I Love the 80s

by Crane, Megan

  The first thing she noticed was the drag queen in full regalia, complaining into the payphone on the corner. A glance up and down the street confirmed that there were payphones everywhere and, stranger by far to her eyes, no cellphones. The people who walked by talked to their companions or not at all, unless they were noticeably and probably certifiably insane. The walk/don’t walk signs at the crosswalks were lettered, not flashing electric. The streets were filled with cars as always, but they were all passenger cars, with not a single SUV to be seen. Everyone smoked. Even inside the restaurants, customers waved lit cigarettes in the air to make their points and blew out clouds of smoke directly into their food. Station wagons, some with that awful wood panelling, careened through the intersection. A kid carrying an actual boom box on his shoulder, resplendent in a tracksuit and gold chains, strolled by with Run DMC blaring from his speakers. Phil Collins blasted out of a car window at a stoplight, and Jenna half smiled to hear that it was ‘Take Me Home’. How appropriate.

  The smile faded, however, as she took in the state of the city around her. It was a much dirtier, more unpleasant New York than the one she knew. There were vials strewn in the grimy corners near the alleyways, and homeless men who looked almost demonic in the summer-evening shadows. Women marched down the street with their purse straps across their bodies and grim looks about the mouth. There were junkies nodding out in boarded-up doorways, and buskers on the corners.

  This was the ‘edgy’ Manhattan everyone bemoaned the loss of. They called it that because time had dulled their memories, and they’d obviously forgotten what it felt like as darkness neared. Just as her terror was hitting a fever pitch, and Jenna was trying to figure out how she was going to survive a night on the original mean streets with predators thick on the ground, she remembered the driver’s licence in the purse she clutched in front of her like a shield.

  Jennifer Jenkins, she thought as relief rushed through her. She fumbled inside the neon blue depths, her mind racing. What if Jennifer Jenkins, like Jenna, had moved to New York City from somewhere else and never updated her information? What if her licence had an old address from some other state?

  But her fears were groundless, because Jennifer Jenkins was clearly the organized type. Organized and living at 457 East 83rd Street. The question was, in a world without a handy Apple store with access to Google Maps, where on 83rd Street was that?

  A dim memory of her freshman orientation programme at NYU surfaced then, and Jenna scanned the street for the nearest empty phone booth. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d used a phone booth, and was slightly afraid that her karma would be such that it wouldn’t provide her with what she needed, as payback for belonging to a cellular world. But karma refrained from kicking her while she was down. This time.

  Jenna pulled the phone book on its chain up to the little metal shelf, and slapped it over a SILENCE=DEATH sticker someone had plastered there. There, in the front of the phone book, was the Manhattan street-number formula she’d vaguely remembered hearing about. According to this, 457 East 83rd Street was located between First Avenue and York Avenue. Jenna closed the phone book and let it fall back down, feeling inordinately pleased with herself.

  She was practically jubilant as she walked up to 14th Street and headed east, along a street that in her time sported fancy hotels and designer stores. There was none of that tonight. No high-rises. No trendy Meatpacking District restaurants – in fact, she thought she could smell the blood from, presumably, actual meatpacking. Gross. She trudged past the brick building on the corner of Ninth that she knew all too well, because of a spate of bad dates she’d suffered through at an Italian restaurant that had been there. More than once, she’d been forced to shove so-so pizza into her mouth and try to stay awake while her date blathered on about himself. None of the men she’d met there had showed even a smidgen of interest in the fact that the building had also contained Glenn Close’s apartment in Fatal Attraction – a moot point tonight, Jenna thought with a sigh, since that movie came out in September of 1987 and it was still, as far as she knew, August. Married men could continue to cheat merrily and without fear of boiled bunnies for at least a few more weeks.

  Jenna continued along 14th Street all the way to Union Square – a grim-looking Union Square, not the gentrified place with the Farmers’ Market she loved, but a disgusting area with a seemingly abandoned warehouse where the Virgin Megastore should be – and went down into the subway in search of the 6 train to the Upper East Side.

  The subway station was another shock. Once again, Jenna was aware of a sense of menace all around, perfuming the air along with the ever-present smell of ripe garbage and unwashed humans in the summer heat. She fumbled for her Metrocard, and it was not until her fingers encountered a token in the bottom of the blue purse that she remembered the existence of tokens. She weighed it in her hand, brass with the silver plug in the centre, then inserted it into the appropriate slot and pushed her way through the rickety turnstile.

  The subway platform was even dirtier than the sidewalk, and was approximately six hundred degrees hotter than the outside world. Jenna kept her attention focused on the track. She did not look at the potentially dangerous pack of young men to her right, with that undercurrent of meanness in their laughter. She did not want to know what slithered out of sight in the dark down on the track itself, because she had a strong suspicion it was a rat. Possibly in the plural.

  The subway car, when it arrived, was not much better. There was graffiti all over the walls, grey plastic benches, and a battered linoleum floor. Jenna missed the new subway cars. She missed air conditioning. Yet when the conductor made his completely incomprehensible announcement, she felt immediately more at home. Happily, some things never changed, and the unintelligible jabber of New York City subway conductors was, apparently, one of them.

