by Tara Clancy
As Mom fiddled around in her purse to pay the cab driver, I just kept reading and rereading the shop sign, flashing back to Mom referencing “a shop,” then rereading it again. I didn’t entirely grasp what the words meant, but even so, I was pretty damn sure that whatever happened in the next ten minutes would be more interesting than anything that had happened in my fourteen years leading up to it. I blinked one more time to make sure I had it right. Yup, the sign read: 665: ONE STOP FROM HELL.
I recall the next five seconds like an out-of-body-experience, as if I were hovering over myself on Sunset Boulevard looking down on it all: there I am, looking every bit the 1990s Queens teenage baby butch in my baggy jeans, all-black Raiders Starter jacket, and fresh Nike Air Trainer Huarache high-tops, feet frozen to the sidewalk, eyes like saucers. Then there’s Mom, in her fanny pack and travel sweat suit, breaking into a run and jumping into the arms of this huge woman with a tattoo of a hypodermic needle and a metal spoon on her forearm with an X over it. “Rosemary!” Mom confirms.
As they twirl around and around in their bear hug, I finally work up the guts to take a few steps forward and sneak a peek into the shop window—turns out, 665: One Stop from Hell is not a Californian pseudonym for the Department of Motor Vehicles. It is a sex-toy store, specifically the kind of sex-toy store that boasts a full rack of black leather harnesses and a hat stand draped with horse whips. (Despite the advanced education I was getting walking around Manhattan’s West Village with my friends some Saturdays, it would be another decade before I’d learn that the term S&M could be used here.)
Rosemary gives me a quick shoulder pat and an “Eh, kid,” then takes my luggage, wheels it into the store, parks it underneath a shelf stocked with foot-long black dildos, and turns to ask me if I’m hungry.
Though I can no longer speak, I manage to shake my head, No.
Mom, on the other hand, with a big ol’ smile, says, “I could eat!”
I see them talking to each other, and then to me, but my brain is too overloaded to make meaning of the sounds; it’s as if every last ounce of my cognitive functioning has been dedicated to deciphering the purpose of the many hundred silicone items of every conceivable shape and size looming over me from all directions. So instead of comprehensible language I hear, “Meepy, meep’re meep meep meep across the meep meep meep sandwiches. Meep meep right meep, meep sit meep!” And before I understand what is happening, Mom and Rosemary walk out the shop door. Only after they’re gone and I’m alone in the pristine silence of the sex-toy store am I able to process Mom’s words: “Dolly, we’re going to run across the street to get sandwiches. We’ll be right back. Just sit there.”
I slowly turn to the spot my mother was pointing to ten seconds ago—a high stool behind a glass case, on top of which is the cash register and displayed inside of which are neat rows of things that many years from now I will google to discover are called nipple clamps, ball stretchers, and pinwheels.
I open the case, pull out a pinwheel (it’s like a pizza cutter but with pins instead of a blade) and run it up and down my arm. And then, I hear a familiar sound. Ding-a-ling! I look up toward the shop door with two simultaneous thoughts: 1) You really don’t expect one of those classic, cutesy doorbells in a shop like this—a little Bridgehampton candle store, sure, but here? and 2) That is definitely NOT Mom and Rosemary.
Standing in front of me now is a couple in business suits, and they are very serious and focused, which may be why they don’t realize that the person they’re asking, “Where can we find the puppy cages?” is fourteen years old and has zero idea why they are asking that question here.
We stare at one another for the longest three seconds of my life. I imagine they’re thinking something along the lines of: I know that butch lesbians tend to look younger, what with their little-boy fashion sense, but this one takes the cake. Meanwhile, I’m thinking: Maybe they don’t have Petco in California?
Finally, they give up on the mute at the register and decide to go look for the cages on their own—665 isn’t exactly Macy’s, so they find them without much trouble. The moment they do, the woman drops down onto all fours and crawls inside one, while the guy, still standing, says, “Whattaya think of that, bitch?” She woofs; he says, “We’ll take it.”
