Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut

by Jill Kargman

  Nightingale had wads of money. Why? Because rather than work for peanuts as an au pair wiping asses, she worked two blocks from our apartment, at the Playboy Club on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street, a huge mansion that is now the Polish embassy. But in the 1970s, it housed a different genre of poles.

  Bunny suits with cotton tails paraded by the cabaret tables serving cocktails on logo-covered napkins. Somehow I knew what Playboy was even at age five because of its extensive advertising campaigns for subscriptions. Because I was glued to my television, particularly the commercials, the bow-tied rabbit was already burned in my brain. Nightingale told Sue she could easily get her cute self a gig there as well, and so soon Willie and I began our career as child extortionists, bribed with Kit Kats for our silence. Nightingale would come over, help Sue put coats over our footie pajamas, and take us to the Playboy Club. Sue installed us in a back room, a lounge for the girls, with a VHS tape of Flash Gordon and our chocolate. She would make the rounds with Nightingale and come in every few minutes to check on us.

  It worked out great! She got her extra dough and we got candy and movies on a school night; bingo!

  When my parents needed her on a night she had to work, we’d simply come along for the ride. This happened once a week for about two months, but it felt like we rode the Hefner Express for ages.

  And then one night the blackmail train came to a screeching halt.

  My parents left for a dinner party and arrived at the hostess’s home to discover that her husband had abruptly fallen ill and the party was canceled. As it was the dead of winter and they didn’t much feel like going out anyway, they decided to come home.

  When we walked in laughing, me on Nightingale’s shoulders and Willie piggyback on Sue, our giggles quickly turned to busted sheepish grimaces. I think I recall Nightingale cursing as we all four beheld the ENRAGED red-faced gazes of my parents on the foyer bench.

  And that was the end of Sue. They had her packing her bags before you could sing the chorus of “Centerfold.”

  Many others followed: Sabina, the morbidly obese German cellist, who was such a compulsive eater she once ate a dinner my mom had prepared for eight guests. Sabina thought it was food up for grabs and Dysoned it all down, leaving my mom sobbing in her bathrobe as she found the empty platters with her dinner party starting in a half hour. Buh-bye, Sabina.

  Saadia from Morocco: she lasted for a while and I remember her screaming and beating her chest when Sadat was assassinated. Eventually she was gonzo, too. There was the gal who had a life-consuming obsession with the Doobie Brothers, covering the walls with posters. And there was scary Lucille. I asked Lucille if I should go ring for the elevator since we were headed to the park. Her response to my first-grade self? “No. Don’t get the elevator! Why don’t we all just spread our wings and jump out the window and fly down!” Sarcasm + six-year-old = massive confusion and in this case, fear.

  In the end, while this chorus of artistically talented but high-maintenance women was more trouble than it was worth, I’m glad I was exposed to the colorful chaos, but as we got older, the (sometimes graphic) book was finally closed on the student au pairs, a permanent wedge stuck in the revolving door. To this day, whenever someone complains about some psycho nanny, I always know I can trump them with our tales of woe. It was pure headache for my parents, but now we all relish the retelling. Because you can’t make up that shit. And hey, at least they didn’t give us shaken baby syndrome. Though they most definitely shook the hell out of my parents.

  4

  Some girls love the scent of roses in full bloom, others their mother’s perfume. For many, it’s rising bread or fresh-baked brownies. But for twisted me, the most intoxicating heaven-sent scent is . . . wait for it . . . gasoline. As a kid I inhaled it while at the pump, causing my mom to freak and roll up the windows for fear of an Exxon-logo-shaped brain tumor on my little noggin. My dad had the same addiction, which we always joked about. I wanted to hook that nozzle up to my nostril and just inhale all day. Bring on the sixty-five-gallon drum so I could do a swan dive into it. Gas stations were my bakeries. Heaven on earth.

  In third grade, we began studying the five senses. The most feared teacher in my whole school was my science teacher, Mr. X. Remember Miss Hannigan, who loathes little girls? She’s Mother Teresa next to this dude. He walked the halls in his white lab coat and regularly snapped at us, sending shivers up my spine that I still remember.

