Somebody to Love?

by Grace Slick

  Still, Palo Alto was interesting enough—not exactly Barnum and Bailey, but for a ten-year-old, it was at least accommodating. Unlike in hilly San Francisco, the roads here were flat and you could ride a bicycle all day and not get tired. And was it peaceful. For the first time, I could pretty much go anywhere I wanted and my mother didn't have to worry.

  I was rarely alone, though. I met two girls several days after we moved in who would be my pals for the next couple of years. They were into a more athletic style of play than I ordinarily favored, but since neither suggested going to a museum and I wanted to have friends, I took up handstands, cartwheels, hide and seek, swimming, and roller skating. Unconsciously, I was beginning to learn about social groups and the hierarchies that inevitably sprung from them. There were the cool guys and the nerds, and I quickly realized that I was going to have to shed the nerd cocoon if I wanted to be part of the pack.

  It was time to start letting go of individuality. Lose the art books, get into Marvel Man comics, take off the saddle shoes and get some flats, never mind Chopin, check out Chuck Berry, adults are a drag, kids rule. Are you too fat? Is your hair the right style? Here it comes: the big teenage mold. The big question was: DO I FIT IN?

  And then there were boys. In 1950, when I was ten, Jerry Slick, one of my neighbors, was in my sixth-grade class. I thought he was a dufus with his round face and glasses, but then, in 1961, I married him.

  So much for the judgments of a ten-year-old.

  Now Red Hendricks—he was another story. He was cool and dangerous, a member of the “fighting Irish,” with a knocked-out front tooth, a greased-up fifties pompadour, and a heavy attitude under a black leather jacket. Too bad I was a fat dufus myself. He wasn't interested.

  Fat blonde doing a Sharon Stone exhibition: me at nine. (Ivan Wing)

  I remember another kid, named Ricky Belli (his dad was Melvin Belli, one of San Francisco's flashiest lawyers), who lived down the street. He and my friend Susan used to make out in his garage. Did they go all the way? She said no, he said yes. But no one pulled me into any garage fun. There were no debates about whether I had gone all the way. No one raced after me when the kissing games began.

  Something was wrong with my picture: braces and fat, for starters.

  I arrived on the first day of class at Jordan Junior High School, wearing the wrong clothes and the wrong hairdo, with the wrong binder and a complete lack of teenage skills. But I did notice the girl with the blonde hair, big smile, big boobs, long legs, and cool outfit. She's the one, I thought. It was Darlene Ermacoff. I knew she'd graduated from one of the other grammar schools closer to the center of town, where the kids were more sophisticated. Her boyfriend, Johnny Schwartz, was good-looking, dark haired, and slender with a great smile, and his father, “Marchie” Schwartz, was the Stanford football coach. When I watched Darlene and Johnny strolling by, I knew I was looking at high school royalty—the king and queen of the prom. So I got the clothes, the shoes, the binder, and the hang of the way to talk. And since I was blonde, I figured as soon as puberty kicked in, Darlene and I would be neck and neck in the Barbie doll marathon.

  But something went wrong. At thirteen years old, my hair turned fuzzy dark brown, the large boobs never materialized, and after the weight dropped off, I was nothing more than a skinny, sarcastic, dark-haired basketball cheerleader. What I didn't appreciate at the time was the wonderful workout a woman's imagination gets when she can't rely on her looks to make it all happen. She has to be ready for contingencies, and she knows that any acceptance she does get is a compliment to her creative ability, not her genetic code.

  Smiling through the transition: me at thirteen. (Ivan Wing)

  But that “silver lining” didn't mean shit in high school.

  Darlene was one of those girls who had it all: good code, good humor, and a good mind. We became friends, anyway, and a couple of months ago when she was staying at my house for a few days, I asked her why she'd stooped to hang out with my nerdy self. We were laughing about the phases, the years, the mistakes, the boys/men, the death-defying drug use, the whole diary, and she said she'd thought that I was the pretty one, the clever one, and so forth. If only I'd known that in 1952. I don't remember feeling like a total loss back then, but until I was about twenty-four and saw myself as a social steamroller, there was always this intangible next step that needed to be taken to feel like I had the situation locked.

