by Mamrie Hart
“Honey, we’re home!” Kat called as we walked up the stairs. Maegan appeared at the front door wearing a 1982 Van Halen Hide Your Sheep Tour T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts, and she had on the exact knee-high gladiator sandals that I had been coveting all summer but had worried would make my calves look like a tray of yeast rolls at Golden Corral. She had wild, curly red hair that stuck out everywhere, kind of like Dana at the end of Ghostbusters, when you can’t tell if she’s about to fuck Bill Murray or wear him as a skin suit. Simply put, Maegan’s look was on point.
“It’s so nice to meet you! Welcome!” she said as she ushered us into her apartment. It was decked out in the raddest vintage shit I’d ever seen. There was a light-up sign that read DISCO hanging above her bed, and the headboard was made out of a refurbished dashboard, complete with an 8-track player. Maegan grabbed me a Corona while Kat was fixing herself a tequila and orange juice.
“Starting early on the tequila, I see,” Maegan called to Kat in the kitchen, then turned to me. “I have that shirt!”
I looked down at my 1983 Kenny Rogers Jovan Musk Tour tee. While I was in shock from the coincidence, she kept going like she had just pointed out a mass-produced tunic we’d both gotten from Target.
“Are you coming to the show with us?” she asked.
“What show?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise!” Kat said, pouring more tequila into her cup. The tequila looked like one of those optical illusion faucet fountains you buy from SkyMall that never stop pouring. “We’re seeing the Pixies at Coney Island tonight!”
“Seriously?!” I jumped up, spilling a little Corona on Maegan’s pristine midcentury modern couch.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” I apologized. Great. First ten minutes at this girl’s place and I was already wrecking the joint.
She walked over and wiped it with her hand. “Don’t worry about it. Kat spilled an entire bowl of beans and rice on it two nights ago.”
Look at me, I thought. One hour in New York and I’ve already got these hip-ass adult friends and am going to a show? Granted, the only song I could name of the Pixies was the one that went, “Uh-huh . . . I got a broken face,” but I knew it was going to be fun. I also knew they had an album called Surfer Rosa, because I pointed out the cassette tape in a boy’s car in high school once and he said, “You like the Pixies?” and I was all like, “Yeah, I love them” (totally lying), and he was all like, “What’s your favorite album?” and I was all like, “I think I just started my period. Please take me home.”*
The rest of the afternoon was spent drinking Coronas on the stoop with Maegan and her boyfriend, Doug. Maegan had already been living in New York for a year and was armed with loads of advice. I was relieved. I was worried that everyone was going to be too cool for school, but she was so nice. I could already see us becoming good friends.
A few hours later, the four of us crammed into a beat-up gypsy cab and rode down to Coney. I had never used a car service before and felt so fancy! Sure, the guy had twelve tiny pine tree air fresheners hanging from his rearview, and I was sitting on someone’s leftover pizza crust, but it wasn’t a boring old yellow taxi. After twenty minutes in the car, we were dropped off in front of a Nathan’s hot dogs. Stepping out of that old Crown Victoria, I (naturally) immediately stepped in dog shit, but I felt like ScarJo being dropped off at the Oscars.
We got to the venue just as the sun was setting. With the pink sky, ocean, and old amusement park rides behind the stage, I couldn’t believe I was finally here. It was the perfect backdrop to start this new chapter of my life. I felt like this moment called for a cheers.
“I’m gonna go grab a drink—you want anything?” I asked Kat as she puffed on a one hitter painted to look like a cigarette.
“Beers are going to be, like, twenty bucks. I came prepared.” She reached into her huge purse and pulled out, no lie, an entire carton of orange juice. “It’s half OJ, half tequila.” How she got that past security, I have no idea. Her bag was like Mary Poppins’s for hot messes. Mary Pill Poppins.*
I started to tell her that I’m just one of those people who can’t drink tequila, but I stopped myself. I had three hundred dollars to my name and no job. If someone was offering me a way to get drunk, I needed to take it.
