our own little meta-reality, in which the Rolling Stones replaced the sun at the center of the solar system. We talked about the Stones as if they were our intimate friends, fantasizing and worrying about them endlessly.

“Oh, Michelle, do you think Mick is lonely?” I said one night, as we were listening to
Some Girls
for the fourteenth time in a row on her Panasonic portable record player.

“Lonely?” she looked at me and snorted. “Girl, this dude has more women than any other guy on the planet. No, I don’t think Mick is lonely.”

“But c’mon,” I said, picking up the album cover and pointing. “Think about it: His last hit was ‘Miss You.’ What if underneath all his fame, he’s really pining away for intimacy, and that song is, like, his plea for help? Wouldn’t that be terrible? Could you imagine him, lonely?”

Michelle set down her cigarette. She’d started smoking—for effect, of course. “Shit. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s really, really depressed. That’s a horrible thought…”

“Oh God,” I said, beseeching the ceiling. “Please make sure that Mick Jagger isn’t lonely. Please don’t make Mick lonely …”

Until this point, I’d spent a criminal amount of time at home, trying to copy makeovers out of
Seventeen
magazine and whipping up chalky Alba ‘77 “Fit ‘n’ Frosty” chocolate milkshakes in the blender. If I went out at all, it was to the movies or to some marginal high school party where kids stood around awkwardly, making lame jokes and grinding Fritos into the rug.

Once Michelle and I became groupies, however, we avoided having anything to do with our parents, and stopped hanging around with any of our “square” friends at school. Musical taste became the sole criterion for our social life. You could be a pothead who came to class in his pajama top … you could be a kleptomaniac who’d been court-ordered to attend an “alternative high school” and dressed in a kilt and a dog collar … you could be one of those creepy twenty-two-year-old guys with a handlebar mustache and secondhand army jacket who still hung around his old high school, buying malt liquor for the sophomores and partying with them on the street… but if you believed passionately that
Exile on Main Street
was indeed
the greatest fucking rock album in the history of the world,
well then, we believed you were a genius and cool enough to hang out with us.

Jimmy Carter was still clinging to the presidency. AIDS had not yet emerged. In New York City, drugs were still considered glamorous; cocaine, in particular, was pricey, chic, and, astonishingly, considered nonaddictive. Discotheques were in full swing: It was customary to see people starting an evening at midnight and staying out until dawn. At Studio 54, people thought nothing about getting high and having sex with strangers in the bathroom, then posing for the paparazzi with a whippet stuck up their nose.

Both Michelle and I felt terribly left out.

We were convinced there was always a wonderful party going on somewhere right near us in a fancy club full of photographers, artists, musicians, and movie stars dressed in gold lamÉ They did cocaine, had sex, and were admired and beloved by the world.

And the kicker was: we were
right.
The terrible tease of New York City is that there always really
is
some fabulous event taking place nearby that you’re not invited to. Celebrity culture—which most Americans only read about as an abstract, faraway, glittering thing— was literally right at our doorsteps. The actor Richard Dreyfuss lived on the Upper West Side—we knew exactly where and sometimes we’d stop by his building and try to talk the doorman into letting us meet him. We knew where Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, and, of course, John Lennon lived. We’d seen Al Pacino once buying groceries. We read constantly about celebrity events and parties. When Woody Allen had a grand New Year’s party, written up in all the papers, we felt genuinely wretched and miserable that we hadn’t been invited to it.

We spent every day in Michelle’s room or mine, listening obsessively to the albums
Hot Rocks
and
Sticky Fingers
and embroidering the Stones’ “lapping tongue” logo on her overalls. Saturated with estrogen and progesterone, we were so frustrated and restless, we didn’t know what the hell to do with ourselves. We started smoking clove cigarettes and pot, and took No-Doz to simulate amphetamines if we couldn’t nab some real ones. Augh, how we longed to do coke!

We decided that if we could emulate the Rolling Stones—the ministers of decadence—and then meet them, we would somehow be rescued from our marginalized, pathetic little lives. Only meeting the Rolling Stones, we decided, would finally transform us into the ultra-cool, sophisticated
artistes
that we really,
truly
were.

Not surprisingly, losing our virginity counted heavily in this transformation. We wanted lovers, not boyfriends. After all, Warhol girls and courtesans always had
lovers;
high school
virgins
had makeout sessions with their
boyfriends.
We regarded virginity as the sexual equivalent of training wheels and braces: the quicker disposed of, the better.

