† Years later, while doing laundry, we did find unusual things in the washer or dryer. There appeared more than once a giant pair of women’s underpants that could not possibly ever have belonged to either me or my mom, and another time, a man’s tie. At that time I still lived at home; it wasn’t like someone had been in the house and I hadn’t seen him or her.
portrait of the artist with a young epiphany
Even in high school I wanted to be a writer. By then it was 1970 and my mom, brother, and I were living in Newton, Massachusetts. My mom decided she had to get away from that town of Amherst, Massachusetts, one year after we got back from Israel. She wanted to be near her sister, who lived in a big house in Newton Highlands. My mom found us a one-year sublet—the walk-up apartment of a widowed rabbi who had taken his own family to Israel for a year. It was a pretty bleak place, especially if you have been in the country most of your life. I had been used to the country and was not particularly happy in an urban environment. Newton Center was a grim, built-up area of small shops and apartments.
We survived in near poverty. Although my aunt and uncle had told my mother, after the divorce, that she should return to being a dietician (which is what she had been until she got pregnant with me, when she got fired, which is what happened to women back then), Mom did not want to. Even if she had wanted, she would have had to go back to school to be recertified.
She had already gone back to school and gotten an M.F.A. in poetry. It was a grant from the Radcliffe Institute that partially paid for our time in Israel. But unsurprisingly, jobs for poets were hard to find. She taught courses here and there in community colleges and high schools, which paid almost nothing, so she was forced to eke out an existence for three on the six grand we got from Dad. She had moved here to be near her sister, but her sister never called or called back or came over.
We never ate out or bought new clothes or went to the movies. Our special treat was buying books with the covers ripped off, for sale at the drugstore. Sometimes there was enough money to get a pound of hamburger meat. Then, using a little press with a lid, we divided the pound of meat into thirds, so that no one got more or less.
It was hard to visit Dad in his huge house with his freezer full of gourmet ice cream and his stereo system and dishwasher and indoor grill, his atrium and indoor fountain and floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace. Mom had to drive us halfway, then wait in the car, since he was invariably late. From our place in Newton to Dad’s house was a three-hour ride each way, and at his house you worked. Vacuuming, mopping, preparing meals, clearing the table, gardening, clearing pathways. We always operated under a low (or high) level of rage; one never could do a job right or do enough to earn one’s keep or behave in a way Dad liked. One summer I said I wanted to take a course in etymology at U. Mass, and Dad said I could live with him and study. When I got there it turned out he planned for me to pay for summer school myself.
I was fifteen and had neither a job connection nor a mode of transportation to get to a job, but Dad found an ad in the paper for jobs in a nightclub that was a former Quonset hut. He drove me there and left. I applied for a job as “hostess,” which of course I did not get. That’s when Dad suggested I enter the wet T-shirt contest, but I was stubborn and fractious even then.
Without the funding to go to summer school, I returned to Newton and my mother’s house. I got a job folding shirts at a discount store in a strip mall. At least there was bus service, albeit erratic.
Initially, the rabbi from whom we were now renting might have been some kind of romantic setup with Mom; I’m not sure. But they met and he took off, leaving some stuff behind in his apartment we now occupied. One day I opened a box. “Ma, what is this?” I asked.
“Oh!” said my mom, who had been brought up as an Orthodox Jew. “Those are the rabbi’s phylacteries. His tefillin. Just shut the box and I’ll put it away.” She was upset that I had found these items. This scared me a great deal. I did not know what phylacteries were, but just the sound of it made me realize I had done something wrong. I had opened a box of phylacteries! What the hell were they? To a modern kid you could probably say, “Those are sex toys!” and that kid wouldn’t even blanch.