  We dissected frogs at age eight, learning where the Golgi body was versus the spleen. We knew every human organ and bone at nine. Every system in the body by ten. About once every two or three weeks, as we’d all assembled around the lab’s black tables, each with our own station, including safety glasses, individual microscopes, dissecting trays, and tools, Mr. X would enter dramatically, like a royal from stage left in a Shakespeare play, grand and with an air of power.

  Sometimes he didn’t speak but took out four pieces of white paper. Oh shit. We knew what was coming. In silence he would fold the paper and press a hard crease into the stack. Next he’d open it and rip along the line. Gasps. He’d then fold the halves into quarters and crease and rip again. Panting. He would then slowly walk around the room, his shoes clacking on the floor as he passed each girl a small section of paper. Hyperventilation. Pop quiz.

  “One. Spell: cytokinesis.”

  “Two. Spell: Lumbricus terrestris.”

  “Three. Spell: deoxyribonucleic acid.”

  Shaking, I’d rev up my mechanical pencil (click click click click!) taken from my Hello Kitty pencil case, bite my lower lip, and go for it.

  After the three terms on our spelling test, he would walk around and collect the small rectangles. In front of the whole class he would announce his findings: “Melanie. Let’s see: Yes, no, no. One out of three. Not good.” If someone got all of them right, he would give them a curt nod, causing the girl to exhale slowly but not even dare smirk in relief.

  If we were doing an experiment, say, peeling back the skin of a Lumbricus terrestris, i.e., earthworm, and putting organs under a microscope, and if he felt someone was sloppy or not doing it per his specific instructions, he would walk up slowly, casually take the girl’s dissecting tray from her, and dramatically dump the contents in a garbage can.

  “Your experiment has been canceled.”

  Then he would take her three-ring binder, open it, and dump all the pages into the can on top of the worm guts. Devil.

  One day he caught me whispering with my friend and opened the door and asked me to go in the hallway.

  “Get out.”

  My heart pounded through my chest like a cartoon getting a boner for the girl skunk or whatever, except instead of cupids in my eyeballs there were skulls. I could feel the stress hormone cortisol coursing through my body as I crossed the lab full of classmates, who looked down at the black lab tables, averting their eyes.

  I solemnly did my walk of shame, fighting tears, to the door, which had a bumper sticker that read i [heart] science. Except instead of a heart like on my Hello Kitty pencil case it was an actual heart, like in your chest with tubes and veins and shit. It was organy and he prolly thought it was really clever, but I just thought it was dumb.

  Looking back, I swear they could’ve found twenty heads in his fridge and no one would have been surprised. The stench of formaldehyde from his many jars of fetal pigs and the like still haunts me to this day as the anti-smell, the one I can’t abide, the one that makes my skin crawl. But not for the reason you’d think; for most people it would carry the stink of death, but for me it triggers thoughts of Mr. X.

  I had this teacher for three years and for that entire period, the two days a week I had science class I woke up with my heart pounding. I loathed him, but he still scared me. Until one day. When I snapped.

  I had just had a very disturbing experience unrelated to school. I had been obsessed with Sat
urday Night Live since toddlerhood and so was overjoyed when a friend of the family got a ticket for me. I went to the show and then briefly to the after party, where Don Henley, who had been the musical guest, was holding court. I nervously approached him, the only kid at the party, with the friends of the family who’d scored me the entrée.

  “Um, Mr. Henley? Hi, um, I’m Jill. I’m so sorry to interrupt you but I just wanted to say, um, I love your records . . .”

  He looked at me with the same glare as Mr. X and responded: “Please. Go. Away.”

  Yes. To a child. What a fucking douchebag. Like, beyond. Tears burning their way to my retinas, I was in the cab home within minutes and stormed into my apartment. My parents had waited up to hear all about my night and I ran past them into my room. I kneeled down and took out my Eagles and Don Henley cassette tapes, pulled the wheels to let out some slack, and yanked at that thin brown tape with all my might. I pulled and pulled and pulled until all that remained was the empty plastic shell printed with the song titles on each side and a garbled web of tape. Fuck. That. Mother. Fucker. I was enraged. I wish I had said something. I wish I had told him he was a jerk. I wish I had stood up for myself.