  Yet other things were completely different, Jenna thought later, as she made the long trek from the subway towards Jennifer Jenkins’s place. No Starbucks. No ATM machines. Just a long walk, practically into the East river. By the time Jenna made it to the address listed on the licence in her bag, which was at least on the block it was supposed to be on, she was dragging. She was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and the truth was, for all the trivia she’d been immersed in all day, she thought she’d finally had enough of 1987 Manhattan.

  Jenna was ready to wake up. She was even ready to join the real world Aimee was always going on about. She could admit it – she’d hidden away in a little cocoon after Adam had left her. But she was ready to leave it behind. She would even approach the endless series of blind dates with more enthusiasm, if she had to – just as long as she could escape the Eighties.

  First, however, she had to fight her way into Jennifer Jenkins’s apartment building through a series of heavy security doors using a selection of keys from the enormous key chain in the inside pocket of the neon blue purse, and then haul herself up five floors to the very top. Jennifer Jenkins’s apartment was the highest, furthest apartment possible in the building, Jenna thought sourly as she limped, overheated and panting, to the door of #15. She had to try each key in each of the three locks on the door, but eventually she made it inside, and closed the door with a satisfying thump on the city.

  For a moment she simply stood there, her back against the door, breathing.

  There was a fan blowing from one of the two windows in front of her, in the area that comprised most of the living space in the studio apartment. Jenna hated studio apartments, on principle. She took a few moments to investigate the one she found herself in, which she accomplished by pivoting around on her heels. It was tiny. A bathroom to the left and a kitchen to the right, and one big room to live in. It should have felt like a cell – the way her own studio apartment had felt those three dire years she’d lived in one – but this apartment didn’t feel cell-like at all. It took Jenna a moment to figure out why.

  It was the pale yellow paint on the walls, she decided, that made the sp
ace seem bigger, somehow, and happier. It was also the fact that the place was spotless. Not a speck of dust. Fresh flowers in a vase on the cute mantel above a faux fireplace, and living plants in the kitchen. Between these plants and the ficus in the office, Jenna suspected that Jennifer Jenkins could actually grow things, which she found amazing, having neglected even cacti to death in her day. The futon couch was carefully made up, rather than left open and piled high with clothes and assorted debris, as had been Jenna’s way. A quick glance proved that the refrigerator was filled with the kinds of things people who knew how to cook assembled – ingredients rather than takeout containers and pizza boxes. The walls were not plastered with old pin-ups from Tiger Beat, but featured pretty prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a few artsy, black and white photographs.

  And, of course, more pictures of the woman who looked way too much like Jenna.

  Jenna trailed her fingers across the photos in frames on the mantel. A trio of laughing girls, all in their early twenties. Pets. The beach. A mountain somewhere and lush green trees. A college graduation, flanked by beaming parents.

  As Jenna stared at the parents, the penny finally dropped.

  Because she knew them.

  She knew them, just as she knew the girl in the pictures with them – she must have known it at once, though she’d been too disoriented to take it in. How else to explain the resemblance? The name?

  Because the parents were Jenna’s grandparents.

  She was looking at photos of her favourite aunt Jen. Jennifer Jenkins was Aunt Jen.

  Jenna sank down on the futon, feeling dizzy, and pulled off her ankle boots. She let them clatter to the floor in front of her, then thought better of it and lined them up neatly beneath the futon. No need to unleash Hurricane Jenna all over this pristine little place.

  Had her aunt woken up to find herself in the chaos that was Jenna’s life in the twenty-first century? The messy office would be a mere precursor to the wreck of her apartment, though at least Jenna had a separate bedroom. Poor Aunt Jen must want to kill herself right about now, sitting nearly twenty-five years in the future in Jenna’s dusty, overstuffed home, surrounded by piles of crap and dirty dishes.

  Was this why Aunt Jen had always suggested that Jenna learn how to pick up after herself? Neatness can never be a bad thing, she’d told Jenna this past Christmas, apropos of nothing. Had she been waiting for this to happen – and hoping to keep Jenna from inflicting her messy ways on her life?

  Was this why Aunt Jen had never grown impatient with Jenna’s Eighties obsession the way everyone else had?

  Get a hold of yourself, Jenna told herself fiercely. There is no swapping of lives. Tommy Seer has been dead for almost twenty-five years, Aunt Jen is even now living her fancy life in that gorgeous house in Carmel that she bought with her Apple shares, and none of what went on today happened anywhere but in your head.

  So she lay down sideways on the futon, closed her eyes tight, and waited to wake up safe and sound and back in her bed.

  9

  When Jenna opened her eyes again, the phone was ringing and the walls were bright yellow in the morning sun and she was still, damn it all, on the pristine futon belonging to the ruthlessly organized Jennifer Jenkins. Also known as Aunt Jen.

  Which meant she was still in 1987.

  Or still dreaming that she was in 1987.

  Ignoring the ringing phone, Jenna dragged herself into a sitting position, and scraped her hair back from her face, securing the curly mess in a knot on the back of her head. The phone stopped ringing, and in the blessed quiet she noted absently that there was no answering machine, a concept her brain could not quite absorb.