I took a big gulp from the carton, already planning a lie about having diabetes if a security guard approached us. I had no problem breaking out the fake seizure from my high school production of Steel Magnolias. It always worked when I wanted to get a free glass of juice at brunch. Once the OJ-tequila combo hit my lips, I realized Kat was terrible at ratios.
“Jesus, I know he got away with murdering his wife and all, but what’s your problem with OJ?” I asked.
Before Kat could judge laugh at my hilarious joke, the music started and the massive crowd went nuts. Well, as nuts as you can for a group of thirty-five-year-olds about to listen to alternative noise rock.
For the next two hours, I helped Kat finish that carton. The sun set and we lost track of Maegan and her boyfriend, but Kat didn’t seem to be worried. The Pixies played songs about everything from Salvador Dalí to scuba diving. I mouthed along to the lyrics I didn’t know, Oprah-style. Seriously, if you never noticed this while Oprah was still on the air, do yourself a favor and find some old episodes. Lady Winfrey never knew the damn words to any of her guests’ songs. And I’m not just talking about when a new artist would come on who Oprah had to pretend to give a shit about. I’m talking when she would introduce Tina Turner singing “Proud Mary.” Tina would be tearing it up to this classic tune, and then when the camera panned to O, she would be mouthing, “Loud Harry keeps on yearning . . . and we’re bowling, bowling!” Oprah had her favorite things, and, well, that was my favorite thing of Oprah’s.
I got drunk enough to stop even trying to be into it and instead spied on all the thirtysomething hipsters trying to get fucked up while also balancing their new responsibilities. I took in a lot of conversations that went something like this:
Hey babe, if I take half of another Ecstasy, will I be normal around the sitter in three hours?
Yeah, babe. But just remember tomorrow morning we have Daphne’s couples baby yoga graduation and then Conner’s prohibition BBQ.
When the concert wrapped up, we found Maegan and Doug. I was pretty drunk at this point, but I could tell that Maegan wasn’t in the great mood that she’d been in on the ride here. Kat didn’t seem to care, though.
“We should all go into the city and do karaoke!” Kat said, pumping her fist.
I full-on squealed at this idea. I love—I love, love, love karaoke. I don’t care if I’m staying by myself in a Holiday Inn; if the hotel bar has karaoke, I’m there. I will shamelessly sing “It’s Raining Men,” complete with jazz runs through the crowd to a roomful of strangers. If this was what life in New York was going to be like, I was going to be kara-okay with it.
“I think we are going to sit this one out,” Maegan said. “But y’all have fun.”
I was sad she wasn’t coming, but I could tell something was off. Maybe she and her boyfriend were fighting. I gave her a big hug. “Thank you for being hospitable,” I slurred in her face, literally spitting on the spit part of the word.
And with that, Kat and I started our vocal warm-ups and headed to the train. Now, a train all the way from Coney Island to the East Village can take anywhere from forty-five minutes to seven days. To pass the time, I pretended to pole dance on the train poles, which is a total rookie move. You can always tell tourists in New York by three things: (1) they are standing in front of the Empire State Building trying to decide if Earlybird or Valencia is a better filter for their Instagram; (2) they think it’s worth it to wait in an hour-long line for Magnolia Bakery cupcakes; and (3) they think they are the first people to pretend the poles on subway trains are stripper poles. Kat beatboxed as I put on my best sultry face and swung around, complete
ly falling on my ass.
Later that year I would try pole dancing again, and the results would be even more embarrassing. I know we have karaoke to get to, but this is worth a tangent, trust me.
A friend of mine from college, Sean, had taken a job producing one of those terrible “We’ve Got Three Dozen Kids” shows as soon as we’d graduated. Although being surrounded by an army of Christian values and perms left over from ’94 sounded like hell, he was making a serious paycheck nine months out of college, while I still considered a fine meal wandering around Whole Foods stuffing my face with free samples. He came to visit New York one night and was ready to spend some of that hard-earned Christian scrilla. He had been kind of a nerd in college, so I knew he was going to be peacocking.
I met a very drunk Sean at a bar in the East Village, along with a few of his friends whom I didn’t know, but they seemed nice. We drank a ridiculous amount of champagne, vodka, and whatever else we could form the words to order. After several hours of imbibing, Sean got an idea to keep the party moving.