Like I keep saying, though, things were different then. I was maybe fourteen, fifteen, I don’t know. Sometime after we moved in, I got—found, acquired, was given—paper panels from a billboard, new, that had never been hung. Each panel was huge. And I unfolded them, one by one, and pinned them on the living room wall. When they were installed they made a picture, a portion of this giant billboard that would have been, I don’t know, five stories high on the highway. So now, one end of this living room was taken over by a huge photograph: ONE GIGANTIC EYE. The room of this dreary apartment did not look any better, but it was unusual. That living room now appeared even smaller, covered with part of a billboard of an eye at one end. Design-wise, it didn’t really work, but that was my mother, who always let me do whatever I wanted. It was encouraging that I didn’t have to follow rules.
Downstairs, there were two doorbells. One was for the downstairs half of the house, the other was for this rabbi’s apartment. And I got a little can of red paint and I painted the button of each doorbell. They were matching doorbells, and now they had red nipples.
I’m sure those neighbors didn’t like it, but they weren’t Jewish and I doubt they had a way to reach the widowed rabbi in Israel. Anyway, what could they have said? “Your tenant’s daughter painted the doorbells so now they look like nipples”?
They themselves were pretty rough, anyway; this was not a fine area of Newton, Massachusetts. This was for the people who lived in houses that got turned into apartments. The daughter who was my age spray-painted her name at the bus stop, and this was a long time before graffiti was in art galleries. Back then people who tagged were considered mentally ill or juvenile delinquents.
Ten years later, in New York City, spray-painting became a career choice, but 1970 was the year that the book Love Story by Erich Segal was published. That early graffiti tagger was reading it. One night I was downstairs there, and I read it, too. I thought it was a bad book, but I also thought Catcher in the Rye was stupid. (How much longer is that book going to remain an American classic, with that pretentious, obnoxious little prick Holden Caulfield dictating some odd version of honesty?) But now I would give anything to have written Love Story. Just saying.
The school I went to in Newton was part of a regular public school, but it was separate. It was an experimental school. You were supposed to teach yourself.
Some parts of the experimental concept worked. Not for stuff like math, though, or foreign languages, or science—so basically I missed ninth grade. I had already missed seventh, living in Israel, when I hardly went at all. At Weeks Junior High School—I forget the name of the experimental program—you didn’t go to school at all one day a week but were supposed to work at a job that day. It could be volunteer or otherwise.
I found a volunteer job at the zoo, and spent a lot of time shoveling manure and other things. One day, the elephant keeper asked me to watch the baby elephant while she took a lunch break. She handed me a whole bunch of tiny bottles of Johnson’s baby oil, the tiny travel-size ones, and told me to give the baby elephant a rubdown. Then she left.
This elephant was young, but already weighed hundreds of pounds and was as tall as me. The skin of the elephant was dry, thick, and bristly. It was in a big round pen and there was a crowd watching. I entered the round pen with the baby elephant. It was a hot day, and I was dressed only in shorts and a tank top. The elephant was naked.
I poured oil on the elephant. Now it was no longer dry but slippery, being massaged by a semi-naked fourteen-year-old. In the sun it was hot. Soon I was covered in oil, too.
The crowd watched with interest, growing in size.
Suddenly the three-hundred-pound baby elephant grinned, backed up, and came at me. It ran into me, slamming me full force with the top of its hot, heavily greased trunk.
Already slinky from spilled baby oil, punched in the stomach at full force, I was thrown up in the air and back, sending me down in front of the audience, which was now howling with laughter.
The wind was knocked out of me. So was any pride I had at being in charge of the baby elephant. I lay flat on my back for a few minutes before I scuttled out of the pen and staggered off.
mom becomes a boardinghouse landlady
How would we survive? Mom wasn’t earning any money and Dad was giving us hardly any.
The rabbi was due to return, so we needed a new place to live. My mother answered an ad for a job as a landlady for a house owned by some people in Lexington, Massachusetts. Now retired, the couple who owned the place were joining the Peace Corps, heading to Sierra Leone and leaving behind their dog and their youngest son, who had not yet moved out, along with a bunch of tenants renting rooms in the back half of the house. We moved in before the couple went on their adventure, so they could show us the ropes.