  A step I could never quite manage.

  So having become at least a second-string member of the ruling social class at junior high, I let the family flag of sarcasm fly in all directions. I figured my mouth was all I had, that my sarcasm was my way in with the popular girls. And everything seemed to be going relatively well, until the night of my fourteenth birthday. I was at home, celebrating with my family, when my girlfriends called me up. I ran to the phone excited, figuring they wanted to wish me a happy birthday. Instead, they told me that my lack of consideration for other people's feelings—aka sarcasm—had led them to the decision to drop me from the group.

  No friends?

  Tears. My mother had a diamond ring I'd always loved, and when she saw my sadness, she gave me the ring in an attempt to snap me out of it. Diamonds as a substitute for friends? The ring did nothing to cheer me up, and I realized that this bauble I'd coveted for so many years was now nothing more than metal and minerals.

  Did I learn anything from the experience? Not really. People are only occasionally more important than metal, minerals, black humor, and cars.

  Stubborn.

  8

  Blue Balls

  Nineteen fifty-five. I was a fifteen-year-old sophomore at Palo Alto Senior High School, and I joined a girls' club to get in the swing of things. On initiation day, I was blind-folded by the other girls and told to take my blouse off and put it on backward. Oh, shit, they'll see the Kleenex stuffed in my bra. But nobody said anything. Were they too polite or was the bra too dense to see through? I'll never know.

  Girl-ask-boy dance. Okay. I went straight to the top by asking the school's star quarterback to be my date. He was older and he didn't know who the hell I was, but he said yes. Polite, I guess. I bought a pink, flower-covered, wedding cake-like monstrosity of a dress and went with Mr. Hotshot to a pre-dance party thrown by a senior cheerleader. She opened the door in a red, body-hugging floor-length number with four-inch dangling earrings, which made me look like an exploding cotton candy machine. After the evening, when I asked my mother what she thought of my “catch-of-the-century” date, she remarked, “He's not very bright, is he?”

  No, but were brains really the point?

  I was a flat-chested fifteen-year-old sophomore trying to impress myself and my friends by pulling in the school jock. This was not about brain surgery. On a Friday night, a few hours before another dance, I ripped off a fifth of bourbon from my dad's basement stash, and my friend Judy and I polished off the whole bottle. She passed out; I thought I was Betty Grable and went to the party with a Catholic boy who smelled like fish. (That's all I can remember about him.) I sprayed perfume in my mouth so nobody would notice my breath, but of course, it didn't work. I danced like a puppet, thought I was Ginger Rogers, stayed up all night, and threw up all the next morning.

  Did I learn anything from the experience? Not really. I figured it was all in how you weighed it: how much fun you had balanced against how much you had to suffer through in the morning. I loved getting high, so I paid the price.

  You want a Rolls Royce? You gotta pay for it.

  During school breaks, we'd all pile into someone's car and go to a drive-in for burgers, gossip, and boy watching. I gravitated toward Judy Levitas. At age sixteen, Judy had her own car, and instead of going to public school like the rest of us, she went to Castilleja, a private school for girls. She wasn't as judgmental or as enslaved to teen peer-pressure rituals as most of the girls I knew, and I liked her easygoing way of looking at things. Judy, who had very understanding parents, often had a bunch of kids
over to her house on the weekends to party and swim in her pool. She gathered boys from Catholic school, boys from Palo Alto, boys from Stanford, and boys who'd dropped out of school to work on cars, along with girls from many different backgrounds and locations—a good mix.

  It was at one of Judy's parties that I met my first love, Alan McKenna, a Catholic school boy. He seemed to be holding court on the other side of the pool, and although I couldn't hear what he was saying, I guessed from all the giggling women around him that he had a personality to go with his good looks. When I got closer, his green eyes surrounded by thick dark eyelashes nailed me to the air. I was hooked and we became a steady couple.