As they walk out the door, he adds, “I can’t exactly bring it back to the office, ha-ha, so we’ll come by after work, and I’ll pay for it then.” And thank God for that, because I also don’t know where to find the gift wrap.
Naturally, I head over to see this “puppy cage” but on my way get quickly distracted by what appears to be life-size G.I. Joe gear—wait, are those gas masks? One entire wall of the shop is dotted with hanging gas masks. And right away I feel the need to try one on, to see exactly what I would look like as a Cobra Viper.
I take down a mask, pull it over my head, tighten the straps, and walk over to the mirror to get a look at myself. After two, maybe three, steps, I realize I can’t breathe. I try to get it off, but it won’t budge. I’m pulling and pulling, fidgeting with the straps, twisting the cartridge in front, and nothing. I try to wedge my finger under the seal adhered to my face. Nothing. Now I’m in a full-on panic. I start whipping around the shop, arms flailing, trying to gasp, searching for something I could use to pry or smash it off with, but really I’m just going in circles until I’m in a total tailspin, looking like a postapocalyptic version of the Tasmanian devil trapped in a sex-toy store.
I make it to the mirror and start banging my head into it, hoping that will break the gas mask open—no such luck. Then, with what feels like my very last breath eking out of my nose, at long last, I hear it…ding-a-ling!—and my mother and Rosemary burst through the shop door.
They charge toward me, throwing their sandwiches into the air. Everything starts to go into slow motion, as I spend what I imagine are my few remaining seconds of consciousness in this world, struck not by the fear of encroaching death, but by the insanity of the fact that the very last thing I might ever see would be from behind the lens of a gas mask that’s suffocating me in front of my mother and her butchy best friend in the sex-toy shop the latter manages for a living, which I was left alone to run, at fourteen, all within the first hour of my first visit to L.A.
I don’t mean to spoil the surprise, but I survived. In fact, I didn’t even lose consciousness—with a lightning-fast, two-handed twist-and-pull combo move, Rosemary shelled that gas mask from my head as if my skull were a peanut. Somehow, in a remarkably short amount of time, Mom, Rosemary, and I just moved on, chitchatting away as if 665 was our favorite café, as if nothing had ever happened, as if this hadn’t been the single strangest sixty minutes of my entire life. But while I leapt seamlessly from meeting the puppy cage couple to the typical teenage talk of school and friends, I was later to learn that Mom and Rosemary were sweating buckets, shocked that they had dodged this particular bullet and managed to steer things back on track.
It would be years before she told me, but it turned out that my mother had ZERO idea that Rosemary worked in an S&M shop until the very second the cab that had brought us there pulled away from outside 665. She had written down the address but not the name of the store and was so focused on paying the taxi driver that she had yet to read the sign until the cab took off. Rosemary had sworn up and down that she’d told Mom the kind of shop she worked in and didn’t question it much when Mom said we would come there from the airport, because she had it in her head that I was a lot older than I was.
Regardless, the second I walked off to peer into the shop window, Mom and Rosemary, still hugging, were sharing panicked whispers, trying to figure out what the hell to do. Mom had a split second to make a tough decision: her whole plan was to introduce me to a lesbian friend, to show me that she had one, and thereby impress upon me that it was perfectly okay for me to be one, and she couldn’t figure out how to say, “Actually, we’re not going into my friend’s workplace, even though we are standing right in front of it,” without also real
ly confusing me and making the whole start of our trip supremely uncomfortable. More than anything, she deduced, it wasn’t worth foiling her entire plan just to avoid fielding a few questions about sex toys. So she decided to go in the complete opposite direction and pretend this was the most normal establishment in the world. She leapt at the chance to grab those sandwiches to powwow with Rosemary on her decision, never imagining that both the puppy cage and gas mask incidents would happen within the mere ten minutes they were gone.
—
After Rosemary’s shift was over, she took us to a kitschy family restaurant called The Stinking Rose, where every item on the menu was garlic-based, even the ice cream. We three sat there sharing a bowl, taking turns lifting the tiniest possible spoonfuls into our mouths and wincing, looking not unlike any of the other adorable families around us (but with one hell of a better backstory).