It was a big ramshackle Victorian house in a fancy town. The tenants kept to themselves, except for the owners’ son, in his early twenties, who took all his food to his room, where he saved it under the bed. He only came downstairs to clean his guns and rifles at the kitchen table.
Then there was the neighbor. She had been having an affair—for twenty years—with the man who had gone away to Sierra Leone with his wife. Now lonesome for her boyfriend, and irritated by her own husband, she liked to come over, unannounced, especially when her son returned to live with them, bringing his team of sled dogs.
One day my mom made a very fancy lasagna and left it on the counter. When she came back, it appeared to have been elegantly sliced down the middle. The whole front half was gone. There were various people under suspicion. First was the rifle-cleaning son, who left chicken bones under his bed, followed by the neighbor, who we believed suspected my mom of having an affair with the man who had gone to Sierra Leone with his wife (she wasn’t).
Our paranoia grew until one day when we came into the kitchen we discovered that the house dog (we were also looking after him for the year) was able to reach high enough to devour food left on the counter, depending on how close to the edge it was positioned. In a sense this was a bit of a disappointment. Nobody wants to have their paranoia shoved down their throat, not when you can blame a neighbor for sneaking in and eating half your casserole.
The dog’s name was Brahms and he was a semi-poodle. He was an early evolutionary prototype of a labradoodle or a goldendoodle, before these hybrids existed, and because of his early stage on the evolutionary scale, he felt no shame about leaning over onto the counter. I am sure later hybrids had more brains, or else this breed would not have survived. But it was too late: once various suspicions have been raised, the enemy is out there.
The couple wasn’t going to come back for another year, but my mom hired a new boardinghouse landlord and we moved.
This time it was to a tiny ranch house, still in Lexington, but very much on the wrong side of the highway. Lexington was important to my mother: it was known for its good school system; also, anywhere else was far too expensive for us. She sold the prefab in Amherst and the money got us this place, with a tiny fenced-in front yard and a massive herd of rats occupying the backyard, built on the edge of the highway next to a chemical-scented swamp.
Still, for once, I got to go to the same school for two years. In tenth grade I found a loophole: if I took one specific course, something like American History, I would be allowed to graduate at the end of eleventh grade.
And what did we do in that crummy house for my last year at home, when I was in eleventh grade? Sometimes my mom would drive me and my brother a couple of hours away to a meeting point in a parking lot where my dad would pick us up and take us back to his beautiful home, where there was heat and hot water and we would work for the weekend for food. Or he would get my brother up on the roof there, which was flat, to plant and harvest marijuana. Marijuana was very illegal then and was a big crime to smoke. To grow it was even worse.
Then, after the weekend, we were back with my mom. She was teaching whenever and wherever she could: adult-education classes in poetry at community colleges, or in high schools that had enough money for one “extra” arts class.
When she was out of work, which was often, I would go with her to wait on the unemployment line. It was the time when all the steelworkers were out of work, so that made for an interesting time. The steelworkers were huge, muscular men weighing hundreds of pounds, kindly and tough and from another planet—the planet that we were trying to escape. That planet represented the working class. Now, I am old. I am educated. I have met rich people, including socialites and aristocrats with titles. I am happy with the working class. I do not need to escape their company. Then, however, at fifteen years old, I was in search of upward mobility, though I did not understand it at that time.
At home, what did my mom and I do? At night, at the table, eating tuna fish sandwiches, we read. We read anything and everything. We had stacks of books from the library; we had used books from sales; we had those books you could buy at the drugstore for twenty-five cents apiece missing their covers that came with the threat: DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK IF THE COVER IS MISSING.
Now I don’t remember what we read back then. But these are some of my favorite books: Alice in Wonderland, Papillon, Robinson Crusoe, New Grub Street by George Gissing, Down and Out in London and Paris, and Down Among the Women by Fay Weldon. Larry McMurtry. Jean Rhys. Tracks by Robyn Davidson. Memoirs by guys who joined the Foreign Legion.
