A Lotus Grows in the Mud

by Goldie Hawn

  When the song’s over, Spiro grabs me by the hand and leads me to the bar. “Come on, let’s get a drink.” A tall, handsome guy in his early twenties nudges between us. “Hey, Johnny, this is Goldie…Goldie, this is a friend of mine.”

  “Hi, nice to meet you,” I yell over the crowd.

  The bartender plops down two scotches, and Johnny throws down a twenty. “I’m buying,” he says. “And another round, please.”

  “We’re having a party now!” I cry.

  It’s four in the morning and the place is closing up. As usual, I am always the last one to leave. “Hey, guys, need a lift?” Johnny says.

  “You have a car? In New York City? Cool!”

  “Sure.” He laughs. “I’m from Jersey. Of course I have a car!”

  “Hang on Sloopy” by the McCoys is blasting out of the car radio when Johnny turns on the engine. I sit on the front seat, sandwiched happily between him and Spiro, two male gods. As we set off the streets are empty except for a few yellow taxis cruising for the last stragglers of the night.

  Johnny has what my mother would call “a heavy foot.” I’m feeling foggy, but not so foggy that I don’t notice that we are reaching speeds of up to sixty miles an hour between stoplights.

  Our car bumps and swerves, tossed in and out of the potholes as I bounce around in time to the music. The warm air from the open window tousles my hair. Happy and relaxed, mellowed by the scotch warming my veins, God, I feel good as I sing along at the top of my voice to the chorus of “Hang on Sloopy.”

  We turn onto the West Side Highway, the fast way uptown. This road is even more pitted, and it curves this way and that. I’m tossed like a rag doll between them.

  The car hits one pothole so violently that my head bounces off the roof. The sharp pain jolts me. “Do we have to go quite so fast?” I ask, rubbing my head.

  Johnny doesn’t answer. I look across at him, but his eyes are glazed. A ripple of fear passes through me.

  “Hey, can you please slow down?” I snap the radio off so he can hear me. Gripping the dashboard with both hands, I yell, “Please! Slow down! You’re going too fast!”

  Johnny hardly slows at all, and I wonder if he’s drunk or stoned. I turn to look at Spiro to see if he is as frightened as I am and I can see that he is. Immediately behind us, just a few feet away, I see a yellow taxi heading straight for our car. The driver’s head is resting on the back of his seat. He is fast asleep, or worse.

  “Hey! Look out!” I cry.

  The cab crashes into us at top speed and shoves our car forward violently. Johnny is too out of it to respond. Locked against our fender, the cab pushes us off the side of the road at around fifty miles an hour.

  Seeing a lamppost rushing straight toward us through the windshield, I try to slide my body underneath the dashboard to protect myself. Covering my head with my hands, I let out a primal scream.

  “Watch out!”

  But it is too late.

  Is she alive? Can you feel a pulse?” someone is asking the stranger who is bending over my lifeless body, crumpled beneath the dashboard.

  “I dunno,” comes the worried reply.

  I’m floating weightlessly, observing everything from an elevated position, a few feet above his head. “Did somebody call an ambulance?”

  In my dreamlike state, I see an ambulance speeding its way down the highway toward us. I hear the siren and I see the pretty lights and I watch the people standing all around. Two paramedics rush from the back to attend to my injuries.

  “Is she dead?” one of them yells. “Feel her heart.”

  I watch, disinterested, as my favorite pink top is snipped clean down the middle.

  “She’s alive. Help me get her out of here,” his colleague replies.

  I’m witnessing all of this, but I am not in my body. I’m somewhere else—where, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s all just a dream. I can see Spiro and Johnny staggering around in a daze, blood pouring from cuts on their faces. I watch as the paramedics lift my body out of the cramped space under the dashboard. They lay me on a gurney with the greatest of care. As they slam the ambulance doors behind me, my world goes black.

  I’m going to throw up.”

  “Keep your head still!” a nurse barks from somewhere near my feet. A giant X-ray machine clicks and whirrs above me. “I’ve got to get pictures of your head. I’m almost done.”

