Life with My Sister Madonna

by Christopher Ciccone

  “I mean, what did you really think?”

  I know she expects me to admit that I’m gay, but I’m just not ready to confront my own sexuality. “What do I think?” Then I retreat back into my comfortable shell. “Well, I think it was fun, the music was great.”

  After that, we arrive at her dorm, and she gets out of the car. We both know that there has been a radical shift between us. My sister has shown me a reflection of my sexuality and I can no longer hide it—at least, not from myself. She has opened my eyes, and I am scared.

  I GRADUATE HIGH school and spend the following summer working at a local gas station. I go to college at Western Michigan, and because of Dune and other books I read after that, I decide to major in anthropology. I am a romantic at heart, love movies and secretly see myself as a latter-day Errol Flynn, so I decide to minor in fencing. Later, my ideal will be William Holden, but you get the picture.

  I make the belated realization that if I ever really want to learn the lessons being taught in college, I can no longer just sit in class and keep my mouth shut. Almost overnight, I am transformed into an adult version of the Show Me! kid. I challenge every assertion made by my teachers. I question everything. Prove it. I don’t believe you. Show me. I learn more in one semester at college than I did all the previous years at school.

  After the second semester, I decide that I want to continue dancing and take modern dance class as well. I break the news to my father, and to my relief he doesn’t get mad. Instead, he looks disappointed, and I feel awful. My elder brothers never finished school, he hoped I’d study to become a scientist, and now he knows that won’t happen. He doesn’t try to stop me, though. All he says is, “I don’t approve, and if you want to take dance classes, you are going to have to pay for them yourself.”

  So I support myself by working in the dorm cafeteria, and by giving blood as often as possible, for $50 each time. I also befriend various women in my dorm, and they fulfill my newly acknowledged need for female friends, or stand-ins for my sisters.

  One chilly winter morning, I see my roommate—with whom I have nothing in common—coming out of the shower naked and I get a hard-on. I am gay. He doesn’t notice my physical reaction, although I am utterly embarrassed. Happily, midsemester he moves out of my room, leaving me to a private room and a great freshman year.

  At the end of that year, although my father is paying half of my tuition, I run out of cash, transfer to Oakland University, and move back home again.

  Enter Madonna once more, primed to introduce me to yet another new and enlightening experience. This time around, though, I initiate it. I have witnessed her smoking pot with her friends, am curious, and want to do what my big sister is doing. So I ask her about it.

  Two days later, she presents me with a joint rolled in pink paper.

  “That’ll be fifty cents,” she says, and holds out her hand for it.

  So I pay her.

  An accomplished businesswoman, even then!

  By now, with Christopher Flynn’s encouragement, Madonna has left Ann Arbor without graduating and moved to Manhattan. Later, she will claim of that first trip, “I came here with thirty-five dollars in my pocket. It was the bravest thing I’d ever done.”

  She was, indeed, brave in not graduating, and in defying our father, who was horrified that the first of his children to get into college was now dropping out. I remember that even I thought that what she was doing was extreme.

  But as for arriving in Manhattan with just $35 and ending up in Times Square because she didn’t have anywhere else to go—that’s pure mythology. First of all, she was a middle-class girl with plenty of contacts in Manhattan—other dancers, other instructors—and far from being this lost, friendless little waif who didn’t even have a crust of dry bread to eat, she had money in her pocket and a support system all in place.

  She may have spent a night sleeping at the Music Building, but that was likely because she was hoping a producer or musician might come by and discover her. Mythology. The further she got into it, the more mythological the story of her first trip to Manhattan became. Shades of Anaïs Nin—the author who was also mistress of embellishing her own biography.

  I know, though, that even with far more than $35 in her pocket, and a group of friends, those first few months after moving to the Big Apple couldn’t have been altogether easy for Madonna. First, she studied with choreographer Pearl Lang, made a few bucks from posing nude for art students, and spent a few months in Paris as the protégé of two French music producers who wanted to groom her as the latest sensation américaine. Afterward, she tells me that she was sick almost all the time she was in Paris—a throat infection—not unrelated, she confesses, to how much she hated being there.