  Alan and I used to do some serious necking, sprawled out on the backseat of my parents' brand-new 1955 Oldsmobile. He knew how to make me laugh and he inadvertently gave me my first string of orgasms, although not by penetration. In the missionary position, when he had his clothes on and got hard, his penis was in the perfect position to massage my clitoris, so with both of us fully dressed, I was getting off every time. But he was getting “blue balls.”

  “What,” I asked, “are blue balls?”

  He explained that a prolonged erection without release gets to be painful. Since none of the so-called nice girls went “all the way,” and for many of the Catholic guys, masturbation was considered a sin, there were a lot of Pope-restricted teenage boys running around with bad cases of blue balls. Now that might have produced a sufficiently large guilt trip to sway me into having some real sex—but I didn't go for it. In hindsight, screwing Alan McKenna, somebody I liked, would have been a better choice than the one I made. But I was dumb enough to do it the first time with somebody who didn't mean that much to me—when I was drunk.

  It was after Alan and I broke up. I'd switched to Castilleja private school because Judy Levitas went there, and I went to my graduation dance with a blond boy from Carmel. I generally liked my guys to be dark, smart, and dangerous (I still do), and David, who was healthy, blond, tan, and conservative, wasn't really my type. But he knew a friend of mine, so we double-dated for the graduation party, which was held at a local country club. At the end of the evening, we ripped off some clothes from the club's golf shop and then took off for David's place in Carmel. His parents were away, so after we loaded up with lots of liquor, we took off for different bedrooms with our respective partners. It turned out that each woman in the house (both my girlfriend and me) got poked that night for the first time.

  Fortunately, I never compared my future lovers to my first experience, which most people say is the most exciting, because I was too loaded to remember it, so essentially, it didn't exist. When I ran into David, the Carmel boy, a couple of years ago in a department store (he was selling furniture), I didn't even recognize him. People often spot me; because I was onstage for so many years, they feel like they know me. But I don't necessarily know them. So when I heard someone say my name, I just smiled politely.

  “Grace, you don't recognize me, do you?” he asked.

  No, I didn't, but I looked a little closer.

  “It's me. David.”

  When he said his name, I laughed because he looked as old and lumpy as I did. You get sort of used to looking at yourself in the mirror, but when you haven't seen someone for about thirty-five years, it's shocking. Like those computer gizmos that can automatically age your face, I sometimes get a time-warp feeling of racing mortality when I run into old friends.

  No reunion parties for Grace.

  9

  What to Do with a Finger Bowl

  In 1957, while I was at Castilleja High School, I met another one of those icon girls, Sue Good. She was a year ahead of me and was one of the main reasons I decided to go to Finch College in New York. Sue had the disciplined ballet-trained body, the ingratiating personality, the requisite blonde hair, and the good report cards. When I found out that Finch was her choice for higher learning, I thought it would probably be a good idea for me, too. I was still plodding behind the blonde Barbie dolls.

  The truth is that I didn't particularly want to go to college, but I did want to live in New York City for a while. Asking my parents for twenty thousand dollars to hang out and play in a city three thousand miles from home was a request that definitely wouldn't work, so I presented Finch as a more appropriate option. They went for it.

  Although it didn't bill itself as such, Finch was a finishing school for girls from wealthy or prominent families, who went there (if they didn't have the grades to get into Vassar) to learn the basics of how to get and keep a Yale or Harvard man. Not that I was interested in that. My freshman class was made up of women like Sandy Seagram (yup, the booze family), three or four Oklahoma oil heiresses, my roommate, whose father was an Estée Lauder CEO, Cece Shane, who was a rich girl from Beverly Hills, and several more up-and-coming socialite types.

  One of the first boys I dated in college was a Princeton boy, Andrew Mathison. No group of people is better at polite disdain and unwarranted contempt than the wealthy old East Coast WASPs. In fact, they're so proud of their lineage as the “earliest settlers,” they refuse to acknowledge that most of the Plymouth Rockers were actually a bunch of malcontents and thugs who sailed over here to escape ridicule and prison back in Europe. My mother was eligible for the DAR, because somebody or other in her bloodline had made the Mayflower boat trip. But she considered the DAR a pretentious group of effete snobs who didn't have the courage to go farther west than Connecticut.