  She forces my head left and right, without any tenderness. Maybe because she can smell the liquor on my breath, she’s as unforgiving as the cold table I’m lying on.

  “I’m going to be sick.”

  “Ah, you just have the dry heaves.”

  As she comes around to the side of my head, I vomit all over her.

  “Ah, shit!” she complains. Disgusted, she hands me a rough paper towel and hurries off to clean herself up.

  “Mommy!” I wail. “I want my mom.”

  I can’t seem to make sense of anything. I don’t even know where I am. Everything feels wrong—upside down. Suddenly, Spiro is at the door. His face is caked in dried blood, and his nose is broken. He’s clutching his left arm, which is in a sling.

  “Goldie?”

  “Uhhhh…”

  “Goldie, are you okay? I’m so happy to see you. I thought you were…well, never mind.” He flops onto a nearby chair, his skin waxy.

  “Spiro,” I ask groggily, “where are we? What happened?”

  “We’re in the hospital. We had an accident.” Standing shakily and walking to my side, he says through clenched teeth, shock vibrating his body, “Nobody can believe we walked out of that car alive. The doctor said we must have an angel watching over us.”

  I hurt too much to care.

  The school bell from across the street wakes me. My eyes flicker open. The sound of the bell reverberates inside my skull. I’m back in my little one-room apartment. How did I get here? Did the hospital send me home? I don’t remember. Sitting up, my head starts to spin. I realize I’m completely alone. Looking across at the telephone on the other side of the room, I stand to negotiate my way toward it. The room tilts around me, and I feel like I could vomit. But I put one foot in front of the other, and dial my mother’s number.

  “Mom? Mommy?”

  “Goldie? What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been in an automobile accident. I’m hurt bad, Mom. I need you.”

  My mother snaps to it. “Where are you?”

  “In my apartment.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The minute I hang up the phone, I rush to the bathroom and throw up.

  In no time at all, it seems, she appears at my door in her suit and little high-heeled pointy shoes. Without even going home, she closed up her store, grabbed her purse and jumped on a Greyhound bus to NewYork.

  “The policeman who saw the car after the crash said we must have had an angel looking out for us,” I tell her weakly, as she feeds me sweet lemon tea from a spoon. “He said no one should have survived.”

  “Yes, sweetheart, you do have an angel,” she says. “It is Tante Goldie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I never told you this,” my mother tells me, “but just after you were born in the hospital something extraordinary happened to me. I know that I wasn’t sleeping, I was wide awake, but I had a vision. Tante Goldie appeared to me out of thin air.”

  “Really?”

  “She sat on the edge of my bed, put her hand over mine, smiled and said, ‘I’m so glad you had a little girl and you named her Goldie. I’ll be watching over her.’ And then she disappeared.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes. Tante Goldie is your angel. She’s watching you.”

  Life and death live in the flicker of an eye, a flash in a cloud or a bubble in a stream. That’s how fragile they can be.

  Many years after this experience, I went to see a psychic in Thailand. He didn’t know who I was, and he didn’t speak a word of English; I had to use a translator. He sat in a ro
om that smelled of incense in a strange little café in the middle of Bangkok. He was a small man with a huge smile that never left his face. He drew illegible scribbles onto paper—strange geometric symbols that made no sense to me.

  He sat in silence for a long while, and then he suddenly spoke. “You almost died at the age of nineteen.” His interpreter carefully translated.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I replied cautiously, thankful that, to my mind, I’d never had any really close encounters with death.

  “Go back in time,” he instructed firmly, his doodling becoming ever more furious. “Something happened to you at nineteen. It must have. Think.”

  “Nineteen?” I said. “No, I don’t think so. I was still in New York then, wasn’t I?”

  “Were you in an accident?” he asked, his brown eyes piercing.

  “Oh, yes, of course I was,” I said, suddenly remembering. “I was in a car crash.”

  “Did you leave your body?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I thought I was dreaming, but, yeah…maybe I did,” I replied, goose bumps appearing on my skin. “How did you know that?”

