Sprinkle Glitter on My Grave

by Jill Kargman

  Awky fall hooves

  New season, new shoes! Just please get the kind that you wear, not ones that wear you. I saw a socialite at a fashion show who was teetering on quasi stilts that made Lady Gaga look barefoot—a platform with no heel, which left her unbalanced and awkward looking rather than confident and sexy. You can’t strut on stilts unless you know how to rock them! It has to be comfy or you’ll look like a ridickity donk doofus. I’m also not a fan of boots with toes peeping out—WTF is a toeless boot for? If it’s cold enough for boots, I shouldn’t see your toes popping out. I like shoes, don’t get me wrong. But nothing you put on your feet should make you walk like a drunk, hobbled giraffe.

  The incessant barrage of back-to-school commercials

  Jesus fucking Christ with the backpacks and the pencil cases and the tiny cargo shorts! I have news for you, JC motherfuckin’ Penney, if you would curtail some of the model children in slow-mo skipping to school, I would be forever grateful. Oh, and by the way, maybe don’t start unleashing the floor the first week of July. Please, we just got to summer, yo! Last year, I saw back-to-school commercials before Toyotathon’s Fourth of July sale ads. Amazon spammed me at midnight on June 30! Sheesh. I even got a Halloween costume e-blast in August. People are insane.

  Humble brags

  I recognize that this is an oxymoron. However, the New Bragging is always couched in an eye roll or reframed with something being a big old drag. Por ejemplo: Ugh, the traffic to Teterboro is just getting worse and worse! Or, I’m so stressed overseeing the gut job on Park Avenue and the renovation in Southampton! Presiding over two sets of blueprints was like a full-time job this summer! In both cases, the complainer is expressing dismay over things other peeps (including myself) would kill for. Clearly you’re loaded and doing the backstroke in a new pool filled with gold coins if you carry your two blueprint scrolls like a yoga mat. Don’t whine about your insanely busy summer and needing a vacation from your vacation. Your life is a vacation compared to the rest of the planet, beeyotch!

  People who crack out their winter duds when it’s still sweltering

  Q. What did one mink say to the other mink?

  A. See you at synagogue.

  Believe me, no one is more thrilled to switch from sandals to tights and boots and crack out the winter outerwear, but sometimes people get too zealous, sporting furs when it’s still 50 degrees out. Slow down, people—you in cahoots with the back-to-school commercial people, or what?! So thrilled you dig your duds, but let’s wait till the mercury plummets a bit more, yes? Of course, the reverse is also common come May, when it can still be freezing out and some women break out their strappy slingbacks while it’s cold enough to still warrant thigh-high black leather shitkickers.

  “This summer just flew by!”

  No, it didn’t. It inched. Time is all relative, and if you experience it as whizzing by, what really is the point of comparing notes on it? Emoji of the boar followed by the ring. The other thing is that the same people who complain that it’s freezing in the winter then complain that it’s so hot in the summer. They’re called seasons, people! If you don’t like them, move to the desert where it’s always the same. I for one, as we know, welcome Halloween and am more than thrilled to see all those bright colors go b-bye. Black is the new orange….

  When I heard all these parents going shithouse over Lenore Skenazy, the author of Free-Range Kids, allowing her nine-year-old son to ride the subway by himself, I wondered what they’d say about my parents. If her kid was an organic wandering chicken, I was a wild turkey—I started taking the public bus to school at eight. Keep in mind two key things: (1) There were no cellphones, and (2) Poor Etan Patz had just vanished the year before. But that didn’t stop them! They didn’t seem to be negligent parents—as crazy as that sounds—because Kathryn Wender came with me, and on our M101 rides we ran into half our friends. It was normal! Even though the city was a cesspool filled with muggings back then. But I guess I was lucky.

  When I turned nine, I started getting an allowance, I think five clams a week. I saved up and took my bus pass and announced I was headed out to Tower Records on the West Side. No one cared. My mom grew up on the West Side, so she didn’t think anything of it, but in the early eighties I can tell you it was not as safe feeling as the East Side. Aside from our trips to Lincoln Center and to Fairway, I hadn’t wandered around that much. But every few weeks, I took the M66 to Tower and blew my ducats on vinyl records, which I played, ladies and gentlemen, on a Fisher-Price record player.