  A week later, I was back in science class. We had completed the senses of sight, having to label all the parts of a human eye on another quarter-paper pop quiz, as well as sound and taste. Then came the sense of smell. He went around the room and asked each girl to say what her favorite smell was.

  “Gardenias!”

  “Chocolate-chip cookies!”

  “Cinnamon.”

  Jill’s turn:

  “Gasoline.”

  Crickets. The silence was deafening as Mr. X’s face warped into a mask of sheer unbridled rage.

  “How dare you be fresh with me?!” he roared.

  I saw the girls in their plaid uniforms around the room straighten in fear for me.

  “I’m not,” I whispered meekly.

  “Gasoline?! You can get up and leave my laboratory. Your experiment is canceled.”

  Normally, like any other girl who was cast into the humiliating flames of the hallway, I would have shaken as I gathered my pencil case and notebook and put them in my backpack. But not that day. My young face twisted to match his ire.

  “GASOLINE IS MY FAVORITE SMELL! I’M NOT BEING FRESH!” I yelled at his face. “IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY FAVORITE SMELL.”

  “You GET OUT OF MY LABORATORY!” he screamed, his arm shooting toward the door like a Spartan arrow.

  “FINE!” I yelled back at him, eyes ablaze, noticing in my peripheral vision the shock of my shivering classmates. “I’M CALLING MY PARENTS AND THEY WILL TELL YOU IT IS MY FAVORITE SMELL!” I stormed out of the lab, slamming the door behind me. On the staircase up to my homeroom, I burst into sobbing convulsive tears. Fuck assholes. Fuck Don Henley. Fuck Mr. X. I opened the door to my floor and ran to the office of Miss Anton—the head of the lower school.

  “My goodness, Jill, what is wrong?”

  I didn’t answer. I reached for her phone, dialed 9 for an outside line, and called home. My mom answered.

  “MOM! TELL HER! TELL HER WHAT MY FAVORITE SMELL IS!”

  “What?”

  “TELL MISS ANTON MY FAVORITE SMELL!”

  I handed Miss Anton the phone, chin jutting out and defiant as my mom issued testimony.

  “Miss Anton, my daughter’s favorite smell is gasoline.”

  I told Miss Anton that I was kicked out of class because Mr. X refused to believe that my favorite smell was gasoline. Miss Anton walked me back down to the lab. I had wiped away my cataracts of tears and was pink faced but empowered as I burst open the door with squinted eyes.

  “Mr. X, a moment?” she said, gesturing to my science teacher. Miss Anton pulled Mr. X aside and whispered as I took my place back at the long black table. The girls looked at me like, What the hell? But I sat proud and tall. He listened to her and then glanced at me and then back at her. He thanked Miss Anton for visiting and then apologized to me in front of the class. And guess what? He never messed with me again.

  And for that matter, no other guy has. At ten years old, I somehow decided that I was a badass. My skin was thickened and I wouldn’t fear bullies. When I bit back, he saw me in a new way and even started writing comments on my perfect quizzes like “good job.”

  The postscript of this story is twofold. 1) When I left for high school, I later learned Mr. X was shitcanned. He screamed at a trustee’s daughter who wept every night before she had science until her father freaked and had him fired. No one knew what happened to him but there was partying in the halls, according to my friends who were at the school after I left. Euphoria. “Ding dong the witch is dead”–style. For years, whenever the gang got together, we’d start to swap stories about his reign o’ terror.

  2) And then one day, I called my friends dying. I made each of them sit down. And I told them the craziest thing. Twenty years after fifth grade, I was walking with my nana Ruth in a mall in South Florida. It was air-conditioned so we decided to walk there instead of outside, with those sliced tennis balls on the bottom of her walker for traction. As we did a lap by the Limited and Victoria’s Secret, I noticed two cute fat gay guys in Hawaiian shirts holding hands. One was eating a corn dog on a stick. I love old queens. As we approached, I started to realize, in the sea of chins, that one of them was Mr. X.

  “Mr. X?!” I yelled, stopping in my tracks, jaw on floor.

  He paused, arm linked with his partner, and looked at me.

