Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “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 bat
hroom, 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.

  “I am so fucked up,” said Michelle.

  “We are sooo bad.”

  “That French shit is nasty.”

  “Think he’ll come after us?”

  “If he does, we’ll just tell ’em that Keith’ll kick his ass.”

  “Ohmygod! Of course!”

  We’d told so many people that we were the Rolling Stones’ girlfriends, we’d actually started to believe it ourselves. We’d also made it policy to speak, whenever possible, with British accents (never mind that sometimes we sounded like Eliza Doolittle, other times like Princess Margaret—we were pretty convinced we were authentic). One night, we told boys from Yorktown Prep that we were groupies who’d hitchhiked from San Francisco. Another night, a group of tourists from Georgia stopped to ask us for directions. High on pot, beer, and cooking sherry, we happily loaded them down with all sorts of useful information about the city.

  “Wow, for British people, y’all sure know a lot about New York,” one of them drawled.

  “Well,” I whispered, leaning in close for effect, “when you’re the illegitimate daughters of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, you tend to get around.”

  Is it even necessary to say, at this point, that our home lives were a misery? Michelle’s parents fought so terribly that through the walls of my apartment, I could hear them screaming and slamming doors. While my family was eating dinner, I’d hear several thuds; a few minutes later, our doorbell would ring. Michelle would be standing there, crying in the hallway.

  “Oh, Susie, oh, God …”

  Similarly, I’d come home from school every day to find my mother moody and seething. She was often enraged at my father (they, too, were headed for a divorce), but I usually presented the easiest target. The smallest transgression—a fork left in the sink, a wet towel on the bathroom floor—was enough to trigger a volcanic fight. My efforts to appease her often backfired as well:

  “I won a prize today at school for a poem I wrote.”

  She read it, looked at me icily, and threw it on the floor.

  “So?” she said. “What do you want from me?”

  “Well, my English teacher liked it.”

  “So go live with your English teacher.”

  Then she told me to make my own dinner and slammed her bedroom door.

  When my father finally arrived home he asked, “What happened? What did you do?”

  “Nothing. Honest. I just showed her a poem I wrote. Do you want to see it?”

  He shook his head. “I think you owe your mother an apology,” he said wearily, setting down his briefcase. “You shouldn’t upset her.”

  He walked into their bedroom and closed the door sharply behind him. I stood there for a minute. Through the door I could hear my mother yelling, then my father stammering, “Jesus Christ, Ellen—” Then I walked slowly over to Michelle’s. She answered the door and I could hear her mother shouting in the background, “Ted! Listen to me for a minute, goddamn it!”

  Michelle looked at me. We didn’t say anything. She just got her cigarettes and we went and sat out in the concrete stairwell. I unfolded my poem and handed it to her, and she read it as she smoked. When she was done, she hugged me.

  “That’s wonderful! That’s really, really wonderful.”

  I eyed her. “You really think so?”

  “Of course! Susie, you’re a poet!”

  “Oh. Michelle.”

  We hugged, and then we both started to cry.

  After a little while, when we felt better, Michelle would say, “So. I had another fantasy about Mick.”

  “You did? Tell me.” Although we’d repeatedly told each other our fantasies, we never tired of hearing them and embellishing the details. Michelle’s main fantasy was that she would meet Mick Jagger at a nightclub and he’d take her around to the apartments of all the other band members so she could meet them. Then she’d hit it off with Keith Richards and travel with him in the band for a while.

  My favorite fantasy was that one evening I would meet Mick Jagger at a dinner party. We would talk about music and literature; he would find me intelligent and attractive. Then we would get romantically involved and he would pick me up from school in his limousine. But the limousine wouldn’t simply pull up to the curb. Oh no. Mick would actually get out and walk directly into my high school. Of course, everyone would immediately stop whatever they were doing and stare. A wave of whispers would sweep through the school—a few kids would try to approach him for autographs—as Mick walked purposefully, straight to Room 217, where I had Third Period Geometry. He’d knock on the door, and my teacher, Mrs. Yearwood, would look on stunned, as Mick strode into the room.

  “‘Ello Suz-zay,” he’d say jauntily. Everyone in the class would look at me and gasp. The boys who’d once ignored me would be practically apoplectic with newfound reverence and awe.

  “Ohmygod,” Henry Piatt would exclaim. “That’s Mick Jagger!”