And through some twisted, fifteen-year-old logic, we equated losing our virginity with losing our virginity to Mick Jagger.

We spent inordinate amounts of time speculating who in our schools had “lost it” thus far. Had Angelina? Most certainly. What about Judy? Michelle wasn’t sure. Yet for her, this guessing game was just an amusement. Lithe and smoldery, Michelle bore more than a passing resemblance to Brooke Shields. Her beauty, it seemed to me, endowed her with unassailable cool. She moved unhurriedly through the world, as if she didn’t have anything to prove.

But for me, the sex lives of my classmates were a source of mounting anxiety. Only that summer had I finally begun to grow breasts, yet I still did not consider myself sexy or pretty. Throughout most of ninth grade, some of the cutest alpha boys had come up to me in the hallways and thrown their arms chummily around my shoulder. Just as my stupid heart went off like a Roman candle—
Ohmygod, does he like me? Does Ira Abrams really like me?
—they’d whisper suavely in my ear, ‘So, hey. When are you fixing me up with one of your gorgeous friends?”

My virginity seemed like the hallmark of failure, the ultimate testimony to the fact that I wasn’t desirable. Anytime I found out that somebody else I knew had “lost it,” I got a sick, twisty feeling in my stomach, convinced that the number of nonvirgins was directly proportional to the extent of my inadequacy.

Don’t ask me why, but for some reason, Michelle and I also had the idea that in order to
meet
the Rolling Stones and
sleep
with them, it was necessary to
dress
like them. Of course, we had no idea what this really meant—so we dressed the way we imagined Keith Richards and Mick Jagger would dress
if they were women.
We assumed, of course, that they’d rather look like groupies than like the fashion models they actually dated, and so we assembled outfits that looked, really, like they’d been designed by a legion of
Soul Train
dancers let loose in the Salvation Army. At a street fair, I’d managed to buy a secondhand pair of Lucite cocktail pumps (you could see the nails in the heels) with rhinestone ankle straps, which I wore with gold socks, pink harem pants, an oversized fake-fur coat, and a gray fedora studded with antique tie-tacks. Michelle, going more for what we decided was a “Keith Richards” look, wore black jeans topped with layers upon layers of secondhand bed jackets.

We bought most of our outfits on East 10th Street at a place called Bogie’s, run by two old Romanian immigrants. It wasn’t so much of a clothing store as a dump. The merchandise consisted of one enormous mountain of clothing: trench coats, old negligees, baseball jerseys, sheets. The women handed us a bag and we’d climb to the top of the pile—it was the size of a haystack—and sort through it until we found things we liked. Almost everything was faded, stained, or frayed, but who cared? Only bourgeoisie goody-goodies and people who listened to disco and Barry Manilow, we told ourselves, wore clothing from actual department stores.

The women at Bogie’s would weigh the bags and charge us a dollar for every ten pounds of clothing. We ended up with all these fancy old garments for two or three bucks. We wore silk teddies as shirts, petticoats as skirts—and traipsed through the city in other people’s underwear. We also bought loads of earrings. Michelle wore one, I the other: lavender feathers, beaded chandelier earrings from India, rhinestones-on-steroids. We also covered ourselves with bracelets and Rolling Stones buttons. Even by New York standards, we were a freak show: we once walked into Tavern on the Green to use the bathroom, and the head waiter asked us to leave.

We took immense pleasure in lying and sneaking around.

“I’m going out for ice cream with Michelle!” I’d shout, halfway out the front door.

“I’m going out with Susie for ice cream!” Michelle would shout to her parents. Then we’d both take the bus up to Columbia University and smoke pot by the statues with some fraternity guys. Or we’d go down to Lincoln Center and hang out by the fountain, hoping to spot celebrities. One night, a thirty-five-year-old man picked us up and took us across the street to a French restaurant called La CrÊpe, where the three of us ate
pommes frites
and got bombed on hard cider. Michelle and I excused ourselves to go to the bathroom, then ran out and left him with the check. Our mothers thought we were baby-sitting.

“Ohmygod, can you bee-lieve we just did that?” I giggled as we lurched across Broadway, me in my clacking Lucite and rhinestone heels, my armload of bracelets jangling.