  MEANWHILE, I AM safely, if not unhappily, tucked away in my second year of college in Rochester, Michigan. When one of my college buddies invites me to spend part of the summer at her parents’ home in Darien, Connecticut, I call Madonna and ask her if I can visit her in Manhattan. She says yes. Moreover, she will take us out to dinner when we get there.

  By the time we get to town, en route to Connecticut, Madonna is living in Corona, Queens, in a synagogue that has been converted into a studio, and playing drums in her boyfriend Dan Gilroy’s band, the Breakfast Club.

  So my friend and I arrive at the airport, rent a car, and drive out to Fifty-third Avenue in Queens, right by the World’s Fair grounds, and end up at the synagogue, a big, wide-open space, still with religious carvings on the walls, but with clothes and instruments thrown all over the place. The whole thing seems a bit sacrilegious to me.

  But at least my sister seems pleased to see me.

  She immediately tells me how great the band is, how big they are going to get, and orders them to play a song for me. She’s at the back of the band, playing the drums, but is still drawing all the attention. I feel compelled to look at her, not at the person fronting the band. That’s just the way it always is with Madonna.

  At the same time, I can’t help wondering what has happened to the serious college student, the dedicated modern dancer who dreamed of one day opening her own dance studio. Although she tells me she still takes an occasional dance class, Madonna the modern dancer has clearly gone the way of Madonna the cheerleader, the all-American girl, and Madonna the nascent prima ballerina and besotted disciple of Christopher Flynn.

  Now she’s morphed into a female, punk Ringo Starr in ripped jeans, a white T-shirt, black fishnets, and her hair pulled back in a ponytail. It seems to me she is just goofing off, with no direction anymore. I am somewhat bemused and rather disappointed, but yet again admire her breathtakingly stubborn sense of self-confidence.

  Later in the evening, a stretch limo pulls up outside the studio. Madonna tells us she’s taking us to dinner at Patrissy’s, a music-business hangout on Kenmare Street in Little Italy. I think to myself how weird it is that she’s living like a starving artist, but has suddenly got a limo at her disposal. I remember thinking, or her telling me, that it belonged to some guy she met in Paris, set on wooing her. I am puzzled, but impressed.

  However, I am distracted from the studio, and even my sister when we drive over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, which seems to me to be spangled with stars, and for the first time in my life I see the lights of Manhattan glittering in front of me. I am engulfed by a sense of wonder. I’m not yet in love with the city, but I’m definitely in lust.

  After a brief weekend in the white wilderness of Darien, Connecticut, I go back to Oakland University. To support myself, I work the entire summer, first as a janitor in a retirement home, then in a local hospital’s kitchen, which I enjoy.

  At college, I devote myself to dance, and by the second semester of my second year in college I’m the lead male dancer in the college company. I am now twenty, and for the first time ever, my father and Joan are coming to see me dance onstage, in Rodeo, an Agnes de Mille ballet.

  I have never been onstage performing for an audience before, so I’m
naturally nervous. I’m also terrified that my father will make the connection between my dancing and my being gay. Since our night at the Rubaiyat, Madonna and I haven’t discussed my sexuality again, nor does anyone else know about it. My nerves take over to such a degree that backstage at the dress rehearsal, my mind on the upcoming opening-night ordeal, I trip and fall. I am rushed to the hospital, where an X-ray establishes that I’ve broken my big toe in two places, and two other toes as well.

  I’m in terrible pain, but the next night, after my toes are taped together, accessing some hitherto recessive trouper gene that Madonna and I have inherited from some far-off, unknown ancestor with theatrical leanings, I vow that the show must go on. With that in mind, I go onstage and, with three broken toes, do twelve jetés, one after the other. Every second is agony, but I get through it with nary a whimper. During the intermission, although my father is far from happy that I’m becoming a dancer, he congratulates me and says that he is amazed that I was able to dance with three broken toes.