  I started out loving First Wave. Yaz, Duran Duran, and Violent Femmes were among my first records. I was glued to MTV, already watching 120 Minutes, and when hair metal bands started coming on, I became infatuated. Thank goodness I hadn’t been older or I would’ve probably hopped a Greyhound to LA and tried to bang those guyliner lions.

  Crazily enough, I can trace my interest in rock to The Muppet Show. My nights in 1983 consisted of eating dinner in front of Kermie and the gang, on these cool faux-burl TV tables. Of all the episodes, and I believe I have seen them all, the Alice Cooper one had the biggest effect on me. I was intoxicated by the monster costumes and smoke and guitars. The dark lights and the raccoon eyes made me obsessed. Synth turned to face-melting guitar riffs, and Toto’s “Africa” (which I still love) was replaced by Def Leppard. My pilgrimages to Tower became more frequent and I would beg for extra money for doing chores or demand a fifty-cent bribe every time my parents dragged us into an antiques store, which was frequently. I saved and scrounged and my album collection piled up. I played air guitar in the mirror to Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero” (long before the video game), blared Journey, and had to wring out my Calvins when I first saw the Scorpions’ album cover for Love at First Sting. It had a woman with black hair with side boob showing as she smashed against her motorcycle-jacketed lover, who was devouring her neck, as a tattoo needle perforated the skin of her upper thigh. I would stare at it for what seemed like hours. I still find it to be the sexiest album cover of all time. I was dying to be embraced like that—his leather jean–covered legs encircling her as he gave her a love bite. I wanted to be her.

  DZON’T GET ME STAHTID about the release of Appetite for Destruction. When Guns N’ Roses burst onto the scene, my brother and I went apoplectic. I was obsessssed, and it may have been the single album that cemented my cultlike adoration of rock and loathing of almost everything else. I wasn’t so crazy about the liner notes illustration of the raped waitress with the panties around her ankles with the violator monster slinking off (in fact, I had nightmares about it), but I wore that record down until I needed a new one. Not to make Metallica fans’ heads explode, but the songs I liked were actually the melodic ones like “The Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters,” whereas the OTT throttle of other anthems was too much pummeling for me and lacked the rich haunted soul—I think I went through menopause during “Master of Puppets,” and only played it for the amazing, rich guitar bridge in the middle.

  Years later, when I was writing my first novel, I needed money to pay the bills and freelanced for two years at BMG, Bertelsmann Music Group. They had just acquired Roadrunner Records and I found myself writing “digs”—or description blurbs—for new records from the likes of Screaming Headless Torsos, Fear Factory, Biohazard, and Sepultura. I overused phrases like “blistering riffs,” “venomous lyrics,” “cookie monster vocals,” and “thrashing drum kits.”

  In the end, though, my work’s death metal roster stayed at work, and at home I played more Soundgarden; Alice in Chains; Mother Love Bone; Jane’s Addiction; and my all-time favorite band, Nine Inch Nails. Later I turned to splintered regroupings of my old favorites, like Velvet Revolver and Audioslave, and now I pretty much exclusively play the old music of all the bands I mentioned. Sometimes in a spin class a pop song can puncture my musical vault, but it’s rare. To me, no new catchy pop confections can rival the anthems of the first thirty years of my life. Still, I hate when people make obnoxious buzzkilling
pronouncements like “Music is dead.” There will always be music. I just hope we can get a little more rock back in the radio roster so my kids know more than the nasal-voiced croons of whiny record-company-configured divas. So far, SiriusXM 33 1st Wave and my Pandora eighties rock station are helping turn the tide; recently when Sadie opted for AC/DC over Charli XCX, I felt I was doing something right.

  I came a little close to breaking the law once.

  I’ve never been a particularly big football fan, but I somehow got swept up in the annual Harvard-Yale rivalry. Not so much for the pigskin, or even the tailgating, which I hated—because to me beer tastes like cow piss (not that I’ve sampled that, but I can imagine)—but for the camaraderie of being on foreign turf, saying hello to fellow navy-clad people I didn’t regularly interact with back on campus. It was kind of like meeting an American on vacation abroad and striking up a conversation just because of your shared nationality when you both know you’d never hang Stateside. Plus, Boston obviously has more action than New Haven, so my friends and I went to the game at Harvard every other year, even into our mid-twenties. It was a reunion of sorts.