We drove to Rosemary’s apartment in her low-rider Caddy with chrome rims—apparently she had really taken to L.A. culture—and she went extra fast and rolled down all the windows and I asked if I could wear her leather jacket, claiming “I’m getting kinda cold…” But I wasn’t.
She gave me a wink and draped it over my shoulders, and I stuck my face out the car window into the wind, feeling in awe of Rosemary, her jacket, her car, and her wallet chain. In other words, I felt the very draw to this person that my mother had presumed I would…even if it would be another five years before I had any clue as to why.
Six months after I left L.A., by some sick miracle I once again found myself in a self-induced near-death situation that involved both a thugged-out best friend and gas masks—well, more like an event at which everyone was praying they had one of the latter. It also just so happened to take place in another place popular among sadists: Catholic school.
Several things had to happen for me to end up there. My zoned public high school had such a bad reputation (with newly installed metal detectors to confirm that said reputation was well deserved) that, come eighth grade, all my friends at Middle School 172 were desperate to find an alternative. A few lucky kids passed the test to get into one of the city’s super-competitive specialized public high schools (e.g., Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science). Esther and Lynette were headed to Bayside High, a public school a few neighborhoods over that admitted out-of-district students to their arts program, and I might well have convinced my parents to let me join them had I not cut school the day of the aforementioned entry tests. In so doing, I not only lost my chance to attend one of those top schools, but I also managed to convince my parents that what I needed more than the company of my best friends, a rigorous academic program, or an arts education was the drilling of hard-nosed nuns.
In 1994, the going tuition rate for a New York City Catholic high school was around $4,000 a year—a price that most cop/construction worker/car mechanic dads in my chunk of Queens could afford, and one-tenth the cost of other private schools. For the money, Catholic schools offered a slightly better education than your average public school, though not half as good as the specialized ones. But whatever these institutions may have lacked in academics, they made up for by way of discipline—and by greatly reducing your kid’s chances of being shot. And so, much to my dismay, I was headed for St. Mary’s.
To make matters worse, the only other MS 172 kid set to do a stint at St. Mary’s was one I didn’t like. Alli was the epitome of the popular, pretty, mean girl, which in Queens of 1994 meant she was something like the love child of Barbie and Snoop Dogg. A thugged-out Irish girl with gel-curled long blond hair, brown lipstick, a perpetual scowl, and too-tight clothes, she had grown up down the block from me on 253rd Street, attended all the same schools I had from kindergarten on up, and had her Holy Communion and Confirmation at St. Greg’s, like I did. And yet, at fourteen years old, having been in the same place practically every day for nine straight years, we had never spoken a word to each other.
After the L.A. trip, I started to veer from the standard Queens kid hip-hop look to some combo of the grunge fashion I saw on MTV (and not anywhere else around me) and the “Rosemary/Still Unaware Little Lesbian Chic.” I kept rocking fresh sneakers, but as the other girls’ jeans got tighter and tighter, I started to wear mine baggy, pairing them with thermal or flannel shirts. And though I could still recite every Wu-Tang Clan lyric, I started seeking out classic punk and rock music—nearly all my peers listened exclusively to rap and hip-hop, and it would be many more years before I had any idea that in the larger world they were not the rule but the exception and that outside Queens I wouldn’t have been the only teenager in a ten-mile radius who owned a Jimi Hendrix album.
Alli dismissed people like me as too weird and uncool to even bother with; I dismissed her as unoriginal and unintelligent. But, despite our protests, our dads—who were both cops and had long been pretty friendly—forced a get-together on us. A few weeks before school started, for the first time ever, I was to walk the three hundred feet from my house on 253rd down to hers, so “you two can spend a little time, get to know each other…won’t kill yuhs!” Dad said.