  As the show carries on, the pain does become unbearable, but I endure it in my stoic way, unaware that my suffering will soon be assuaged, my stoicism rewarded with a dancer named Russell.

  I’ve noticed him before, but nothing has happened between us. Tonight, though, with my mutilated toes, I’m the hero of the hour. And as Russell and I undress in the locker room, primed to take a shower, he stops suddenly and kisses me.

  Initially, I am stunned. Then I relax and linger in the moment. I am about to fall into Russell’s arms when the locker room door opens. We quickly step back from each other, undiscovered.

  Not long afterward, Russell invites me over to his house one night when his mother is asleep. We start watching TV together. His hand touches mine as he rolls on top of me.

  “You want to put what where? Don’t even think about it!” I say.

  Shaken and dumbfounded, I jump up, put my clothes on again, and go home fervently wishing that I knew more about what to put where and when.

  Time passes slowly as I discover my homosexuality and lose my virginity while in the backseat of Russell’s gold Datsun. One night, at a drive-in movie, I am with Russell in the car, he presses a latch, the car seat flips down, and so do I.

  Coincidentally, Madonna also lost her virginity with a guy named Russell—and in the backseat of a car, as well. Clearly, we don’t share merely almost identical genes, but also similar fates. Trust her, though, to best me by having her first time in a Cadillac, not a Datsun.

  I finally accept that I am gay and even grow to like the idea. But not so much that I want to broadcast it to anyone, not even to Madonna. So I keep my relationship with Russell a deep secret from everyone, especially my family.

  A FEW WEEKS later, my parents are out for dinner. Russell and I go downstairs to my elder brother’s old bedroom in the basement, figuring it’s safe for us to fool around there. And infinitely more comfortable than the vinyl backseat of my Dodge Dart or Russell’s Datsun. We take our clothes off and start making out. We are so foolishly oblivious that neither of us hears footsteps on the stairs.

  Within seconds, my sister Melanie is standing there in the doorway, her mouth wide open, her face as white as the streak in her hair.

  She runs up the stairs again.

  I’m screwed in more ways than one.

  Russell and I quickly get dressed. I ask him to stay in the basement.

  I head up the stairs and come face-to-face with my brother Marty, the most macho Ciccone of all Ciccones.

  He gets right in my face and yells, “What the fuck are you doing down here? Are you a fucking faggot? Are you?”

  For a split second, I evaluate my alternatives. I decide to stand my ground, and prepare to take what’s coming.

  “Yes, I am a faggot, Marty.” Then, with as much swagger as I have been able to muster before or since, I add, “So what are you going to do about it? Kick my ass?”

  Marty takes a step back from me. “That’s what I came down here to do.”

  There is a pause, during which I silently kiss what I consider to be my good looks good-bye.

  “But I’m not going to,” he finally says.

  He marches back upstairs, and that is that.

  Or so I believe.

  CUT TO THE Ciccone Vineyard, Traverse City, Michigan. My father’s seventy-fifth birthday party, two years ago. Marty approaches me while I am sitting on the veranda and says, “There is something I need to apologize for.”

  I immediately flash back to that night in our basement. “You don’t really need to.”

  “I really do.”

  “Please, don’t. It’s cool, we’re cool.”

  But Marty won’t be diverted from his mission. “I’m really sorry for what I said, but I didn’t like that you were gay, and I’m sorry for being such an asshole.”

  And that, as far as Marty is concerned, really is that.

  BY 1980, I make the radical decision that anthropology can wait. So can professional fencing. I decide to become a dancer instead. My father is not happy. He doesn’t give me a hard time, though, because I know despite his protestations, he wants me to be happy.

  So I move to downtown Detroit, work part-time in a sandwich bar, and take a job with Mari Windsor’s Harbinger dance company.

  Over the year I spend dancing with Harbinger, I get a deeper education in dance. I discover Alvin Ailey, Katherine Dunham, and new and inspiring styles of dance.

  Madonna, however, is not impressed.

  During one of our periodic phone calls she says, “If you really want to be a dancer, Christopher, you have to be in New York.”