Anybody who’s a loser, an idiot, a victim, or engaged in a basic struggle for survival: I’m there. When I read a book I just want a bunch of interesting stuff to happen, adventure-wise, like In Cold Blood, without too much musing and thinking and philosophizing.
I don’t want a moment of epiphany. I want to go someplace worse, different, more interesting than where I am. So when I stop reading, I can feel good, even if I’m in a cramped economy seat on an overnight flight, or in a filthy kitchen where I should be doing dishes.
london in 1976
I “studied” in London for my junior year of college, from 1975 to 1976. I found a program at Goldsmiths’ College, which at that time was not a fancy art school but a teacher-training program. It was the first year the college was trying to attract American kids to study there, so they made a catalog that looked like an American university catalog, offering classes like “The History of England through Furniture, M–W 10–12.” But when you got to the class it turned out that it was a group of guys who were learning to make furniture and that day they had gone off at 9 A.M. to visit the chair factory and wouldn’t be back until five. Stuff like that.
I had fun, though. One day I was hanging around the Tate Gallery and some guy and his friend started following me. The guy looked kind of like Andy Warhol and it turned out he was from Neptune, New Jersey, and he invited me to his flat for dinner with his wife. She was a stripper in a pub at lunchtime and she encouraged me to work as a stripper there, too. She said the clientele, primarily lorry drivers, was always glad to have new bosoms to look at.
I said my breasts were quite small but she said it didn’t matter. I asked what the pay would be and she said four pounds—I think—for a two-hour shift, and that did not seem like very much money to me, and in addition I still did not want to dance half-naked in front of truck drivers, despite my dad’s wish years earlier.
This couple said that for fun we would play strip Monopoly before dessert was served, but I would not have to take my clothes off. So when I lost the round Lyn presented me with a long evening gown to wear, but it did not fit very well at the top.
Then Ted lost his turn and Lyn made him unzip his flies (I don’t know why it’s plural in the UK) and serve dessert with his penis hanging out.
Then they said it was time to go to the party. This party was quite far by the tube and it was in the loft of a man named Andrew Logan. He lived
in an old factory that was full of all the items from the department store Biba, the incarnation after the one I had first gone to in 1969. It had reopened as a splendid department store with a roof garden. But I missed it.
Andrew Logan had things like giant gold palm trees made out of stuffed fabric and plastic hamburgers. Lots of great items from that store were now in this guy’s loft.
Nobody was living in a loft then. His was in some odd old factory, way the heck in the middle of nowhere. Later it burned down. I didn’t even know who he was or what he did. He reminded me of the Mad Hatter, with a reedy nose, long face, quite manic—he was friendly as I admired all the magical items.
At about one o’clock the Sex Pistols played. I think it was the second time they had ever performed. They were bad.* They knew about three chords, I guess—I didn’t know anything about music, but basically if you handed me a guitar and told me to strum it, that’s what it would have sounded like. Nor did there seem to be any tune, melody, song, or lyrics. Was it a joke? The crowd of partygoers gathered in front of the mini-stage to watch.
One girl named Jordan wore a rubber dress that had fake fur under the armpits, and there was a man in a beautifully made suit in powder blue with large white polka dots. Later, maybe eight years later, in the clubs in New York City you would see great outfits like these, but not at the time. These were forerunners. I said to the man in the bespoke polka dot suit, “This band is terrible!”
“I know,” he shouted. “But they’re so bad they are certain to be famous!”
It hurt my ears, and I left the room scowling, and I sat in an overstuffed chair scowling. I was not having any fun. Then, because I was scowling, a lot of photographers came out and started taking my picture. I represented “punk,” which was just starting.
Then the group came out on their break after three “songs.” It was just me and them in this little area off the kitchen. They were very young. They had a lot of pimples. It was their “photo shoot.” I was still sitting. They stood sheepish and pimpled. “All right then,” one photographer said. “Can you just go around behind her, kind of in a horseshoe behind the chair?”
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