“Let’s go to the strip club. I’ll buy everyone lap dances.”
Brilliant idea! Look at me, chugging champagne and getting lap dances paid for on a random Monday night. I am the white female P. Diddy! I thought to myself. I was two seconds from starting my own clothing line (instead of Sean John, it would be called On the John), feeling completely pimp. Until then, I’d only “made it rain” with IOU slips. I felt like my baller status was at an all-time high—that is, until we arrived at the actual strip club around three a.m.
Sapphire, conveniently located under the Queensboro Bridge, was the saddest thing I had seen since I caught my high school history teacher crying by himself during Titanic as I waited to sweep the theater. I had expected to roll into a place with crazy lights and lots of bass pumping through the speakers—basically, I was expecting a live Rihanna video. Instead, we walked into a room where one dude was getting a subpar lap dance as eight other strippers counted down the minutes until they could go home. It was clear to me why they had named this place Sapphire, because it was making me blue.
We took our seats in this den of sadness, and you could almost hear the collective groan from the strippers in the back. I couldn’t blame them. I myself have never worked as an exotic dancer, but I have worked in many restaurants; and when you are just about to close and a party of ten rolls in, it fuckin’ sucks. That leftover pizza in your fridge and DVR’d Say Yes to the Dress are gonna have to wait, because you’re stuck for another two hours. I think I even mouthed, “I’m sorry,” to the really tired-looking ones as we walked to find a table. It wasn’t so much finding a table as deciding which one to take in this completely empty strip club.
I went to the bathroom to give myself a wasted-face pep talk. This usually involved a lot of slurring, “You got dis, bitch,” into the mirror and a lot of emphatic hand gestures. (Note to self: Always check to make sure someone isn’t trying to take a dump in one of the stalls as you are screaming, “Shut up, you’re beautiful!” to yourself.)
I had gotten to the point in my pep talk where I almost aggressively fist-bumped my reflection (before remembering it was a mirror and that would severely hurt me) when one of the exhausted strippers walked in. I curtsied and went back to the table. When I got there, I found the only other girl in the group sitting by herself.
“Where is everybody?”
“They ditched us girls to go get private dances. Sean left us his credit card to get drinks, though.”
The music must’ve been super loud, because all I heard was, “Sean said to do a bunch of Patrón shots and pop a bottle of Moët and Chandon,” which is exactly what we did. Just two women who had never met, sitting in a flypaper of a strip club at closing time on a Monday, taking shots and putting money in thongs as we talked to the strippers. And not to knock these ladies, but they really weren’t working it. This wasn’t the type of place where someone could argue, “She holds up her own body weight upside down, then does eight spins. This isn’t just stripping; it’s athleticism!” Or a place like the one in Flashdance, where your artistic expression is just as valued as your ta-tas. The closest these women came to artistic expression was the “in memory of” tattoos on their shoulder blades.* Their dance moves made them look like C-3PO in drag.
The few times I’ve been to strip clubs, I’ve sat there and tried to enjoy myself even though I really would rather have asked the strippers about their young sons’ reading levels or told them why they should go back to cosmetology school. But I couldn’t just sit back and watch this sad display at Sapphire. I was the white female P. Diddy, after all! I wasn’t going to have my ticket punched on the lame train. It was time to board the Hot Mess Express. So, I took matters into my own hands.
Before you could say “terrible decision,” I climbed up onstage and was knocking on the window of the DJ booth. I slurred to the DJ to play “Poison,” by Bell Biv DeVoe, one of the all-time greatest songs in history.
The beat dropped and so did all of my inhibitions. I started owning that stage. I’m talking medium-level kicks, almost-splits—all of my signature moves. At this point the strippers had sat down and were watching me. The poor girl I was there with appeared to be awkwardly clapping, though she might’ve just been trying to swat gnats away from our Moët. I waited for the chorus to kick in as I slowly sauntered to the pole.