  “Your life changed drastically after that, didn’t it?”

  I started thinking about it and nodded my head. “Yes, it did,” I said quietly, more afraid now.

  “That is because you were not supposed to die. You were sent back because you had something to do. You are here for a reason, and what happened to you then was supposed to happen to you.”

  A few minutes later, he shut the lids on his smiling eyes. The session was over. The interpreter told me it was time to go.

  I could barely stand and leave the room. I thanked him and staggered out into the bright white light of day, completely winded. The truth of how close I had come to dying, and how it was always supposed to happen, shook me to the core.

  “So, I have a purpose,” I whispered, repeating his words. “I was sent back for a reason? Hmm. I wonder if I’ll ever really know what that is.”

  Nobody ever loved a dog as much as I loved my little Lambchop, who accompanied me to California and helped me through my early troubled years of success. (Author’s Collection)

  trusting men

  The uncertainty that darkness brings can humble even the hardest soul.

  “Goldie? Is that Goldie? This is Max down at the Stage Deli. Your dad’s been on the telephone again. He said to call you and get you down here and eat some blintzes.”

  I laugh and climb out of bed, the phone still in my hand. “Okay, Max.” I giggle. “I’m on my way. Thanks, honey.”

  Gee, I love my dad. He seems to know just when to pick me up with a call to Max, or by sending twenty bucks in the mail. This is perfect, because the Stage Deli is around the corner from my new apartment and just down the street from Herman, my newfound go-go agent, whom I have to go and see today.

  I take a shower and throw on some jeans and a T-shirt. I run to the Stage Deli for coffee and blintzes. Stuffing my face, I sit there happily contemplating my new life away from Needle Park. I share a great apartment now with four roommates, all of them dancers, in a brand-new building on Eighth Avenue. It is right next to Jilly’s Bar, the hangout of Frank Sinatra and his friends, and just around the corner from Broadway. I feel one step closer to my dream just by living there.

  “Thanks, Max,” I say, kissing him on the cheek and grabbing my dance bag. Running from the deli, I skip up the three flights of stairs to Herman’s office and push open the door. Herman is a tall, dark, handsome showbiz agent, and he handles all kinds of third-class acts, everything from the Dancing Waters to the Catskills, and even an act with a singing dog.

  Slamming down the telephone and looking up at me, he smiles. “Hey, Goldie, looking good. Come on in and take a seat.”

  “Herman, you got anything for me?” I say hopefully. “I gotta pay my rent next week.”

  “No luck on Broadway, little girl?”

  “Almost…I auditioned for On a Clear Day and I got down to the last ten, but I was too short.”

  “Well, you’re not too short for me. Let me see what we got here.” Flicking through his Rolodex, he asks, “What about Dudes ’n’ Dolls?”

  “Herman, I’m working there already. Friday nights. And by the way, the pedestal is so high I get vertigo each time I go up there. Can’t you get me something closer to the ground?”

  “No problem, honey. Your wish is my command. We’ve always got the Entre Nous.”

  “Again? I already did the Entre Nous. I quit because the guy wanted me to have a drink with Huntington Hartford.”

  “You sure you don’t want to go topless?”

  “What, with these?” I laugh, pointing at the two fried eggs on my chest. “No, I don’t do topless, Herman. I’m a trained dancer.”

  “You could double your money,” he reminds me.

  “Top on,” I state flatly.

  “Okay, okay. How about modeling? I’m a friend of the woman who runs the Candy Jones modeling agency. You should maybe go and get some test shots done for hair commercials, because, you know what, Goldie, you got great hair.”

  “Yeah, great, Herman, thanks anyway, but I did that already.” I sigh, swallowing the memory. I went to that place after my car accident, you know, when I lost my job at the World’s Fair. The photographer invited me into the darkroom and attacked me. When I finally pushed him off, he told me I’d never make it anyway because I wasn’t pretty enough. “No,” I tell him. “No more test photographers…So, you don’t have anything for me, then?”

  “I dunno, kid,” he says, shuffling some papers on his desk. “Have you tried out for the Copacabana?”