  There was a lot of that going around.

  The problem was, she didn’t feel like she was dreaming. She’d had epic dreams before, many of them also involving Tommy Seer, in which everything felt real – but that was only the kind of thing she’d noticed in retrospect, upon waking. She’d never dreamt in such detail before. The weathered faces of the homeless men she’d seen on 14th Street. The depressing and sticky-looking porn shops and theatres in Times Square. The beginnings of blisters on her feet from those damned ankle boots, pink and tender even now. The potent stink of the cab she’d shared with Duncan Paradis. The continuing ache in her butt from hitting the supply-closet floor. The numerous times she’d tossed and turned herself awake during the night, only to lie there, fuming and too hot even next to the fan, until she’d drifted back to a fitful sleep.

  The only reason she thought she was dreaming at all was because it was, obviously, impossible to wake up one morning and discover oneself in the distant past, consorting with long-deceased childhood idols. If she hadn’t known such a thing was impossible, the idea that she was dreaming would never have occurred to her, since absolutely nothing that had happened felt dreamy at all, up to and including her awful interaction with Tommy Seer the night before.

  An interaction that was so bad, even in retrospect, that it practically proved that none of this could be a dream. In the more than twenty years she’d been dreaming about Tommy Seer, she had never once dreamed him to be cynical and snide. Never. Not one time. Until now.

  So if she wasn’t dreaming … Jenna sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands. This is crazy, she thought, and then groaned it aloud.

  Which was, of course, the other option. That she was insane. That she was even more unhealthy than Aimee had suggested she might be – and that she had spent the past eight months preparing for a serious nervous breakdown. That she had suffered a catastrophic break from reality and was even now locked away in some mental institution while all of this took place in her head. Like that Buffy episode where Buffy thought her entire life (and therefore the entire show) was a paranoid schizophrenic delusion she was having from the safety of a padded cell, complete with a straitjacket and guards.

  The phone began to ring again, and Jenna glared across the room at it. It hung from the wall, the receiver attached to the base by a very long, stretchy cord, presumably one that allowed Aunt Jen to wander all over her apartment. Yet still on a leash. Every time it rang, the cord moved a little bit, calling attention to itself and the fact it was not cordless.

  Jenna looked around the studio, and let out a long breath.

  There was nothing to be done about her situation. Either she had somehow travelled through time, or she was insane. Did it really matter which? She happened to look enough like her aunt to ease right on into the life Aunt Jen had left behind, she’d managed to embroil herself in some high Eighties drama already, and going to sleep had not altered her circumstances even one iota. So whether or not any of this was actually happening, it looked like Jenna was stuck in it.

  And that being the case, she’d better stick to the new course she’d set for herself. No more hiding away from life and dreaming of other times. Hadn’t that gotten her into this mess in the first place? No more being passive and apologetic, no matter how much the thought of seeing Tommy Seer again made her want to cry. Which it did. And absolutely no more feeling sorry for herself.

  She’d spent eight months going nowhere, and now she’d gone too far. It was time to get over herself. She wished she could let Aimee know exactly how right she was.

  Jenna blew out a breath, and squared her shoulders. Everyone always claimed they wished they could go back in time and redo things, with all the knowledge they’d gained in the interim. Well, here Jenna was, with 1987 wrapped up in a bow. Thanks to her obsessiveness, and recent quicksand-like descent back into extreme fannishness, she knew pretty much every last newsworthy detail of that year – and many un-newsworthy details, for that matter. Jenna had always worried that her life was boring and lacked adventure, that she was boring and lacked a sense of adventure, both while with Adam and after he’d left her. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if, faced with the ultimate adventure, and who cared if it was only in her own mind, she hunkered down like a turtle and disappeared into her shell.

>   It was time for the new Jenna. The New Jenna Project, in which she would finally be the person she’d always meant to become. The person who stood up for herself, and did not hide somewhere dreaming of a different life but lived the one she had. Even if that involved humiliating interactions with the likes of Tommy Seer.

  She could practically hear herself roar.

  She surged to her feet and strode across the room, snatching up the phone despite the tangle of the cord and congratulating herself on her confidence. She was a badass. At long last.

  ‘Jen, what the hell is going on?’ Ken Dollimore, of course, his elfin voice in the higher register. Which she interpreted to mean he was panicking. ‘You were supposed to be at the studio an hour ago!’

  ‘Ken,’ Jenna said in a confident, New Jenna sort of voice, ‘let me stop you right there. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I am talking about how I look like a schmo in front of Duncan Paradis,’ Ken barked at her, which pretty much murdered the confident thing in its infancy. ‘Are you trying to screw me? Because you screw me, you screw yourself, Jen. I’m not kidding on this. Watch me.’

  Not an auspicious start to the New Jenna Project, she reflected sometime later, in the back of a cab hurtling downtown at what she feared was literally breakneck speed, but she’d done her best to rally.

  She’d assured Ken that there had been no start time mentioned, but that she took full responsibility anyway and would tell Duncan Paradis so the moment she saw him. Only slightly mollified, Ken had told her to get her ass in gear, except he’d been more profane, and he had then hung up with such force it made her ear ring.