  Ouch.

  Even in the face of that sound information, I managed to go out with Andrew, who came from one of those East Coast genetically incorrect blue-blood families. He was an intelligent boy with buckteeth and a good sense of humor, but I wasn't aware of his lofty ancestry until the seventies, when a woman who was doing some biographical material on me reported that his “people” refused to talk to her about our relationship. His family probably didn't want it known that their bucktoothed scion had banged a rock-and-roll slut. Buckteeth aren't bad in and of themselves, but why, with all that money, didn't his parents slap some braces on their rodent-toothed kid? I'm very grateful to my parents for having my teeth fixed. Otherwise, I would have been the poster child for my own song, “White Rabbit.”

  Jimmy Gaither, another Princeton boy whose parents had political and diplomatic affiliations and a fancy four-floor town house on the East Side, was Sue Good's boyfriend and, later, became her husband. The two of them, along with Andrew “Bugs Bunny” Mathison and I, went on a double date one time and made the mistake of staying out all night. No sex, no drugs, just some romping around in the snow in Central Park. But the Finch social police declared our nighttime activities to be a scandalous travesty of the “nice girl” code. They found it necessary to call a closed meeting of teachers and housemothers to vote on our possible expulsion from that immaculate school of etiquette. I still remember the hours of fear, awaiting their verdict.

  Thanks to Sue's cherubic persona, the faculty admonished us for our scandalous behavior, but we were allowed to stay in school so that we could continue the strenuous curriculum of studying the social graces. No pun intended. We learned things like:

  1. Which fork to use with which course in a seven-course meal. 101

  2. What to do with a finger bowl. Don't drink it. 102

  3. Sit properly, legs crossed at the ankle, never at the knee. 103

  4. Find out, in the most subtle manner possible, the extent of your escort's liquid assets. 104 (This was everyone's major.)

  Along with the above meaty courses, some English, history, and drama were thrown in so we could conduct ourselves properly at a formal dinner and string a couple of sentences together without making any glaring grammatical errors. And they wanted us to be able to speak to each other, hoping that we would develop those cherished and fondly remembered friendships that college life is so famous for. But today, I don't even know if any of those “fond friends” are alive or dead, except one person—Celeste Shane, better known as Cece.
/>   In the beginning of a school year, at an afternoon tea—they were big on high tea at Finch—the dorm housemothers gathered us all in the main hall so we could begin building those cherished relationships that would constitute fodder for old-age reminiscence. That was where I met Cece. You know how some people look irreverent even though they seem to be conducting themselves in a normal manner? Cece had that look. She also looked like the tanned, healthy, blonde Southern California girl that was on the cover of my imaginary “How to Do It Right” handbook. Having already been married once to Gene Shacove, the hairdresser on whom the movie Shampoo was based, Cece was one step ahead of most of us in the sophistication department.

  She and I hit it off because of our shared sardonic take on the upper-crusty, East Coast social scene that was heavily fortified at Finch. During a Scotch-and-tradition-soaked weekend at Princeton, Cece and I outraged the preppy boys by doing a spontaneous song-and-dance routine that we thought was a harmless bit of fun. They, on the other hand, thought it was completely “unbecoming” and asked us not to return to the campus in the future. The affronting performance consisted of Cece dancing by herself (fully clothed) in the middle of the room—are you shocked yet?—while I sat on the sidelines singing Chaucerian trash to my own guitar accompaniment.

  The offending song went as follows:

  I love my wife, yes I do, yes I do,

  I love her truly,

  I love the hole

  That she pisses through.

  I love her tits, tiddely-its, tiddely-its,

  And her nut-brown asshole,

  I'd eat her shit—chop, chop, gobble, gobble,

  With a wooden spoon.

  If one of their male college buddies had offered up that song, they would have just thought it was kind of stupid, but would they have asked him to leave and never come back?