  “It’s really him.” Ira Abrams would say with astonishment. “For Susie?”

  Some of the girls would squeal and faint, and Mick would have to step over their bodies to get to my desk. There, beside me, he’d drop to his knees and grab my hand and clasp it desperately to his heart while the whole class looked on. “I’m sorry, luv, but I just ‘ad to see you. I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  And I would just sit there, looking unbelievably glamorous.

  “Oh, Mick,” I’d sigh coolly, “I’m in the middle of Geometry. Can’t we talk about this later?”

  In November, Michelle came running upstairs with a newspaper article.

  “They’re here,” she shrieked.

  According to the Daily News, the Stones were back in New York, putting the finishing touches on their album Emotional Rescue at the Electric Lady Studios. From the Yellow Pages, we learned that Electric Lady was on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. It was 10:00 P.M. on a Thursday night, but clearly, this was not something that could wait until morning.

  I told my mother I was going to Michelle’s house to bake cookies; she told her mother she was going to mine. Then we both took the C train downtown to West Fourth Street. The studio was one of the most nondescript doorways in all of Greenwich Village. Located next to a movie theater, it was a small, windowless storefront with a small door set in far from the street. Only a small brass plaque saying “electric lady” in lower-case letters distinguished it. You could walk by it a thousand times and never notice.

  For the next two hours, Michelle and I stood in front of this doorway, stopping people on the street who looked like they might know something, asking them if they’d seen the Rolling Stones.

  After that, we spent every weekend camped out in front of Electric Lady. We’d get downtown at about 10:00 A.M., position ourselves against a car parked right near the entrance, and wait. Michelle would smoke cigarettes while I, ever the groupie geek, would bring along books and do my homework. We flirted with strangers a bit, if we thought they were “somebody,” and took beer from guys on the street. Sometimes Michelle would ring the bell at the entrance and say she was sent over from the Village Voice with a package for Keith Richards, but they never let her in.

  We fell in with some other hippie-groupie types from Michelle’s school who were obsessed with Hendrix, the Doors, Janis Joplin, and Zeppelin as well as the Stones. On the weekends, they often threw “the parents are away” parties out in Flushing, Queens. Since the parties lasted all night, we rarely slept at them; at 3:00 A.M. a bunch of us might try to set up beds on the floor using sofa cushions and towels, but when the sun rose, we’d all be up listening to “Free Bird” and cooking frozen pizza in the kitchen.

  Most of the time, none of us knew where we were, or who we were with. People were taking speed,
smoking grass, dropping acid, making out with whoever was around: it was a druggie, psychedelic mess. There would be beer and cigarette butts all over the basement floor, cans and paper, little pools of wax where candles had melted down on the coffee tables. Each party, I made out with a different guy. Making out, I’d quickly discovered, was the greatest activity ever invented in the history of the planet. As soon I started making out with boys on a regular basis, I couldn’t believe that vast segments of the human population ever did anything else. How, I wondered, could people possibly pick up their dry cleaning, perform open heart surgery, or teach high school mathematics when they could be making out instead? What was wrong with this world? Where were peoples priorities?

  Yet after eight straight hours of mashing, grinding, and drinking, my lips were always swollen, and by morning, I always felt battered from alcohol. All I ever wanted to do was take a hot shower and slide between the cool, fresh sheets of my own bed. Instead, Michelle and I would take the subway to Greenwich Village and spend a few hours replacing whatever it was we had lost at the party: lipstick, change purses, socks.

  We were walking across Eighth Street one of these afternoons when a limousine pulled up in front of Electric Lady.

  “Michelle!” I grabbed her hand and we raced across the street. Then we leaned against an Oldsmobile parked right in front of the studio and waited to see who was coming out. We were determined to appear very cool and nonchalant about it.

  Two minutes later, the door to Electric Lady swung open and Keith Richards sauntered out with his little blond son in tow. He looked, if this was possible, scraggly and regal. His black hair was tousled and he was wearing a pair of gold-mirrored sunglasses. I sized him up as fast as possible: tight black velvet pants pulled over boots, black jacket, a red-green-yellow scarf slashed around his neck. When he walked into the sunlight, he recoiled a little. Then he spotted me and Michelle, and for a second, he acknowledged us with a nod before staggering toward his limousine.