Take the Cannoli (21 page)

Jay Leno: These must be pretty endangered.

Animal guy: Yeah. They are.

I'm asleep before the musical guest comes out. This advice is working the best so far. I stay asleep for five whole hours. Does everyone know about this? That maybe this is the reason Leno's ratings are better than Letterman's?

Consensus (or should I say conspiracy?): I haven't mentioned it until now because it was just too painful, but every last one of my sources—my mom, my friend, the doctor, the Web—advises against caffeine. Which is a problem in that I have been addicted to coffee since I was fifteen. I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but still, my motto:
Sine coffea nihil sum.
Without coffee I'm nothing. So today, I'm planning on nothing. I go cold turkey, starting with a brisk pot of peppermint tea at 8:30. By 10:15 I'm splayed on the couch with a cardigan sweater wrapped around my eyes. My head throbs. The phone rings every fifteen minutes. One of the calls is from a telemarketer, who hangs up when I start to cry. At 12:38, I crawl over to the cabinet where I keep the coffee can and sniff its contents. I turn on the television and watch
North by Northwest.
You know you're in agony when it hurts to look at Cary Grant.

It is a very long day.

And guess what? It doesn't work. I'm awake all night watching the clock, waiting for morning, when I can make coffee. At five
A.M
. I tell myself “close enough” and suck down six cups before 5:15.

Now that reason is restored, I come to this conclusion: If there's anything worse than insomnia, it's taking advice about insomnia, especially
from people who can sleep. Being up in the middle of the night is kind of nice actually. It's quiet and dark and the phone doesn't ring. You can listen to records and weirder movies are on TV. I've never known another life and now I'm not sure I want to.

One of my earliest memories is listening to my dad, in the middle of the night. He was awake. I was awake. I called him to ask for advice about doing away with insomnia but he didn't have any. He sees no need to fix it. I recited for him the exact sequence of his nightly wakeup routine, how from my room on the second floor I could always hear him turn on the buzzing kitchen light, open and close a cabinet, turn on the faucet, stir bicarbonate of soda into a glass, even the way the spoon sounded when he set it down.

“Wow,” Dad said. “Did you hear my ears wiggle, too?”

Then he goes back to bed, but not back to sleep. In the middle of the night, lying in bed, he invents these machines I don't pretend to understand. The night before we spoke, he was up plotting out something called a spoke duplicating lathe, adding, “I feel sorry for all those people who slept through the night and didn't accomplish anything.”

We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left. If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me.

I
'
M SITTING AT MY DESK
, quietly “minding my own” as they say in the rap songs, when my torturer darkens the doorway. She drags me into a cramped bathroom, shoves my head under a faucet, shines a blinding light in my eyes, cinches my neck in plastic sheeting, and comes at me with scissors. She douses me with chemicals and makes me sit there, dehydrating under the plastic while the acid stings my flesh. And so, when I look up from my desk and see her standing there with the scissors, I shudder.

“Hi, Mom,” I say. “Guess you think I need a haircut?”

My mother had been a hairdresser before my twin sister, Amy, and I were born. More precisely, she was a hairdresser in Oklahoma in the 1960s. That era is usually characterized as a time when men and women were letting their hair down, but in Oklahoma, they were spraying hair
up;
the beehive was enjoying a golden age. Since Mom gave up her career to take care of us, all that energy that used to go into
whipping hundreds of histrionic heads into an architectural frenzy was focused on the two of us. And since we were as bald as pharaohs, she killed time while our hair was growing in by Scotch-taping bows to our newborn noggins. Her ardor for our appearance increased as we got older, and her attentions never stopped at the neck: There were clothes, there were shoes, even the dreaded accessories. Amy liked to think about such things, shop for such things. Unlike me, my sister did not threaten to call Amnesty International every time Mom wanted to give her a home perm. I was a bit of an embarrassment to my mother—all scuffed shoes and stringy hair and lint.

Once, when Amy and I were fourteen, the three of us were getting out of the car after a trip to the mall. The neighbor woman, who was out watering her yard, saw the shopping bags and asked what we'd bought. Amy showed off her new candy-colored sweater and her hoop earrings and hot pink pants. The woman congratulated Amy. She then turned to me, pointing at the rectangular bulge protruding from the small brown bag in my hand. I reluctantly pulled out my single purchase—a hardback of
The Grapes of Wrath.
My mother looked at the neighbor, rolled her eyes in my direction, and stage-whispered, “We're going through a book phase.”

It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word “phase.” As if any minute “we” would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to “our” senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including
our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don't Talk to Me. Now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven't gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now, we own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made.

Still, I have been called a curmudgeon by
Bitch
magazine. That's the image I'm cultivating. But truth be told, I'm not as dour-looking as I would like. I'm stuck with this round, sweetie-pie face, tiny heart-shaped lips, the daintiest dimples, and apple cheeks so rosy I exist in a perpetual blush. At five foot four, I barely squeak by average height. And then there's my voice: straight out of second grade. I come across so young and innocent and harmless that I have been carded for buying maple syrup. Tourists feel more than safe approaching me for directions, telemarketers always ask if my mother is home, and waitresses always, always call me “Hon.”

So the last time I got my hair cut, I asked my hairdresser if he could make me look more menacing. I said I admired Marilyn Manson's new hairdo and could he make me look like that. And even though my hairdresser is German and everything, when he was done with me, I have never in my life looked so sickeningly nice. Is it too much to ask to make strangers nervous? To look shady and untrustworthy and malcontented? Something needed to be done.