  I know she’s right, but don’t know if I’m ready yet to take on the Big Apple.

  Sensing that I am tempted, my siren of a sister says, “Come to New York, and you can stay with me in my apartment. I’ll introduce you to people. I’ll take classes with you. I’ll get you into a company.”

  Within days, I pack everything I own into my big green duffel bag, and off I go to Emerald City, where I assume Glinda the Good Witch will be awaiting me with open arms.

  AS PREARRANGED WITH Madonna, I fly to JFK and take a cab into the city. The driver drops me a few blocks from the address Madonna gave me, so I have to walk a bit. By now, it’s late at night and I arrive at Madonna’s apartment, in a prewar building on West Ninety-fourth and Riverside, my back aching from lugging the duffel bag. Nonetheless, overflowing with excitement and great expectations, I ring the bell.

  The door opens, whereupon I am confronted by Madonna Part Four (Part One, the cheerleader; Part Two, the serious dancer; Part Three, the punk drummer), whom I hardly recognize. She is dressed in an odd-looking outfit: black crop top, short red plaid skirt, black panty hose, ankle boots, black leather studded bracelets, and a black rag knotted into her matted hair.

  She takes a lipstick-stained cigarette out of her mouth.

  Before I can exclaim, “But, Madonna, you’ve never smoked before!” in one breath she announces, “Hi, Christopher, you can’t live here after all.”

  Straight and to the point, with no sugarcoating.

  “What do you mean I can’t live here? I just gave up my life in Detroit. My apartment, my job, everything.”

  Madonna shrugs. “Whatever…”

  Seeing my crestfallen face, she relents slightly. “You can sleep on the floor for a couple of nights, but that’s it.”

  I’m dumbstruck.

  She reaches into her jeans and pulls out a tablet. “Here, try this. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Feeling like a hick, I ask her what it is.

  “Just take it,” she says firmly.

  I take it from her and later discover that it’s ecstasy—or MDMA as it was called at that time.

  I also note that, unlike the joint, at least this time, she hasn’t charged me.

  She beckons me to follow her into the apartment. With wood floors and crown molding, it’s one of those prewar apartments with lots of bedrooms that are prevalent on t
he Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  We enter an open foyer that leads into a large living room filled with broken furniture. To the right of us, a kitchen and another living room; to the left of us, a thirty-foot hallway. I am amazed at the size of the place. Walking through the cavernous apartment, I am surprised that my sister has said there is no space for me, but I don’t voice my thoughts.

  Madonna’s bedroom is the third on the right. I later discover that she is only renting her bedroom from an unidentified landlord, and that the apartment isn’t hers at all. The bedroom doesn’t have any furniture in it, except a mattress with dirty pale blue sheets on it on the floor in the middle of the room. A sink is in one corner; a naked lightbulb swings from the ceiling. The only other light comes in through a window without shades or drapes, boasting a gloomy view of the brick wall opposite.

  Piles of punk-style clothes are all over the floor. The cracked plaster walls are all white. There is no art, except for a tattered Sid Vicious poster taped to one of them.

  Madonna gives me a faded old blanket and a pillow, leads me into the living room, then leaves me alone. I throw the blanket on the floor, and to my surprise, it moves. Literally. I pick it up again and realize that my sister’s announcement has so dazed me that I haven’t noticed that I have company, about 5 million cockroaches crawling all over the floor.

  Right now, though, I am far too tired and dispirited to care. I put the blanket down again and try to sleep. Meanwhile, the cockroaches crawl all over me.

  If the insects don’t keep me awake, the various people arriving and departing throughout the night do. Madonna looks in on me, then promptly disappears. What am I doing here?

  I am both shell-shocked and angry. My sister initially seemed to be looking out for me, inviting me to stay with her in Manhattan, but now clearly doesn’t want me here at all. I simmer with hurt and rejection: Glinda the Good Witch suddenly seems more like Glinda the Bad.

  Early the next morning, I knock on Madonna’s bedroom door.