  “Hello, Jill.” He said it the way Jerry Seinfeld addressed Newman.

  “You remember me?” I marveled.

  “Of course I do.”

  He said it very calmly, and a small chill just began to make its way up my spine as I recognized that creepsville glint in his eye that I now realized was not unlike Hannibal Lecter’s. But then I stopped, realizing without that crisp white lab coat, with an aura of power and the ability to drive me to tears, he was just an ex–science teacher sporting a horrifying floral exploding shirt and was in a mall in West Palm Beach with his old cock-gobbler boyfriend. And it was sad.

  “Nice to see you,” I said sweetly. “Happy holidays.”

  I walked away, thinking how strange life is.

  PPS: Fuck Don Henley. I met him again later in life, not at a mall, but at a small dinner party, and while I wanted to give him the cold shoulder, I decided to turn on the charm and kill him with kindness. He’d peaked back in the eighties when he was telling little moi to scram. How sad to have hit your zenith ages ago. He must be longin’ for them good ol’ days. Desperado, in fact.

  5

  I was the vampire of my high school. Okay, I wasn’t. But in comparison to the legions of blond fleece-wearing preppies who looked like J.Crew explosions, I might as well have been a tongue-pierced goth. I was pale; I wore black; I never saw a field hockey stick.

  Oddly enough, I had begged my parents to let me go away to boarding school. In New York I felt like girls went from twelve right to twenty-one, our teen years sucked out by the social chasm between dumbass charity dances from seven to nine p.m. and then bars. You could either kiss a brace-face boy or dance with older gross men at a club. But where were the “guys”? Like in the John Hughes movies? Not that I wanted to cheer on the football team, or even bite my lower lip Molly-style; I just wanted to be a fucking teenager! So, at fourteen years old, I secretly sent applications to six New England boarding schools. When the time came to get my parents to accompany me to interviews, I sat them down.

  “Why would you want to go to boarding school?” my mom asked.

  “I went to get away from my parents,” my dad added. “Is that what you want?”

  I took a deep breath. “You know how last week I said I went to see Rain Man and slept at Sara’s?”

  They nodded.

  “Well . . .”
I continued with trepidation. “That was a lie. Sara said she was sleeping here and instead of seeing Rain Man we went to Mars, a club on the West Side Highway, and danced all night until the sun came up and then we went to a diner in Chelsea and got breakfast and bought the New York Times and read the Rain Man review so I could discuss it with you.”

  I was promptly FedExed to boarding school in Connecticut.

  When I arrived in my multizipper black leather motorcycle jacket, which I tossed on my bed next to my blond, southern roommate’s poster of a fluffy kitten dangling from a branch that said hang in there!, it was as if I had parked my spaceship on the verdant perfectly mowed quad. It was the first day of school, a crisp gorgeous September day, and old friends were embracing each other as Big Head Todd and the Monsters blared from a “boom box.” Except I felt like I was the monster, a bloodsucker descending on this quaint country club of tended grass and blond hair. Whenever it was a big day at school, like mothers’ day or fathers’ day (separate ’cause of the divorced peeps), graduation, or in this case, the first day of school, they had that square-cut bright green sod patched in what I call toupee grass. Equally sunny-hued were my classmates, unpacking tapestries and bean bag chairs, bedspreads and wardrobes. The clothes were ROYGBIV all the way, ripped from a prism, or a J.Crew catalog, which at the time, 1989, had color choices like Wave, Berry, Lemon, Pumpkin, and Rat Blood. Not really. But they were weird. And then there was Jill’s closet. Black. Brown. Gray. White. Navy was steppin’ waaaay out. Going crazy. Boots on my feet instead of Tevas and later black leather clogs instead of Birkenstocks. It was as if Patagonia threw up on the campus; that little mountain logo may as well have been an active volcano that Pompeii’d everyone’s ass into fleece for all eternity. Not a soul wandered the halls sans zip-up pile. But it was Indian summer, so Panama Jack was squirted on tan-skinned bikini bods. Hacky Sacks were kicked, Frisbees thrown. Some mop-headed Aryan Nation dudes noodled to the Dead, while others threw lacrosse (aka “lax”) balls back ’n’ forth.