  “Yes. I had to dance in a cage, but they fired me because I was too skinny. That was the night I got molested on a subway by those two guys on the way home and ended up asking a doctor who was on the train to walk off with me.”

  “Oh, poor kid.”

  “I know, I know. So, Herman, what do you have? Because all I’m doing at the moment apart from Dudes ’n’ Dolls is the supper theater out at Danbury, Connecticut, once a month. I go on between a comedian and a belly dancer.”

  “Have you ever danced at the Peppermint Box?”

  “The Peppermint Box?” I cry, sitting on the edge of my seat. “You mean in Midtown? I was there the night of my accident!”

  “Er, no, honey. That’s the Peppermint Lounge. The Peppermint Box is in Jersey.”

  “In Jersey? Oh, come on. How much does it pay?”

  “Thirty-five dollars; thirty for you and five for me.”

  “How am I going to get to Jersey for thirty dollars?”

  “You take the Greyhound bus. It stops right outside. It’s just across the river on Palisades Highway. And, I’ll tell you what. I’ll come and pick you up.”

  “You will?”

  “Sure. You’re my favorite go-go girl. Consider yourself booked.”

  I dash home and tip the contents of my dance bag out onto my bed. I sew up the holes in my fishnet stockings. Some of the gold fringe on my trusty go-go dress has come undone, so I spend the next day stitching it back onto the black leotard that comes up high over my hip bones. I double fringe the top of my leotard so it really shimmies. By the time I am done, I am starving. I am always hungry. I lick a spoonful of honey from the jar I carry with me wherever I go so that I can have a quick hit of energy.

  The following night, I take the Greyhound across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey. Befriending the driver, whose name is Sam, I ask him to let me know when to get off. Sitting right behind him, knitting some new leg warmers and chatting away, I try not to notice how bleak the area is getting.

  Just when we reach the middle of nowhere, in an area of industrial nothingness, Sam tells me, “Okay, Goldie, this is your stop!”

  Disappointment sucks the air from my body. The Peppermint Box is nothing more than a fifth-rate truck stop, slumped by the side of the road like Deidre the junkie. Eight eighteen-wheelers are parked right outside.

&nb
sp; As I lug my dance bag off the bus, I hear its doors slam shut behind me as Sam pulls it away. Too late to get back on.

  Pushing open the creaky door of the bar with its diamond window, I am hit by a wall of heat, cigarette smoke, sweat and stale beer. “That’s Amore” belts out of an old jukebox to my left. The room is dank and dirty, littered with chairs and tables. At the bar stand a few indifferent truckers, in denim and work boots, being served by a butch-looking woman who stares at me as if I have just landed from Mars.

  Hitching my dance bag high onto my shoulder, I approach the bar.

  “Excuse me, my name is Goldie,” I say.

  “And?” says the woman bartender.

  “The go-go dancer.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.”

  “I’d like to see the boss.”

  “Merv!” she yells at a thousand decibels. A fat, middle-aged man with a ruddy face and a cigarette stuck to his bottom lip staggers out from behind the bar.

  “The dancer’s here.”

  “Oh. Okay. This way.” He shuffles along in front of me, leading me into a back room. I look around nervously, wondering if I should just take off.

  I smell the bathrooms before I reach them. They haven’t been cleaned in years. “This is where you change,” he says, flinging open the peeling door. I stare at the brown-stained toilet bowl and almost retch.

  “In here?” I ask, piteously.

  “Unless you want to do it in full view of all the guys,” he smirks.

  Breathing through my mouth, trying not to look too closely at the walls, I wriggle as quickly as I can into my tights and outfit, making sure nothing accidentally touches the floor. Peeping through the door, I step out nervously in my spiked heels, fringed leotard and fishnet stockings. Only a couple of men even bother to look up from their beer.

  There is no stage and no clear space on the sticky floor to dance. Spotting the owner at one of the tables, a bottle of scotch and a smeared whisky glass in his hand, I ask, “Excuse me, where do I dance?”