I thought it would be just us, but when I got there, she was waiting out front with a little crew of girl clones—all wearing painted-on, cutoff jean short-shorts, baby tees, door-knockers, and all-white low-top Reebok Classics. Beside them was a pair of guys with matching Caesar haircuts and plaid boxers sticking out from jeans belted below their asses. Nobody said a word when they saw me but instantly took off in a pack, all behind Alli. She turned back and said, “You comin’ or not?” I rolled my eyes, feeling as if I had just walked into some lame-ass after-school special, but followed them anyway, all the way to the back corner of the handball court at the PS 133 playground.
I had never smoked weed before, but I sure as shit didn’t say that, and when the blunt came my way, I took a long, proper puff, hunching over and pulling from my toes so I wouldn’t cough and face hell before passing it to Alli. After she took her hit, she looked me up and down, and said, “Why are you so fucking weird? I mean, ‘grunge,’ or whatever might be cool in Bubbafuck, Kansas, or some shit…but here it’s just wack.” To which I shot back, “Says the girl whose ass cheeks are hanging out of her shorts like some—” I stopped myself as Alli, now all cocked head and pursed lips, squared up to me as if she was going to throw a punch if I let slip a single syllable more.
I took a step back but, suddenly struck with the feeling that this was one of those fork-in-the-road, fight-or-flight, pivotal life moments, dug deep to summon my inner Lynette Solina and stepped forward again, chin up. I changed course but didn’t back down. “Besides, that doesn’t make any sense. I think you mean, Bubbafuck, Seattle.”
“Seattle, Kansas—what’s the fucking difference?”
“Damn, you really gotta get out of New York. Or buy a map.”
“They got a Bubbafuck atlas?”
“Yeah. You never heard of it? The Big Book of Bubbafucks.”
And at the same time that the tension broke, the weed kicked in, and we both started laughing so hard, we keeled over. Then we hooked arms to use each other as leverage to get to our feet, and that was that.
For the next few years we began every single day this way: arms hooked, crying-laughing over one stupid thing or another, smoking a blunt for breakfast, walking down our block to get the bus to school. By our sophomore year, however, we weren’t getting on the bus to St. Mary’s anymore—after we instigated that near-death situation, we got kicked out.
—
A month into my freshman year, I had proven to be the type of high school student who—if I wasn’t asleep or stoned during class—I was drunk. In the waistband of my uniform’s pleated wool skirt, I kept a “flask” of whiskey, which I’d made by washing out a travel-size shampoo bottle a thousand times (and then I colored it with a gold paint marker). Whenever I drank from it, I thought I was Janis Joplin reincarnate.
Meanwhile, in the waistband of Alli’s skirt, rolled up to shorten its length to all of four in
ches and always worn with thigh-highs, was a beeper that went off incessantly with the stream of guys she was flirting with but never talked about.
By this time, Alli and I were inseparable. I loved her brand of toughness, and she loved mine. I loved how smart she was, even if she didn’t want anyone to know it. I loved that, as hard as Alli worked to keep everyone else at arm’s distance, she pulled me in close, twice as hard. And yet, for all the time we spent together, all the bus rides, lunchtimes, weeknights, and weekend conversations, sex was the one thing we didn’t speak about—in fact, even though it wasn’t difficult to guess that she had some experience, I only learned the extent of it by accident.
Half-drunk at 3:00 p.m. and lollygagging along at Alli’s side as we walked toward the bus stop after school one day, out of nowhere I heard, “You little bitch! I know what you did! Stop!” We both turned back to see a gang of senior girls a block away but gaining on us, the two at the front shouting to their crew, “That’s the fucking freshman who screwed my boyfriend!” “Yeah, mine, too! I’m gonna kill her!”
Just then the bus appeared at the corner, and Alli put her hand on my back, pushed me forward, and took off running toward it, “We gotta book! There’s too many of ’em! GO!”
Alli gave them double fuck-you fingers through the bus window as we pulled away, then took a seat and made as if nothing had happened. I was confused as all hell, but right then I remembered walking into her house the previous Saturday night, just as two guys I kind of recognized were walking out. As soon as I saw her that night, in her room, I said, “Who were they?”