At the sound of “That girl is poisooooon,” I started spinning on the pole. And as soon as I did, my right contact lens went flying out of my eye. Mind you, I am legally blind, so I can’t see shit without contacts, let alone spin around and do tricks. So there I was, on all fours on Sapphire’s stage, looking for a contact. Just as I found the thing and held it up in triumph, one of the dancers grabbed the contact and threw it as hard as she could,* like a grenade about to detonate. She looked me square in the good eye and said, “Honey, unless you want some random coochie juice in your eyeball, you gotta let that thing go.” I can’t thank you enough for that advice, Cinnamon. I really hope she went back and got her final perm credits.
Worth the diversion, right? Okay, back to the scene with Kat! There I was, lying on the floor of a subway car in the same spot a homeless man had probably masturbated to an Archie comic. But at least I had both contacts in. My vision was only obscured by that half bottle of tequila. My eyesight was 20/90-proof.
During our trip, Kat and I reminisced about our summer at camp together.
“Remember that time you drank absinthe at Chrissie’s lake house and refused to take off that bonnet all night?”
“Oh God,” I slurred, “don’t remind me. I have so many pictures of me looking like Little House on the Scary. Change of subject. What the hell have you been up to since you got here?”
Turns out that despite her current habit of drinking tequila out of a Tropicana carton, Kat seemed to have her shit together. Her friend had gotten her a job at a recording studio, and she was full of weird celebrity-interaction stories.* Once we hit our stop, we chucked the empty OJ carton in the trash and stumbled into the karaoke bar. Kat beelined to the bar and gave the bartender a smooch on the cheek. She waved to a few other people in the bar and headed back our way with martinis. “These were on the house,” she said, winking. Dayum! I thought to myself. Kat had covered some ground in the past month.
As they usually do after half a fifth of tequila and martinis, the night got blurry from there. I remember a lot of sweaty dancing, doing sake bombs with some Japanese businessmen, and telling a guy he was attractive in a Bob Ross kind of way.
One thing I do remember perfectly clear is when I finally got my name called to sing. Well, not my name, exactly. They called out the name Chauncy, which is my karaoke stage name. Look, when you rock the mic as hard as I do, you need a little obscurity.
I chose the song “Kiss,” by Prince, and went full-force with it, telling the group of sake bombers that they didn’t need to be beautiful t
o turn me on. I pointed at Bob Ross to let him know there wasn’t a particular sign I was more compatible with. When the last lyric flashed across the screen, I sold it. “I just want your extra time and your”—I shook my ass so hard on that guitar riff, then jumped up and landed in a split—“kiss!”
I assumed it was followed by a WELCOME TO NYC, MAMRIE! banner dropping from the rafters and the businessmen hoisting me up on their shoulders as people clamored to shake my hand, but I can’t be too sure. Why, you ask? Because I blacked da fuck out.
To this day, I have no idea how we got back to Maegan’s place. All I know is that I woke up with Andy Capp’s Hot Fries in my hair, and it felt like there was a Vine of Mariah Carey hitting her highest note on a loop in my brain. I thought I was alone, but then I heard Maegan and Kat in the bedroom talking tensely. I could tell they were trying to keep it down, but French doors don’t really lock in sound like they used to. After I unsuccessfully tried to eavesdrop, Maegan came out, looking totally put together. She had on another awesome vintage rocker tee covered with a blazer. I was still in my Kenny Rogers shirt and . . . yep, no pants.
“Sounds like you guys had fun last night!” she said, smiling. Kat, not saying anything, walked to the bathroom and started the shower. As awkward as I felt about the situation, I had just spent thousands on a theater degree and I was going to act cool about it, dammit. My first NYC acting gig!
“Totally! Thanks for—” I stopped myself, slapping my hand over my mouth. Something felt different. I swirled my tongue around my mouth faster than Joey Newman did at the Christmas dance in seventh grade. It was then that I realized what had happened.
“Holy. Shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“No, no, no, no, no.” I grabbed a compact out of my purse and smiled into my reflection. “I chipped my front tooth last night! I fucking chipped my tooth.”
I must’ve hit myself with the mic when I went for the split. To be honest, it wasn’t that noticeable to the eye, but it felt like such a difference in my mouth. I couldn’t stop running my tongue over it. It was like when you finally get your braces off and your teeth feel like glass, or like a hockey rink freshly slicked by a Zamboni.