I happened to hear about a group of goths in San Francisco who offer goth makeovers to civilians and then take them to a goth club to see if they can “pass.” Goths, for those unfamiliar with this particular subculture, are the pale-faced, black-clad, vampiric types, with forlorn stares framed by raccoon eye makeup. The name derives, of course, from “gothic,” a style, according to my dictionary, “emphasizing the grotesque, mysterious, and desolate.”

I've always admired the goths. There's something brave about them. Something romantic and feminine and free—not to mention refreshingly honest. If the funny T-shirt slogans and crisp khaki pants of the average American tell the lie that everything's going to be okay, the black lace scarves and ghoulish capes of goth tell the truth—that you suffer, then you die.

So I called Mary Mitchell, a.k.a. Mary Queen of Hurts, and asked for a private lesson in goth. She told me to come to San Francisco and pack some black clothes and she and her team of expert goths would handle the rest.

Coming up with black apparel for the occasion wasn't particularly problematic for me. One might describe my closet as Johnny Cash once described his: “It's dark in there.”

I reported to a Market Street address where I met the five members of my death-warmed-over beauty squad. I met Indra, a gorgeous blonde in a long velvet skirt; Terrance, dashing in a velvet smoking jacket; the tall, dark Monique; Elizabeth, in strappy black leather; and,
of course, Mary, whose seven-inch patent leather heels would relegate her later on to dancing only to the slowest songs, for fear of tipping over. They all turned goth in their early teens and they are, as Indra puts it, “
so
in our thirties.”

Prior to meeting Mary Queen of Hurts, I found her sadistic nickname entirely appropriate, as she assigned me “goth homework” to do before my arrival. The assignment consisted of going through a punchy little primer she wrote with Indra and Terrance which outlines the seven steps to “gothitude.” Step number seven? Write goth poetry. One of my poems is a haiku about compost, which I wrote while pondering decay:

eggshells pulverized

tossed into the rot of life

toenails of the damned

Step number six asked me to go through my records and pull out the darkest, saddest song and play it over and over again—though the darkest, saddest stuff in my collection is all old country music. So my goth soundtrack is Roy Acuff's godless, drunk-driving, car-crash number “Wreck on the Highway,” in which “there was whiskey and blood all together, mixed with glass where they lay.”

Before anyone breaks out the eyeliner, we all sit in a circle and go through my homework. The whole thing reminds me of graduate school seminars, except these people are smart and funny and have something interesting to say.

Step one of the guidelines is choosing a goth name. Indra says, “Most of us have changed our names to be something more gothic. A lot of people legally change their name. Live it!” According to Mary, “If you go into any of the goth clubs nowadays, you'll find a lot of spooky names—like Raven and Rat and Sage.”

When I was pondering a good goth name for myself, I paged through my reference books on death and dying looking for something gruesome. Nothing felt right. Maybe it's because I came of age in the '80s and I've seen
Blue Velvet
too many times, but to me, the really frightening stuff has nothing to do with ravens and rats. The truly sordid has a sunny Waspy glow. Therefore, I tell them, the most perverse name I can think of is Becky. It turns out that by saying the magic word “Becky” I have suddenly moved to the head of the class, gothwise. As Monique puts it: “You are understanding the pink of goth. You've skipped a couple levels and you went straight to pink.”

The group's consensus is that pink is the apex of expert goth—that newcomers and neophytes should stick with basic black but those confident enough, complex enough, can exude gloom and doom while wearing the color of sugar and spice. Indra argues that pink can be “an intelligent, sarcastic color,” though Terrance says of experimenting with pink, “Proceed with caution. I can't warn you enough.”

As if they need to warn me. It would never occur to me to wear pink, just as it would never occur to Michael Douglas to play a poor person. These, I realize, are my people. Simpatico. I think that's why, at that moment, I'm willing and able to do something with them that I was
never able to do with my mom: namely, sit still while they poke and prod and paint me without complaint. I know I'm in the right hands when Terrance reassures me, “When we're done with you, no one will call you ‘Hon.' ”

And then, there's a magical moment when Indra applies the critical first layer of bloodless powder and foundation. When I see the transformation in the mirror—out, out apple cheeks!—I ask Mary if there's a word for this whiter shade of pale. She tells me, yeah, that I look “Laura Palmer dead.”

It's an astonishingly slow process. Indra decides to make me up like the silent film star Louise Brooks, shading in concentric circles of eye shadow and then liquid eyeliner, which takes a full five minutes to dry. She agonizes over lipstick, applies a birthmark in the shape of a snake on my cheek. Then, they dress me. By the time they're done cinching up the corset and stabilizing my bustle, I'm in so many layers of black lace scarves and fringe and fishnet stockings that I could play strip poker for three weeks straight without baring my belly button.

The finishing touches are applied in a full-on pit stop. I sit in a chair and Monique curls my hair while Terrance fusses with my lipstick and Mary paints my nails black. All at once. I find I enjoy this loving, methodical attention. All these people are putting all this thought into how I look. They kept cooing, “You look great! You look fabulous! I looooove the snake!” I am so pleased with the results that I keep looking in the mirror and smiling. I smile so much that Elizabeth reminds me that, technically, a good goth is supposed to pout. But I'm too giddy.

Something occurs to me: What if all those years my mom wanted to do just this—sit me down and fiddle with my hair—not because she wanted to torture me or because she was embarrassed about how I looked or because she missed her job? What if she wanted to do this for me to show me that she loves me? If all along she was trying to give me the feeling I'm getting from these strangers?

I thought
she
was the oppressor and I was the victim, but it can be just as true the other way around.

At 10:30, it was time to go to the club. But after two hours of primping, I was tired. I asked them if they ever spend so much time doing their hair and makeup that they're too pooped to go out. They said that for this very reason, there's a goth rule: You have to stay at the club at least as long as it takes to get dressed up.