  One year, three years after graduation, my BFF, Vanessa (who is the inspiration for Vanessa on Odd Mom Out), and I became absolutely obsessed by a new book called At Home in the World, a memoir by Joyce Maynard. It began with her freshman year at Yale (1973), when The New York Times Magazine profiled her for a cover story about being a college student at the time. Maynard rocketed to national attention when her doe-eyed face graced the cover—photo by none other than Richard Avedon—and before long she received reams of fan letters. One of them was from J. D. Salinger.

  The literary icon was a notorious recluse, having decided to hole up in New Hampshire and not publish anymore. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t writing. Joyce wrote him back and a pen pal rapport ensued, followed by a love affair that resulted in her dropping out of Yale and moving to live with him; she was nineteen and he was fifty-three. I don’t know what it was about the pairing—perhaps the fact that it was clandestine, more or less, that she kept her silence long after they split up, that she was the mistress and muse of an icon—but Vanessa and I became completely fascinated by her, and all we could do was talk about her memoir. We were a book club with two members, but we told everyone to read it like the gospel. Somehow it captured a time and was a window into the dark world inhabited by this author we had so admired.

  So, back to the fall football face-off at Harvard in 1998. Vanessa and I went up to Boston. I was doing magazine work and writing for a dot-bomb and for David Lauren who was launching polo.com, and Vanessa was on her way to becoming the youngest vice president at Young & Rubicam (which she did at twenty-seven). The game ended and everyone was scattering to this party or that bar. We recoiled at some of the familiar faces and didn’t feel too social. It was then that Vanessa and I hatched an alternative plan.

  Within minutes we bailed from the stadium and were at a car rental. No one really had cellphones and there was no such thing as GPS, so with our Avis map, we made our way up to New Hampshire. We were going to try to meet J. D. Salinger.

  —

  We figured we knew he liked younger women, and while he was by then an old man, perhaps before he died we could somehow befriend him in his small, boring town. Maybe he’d even be our pen pal and give us some treasure trove of manuscripts. Maybe we could just take a picture with him? I bought two of those now-defunct orange cardboard disposable cameras with that crank/wheel thing to rotate the film. It was a pre-Instagram age and those photos were to “share” with each other. The first snap was the sign showing we’d entered Salinger’s town of Cornish, New Hampshire. There were no B and Bs around, so we ventured over the state border and into Vermont and found the Juniper Hill Inn. The brochure was printed at Kinko’s on pale yellow paper trifolded, and on the back were Xeroxed photos of the owners’ corgis (“our children”). It was getting late, so we decided to grab dinner at a traincar turned diner. Like, an actual one. I got a turkey club with Russian dressing, my typical diner fare with Vanessa in New York. But nothing else about sitting together at a diner was normal. We were out of our element. We were in Kathy Bates/Misery rural territory now and were starting to get a little freaked out.

  We returned to the hotel after dinner and I went in the phone booth (yes, they still had a phone booth!) and called my now dearly departed, city-dwelling Grandma Ruth to say hi and tell her about our adventure. A part of me also wanted someone on the planet to know where we were in case we disappeared.

  “What are you, crazy?” she asked. “You can’t be two young girls alone in the wilderness! Just be very careful and remember, not all the nuts are in the nuthouse.”

  That line has stayed with me always, since I seem to be a five-foot-seven strip of flypaper for lunatics everywhere. In any case, I swore I’d be careful and hung up. In our room, Vanessa and I poured over articles she had harvested about Salinger. We highlighted passages that described the terrain, such as a canopy of foliage or forks in the road. We had earlier noted that he loved Dunkin’ Donut holes, so we had procured a box of fifty Munchkins in one of those friendly boxes with finger slots for convenient carrying. It’s amusing now that we were planning to tempt him with mass market pastries as if he were a little kid to be lured by candy to a van, but we figured we “looked normal” and could use them as an icebreaker/offering of some sort. We come in peace, bearing fried dough, Mr. Salinger!

  The next morning, after our complimentary Continental breakfast, we began our Sherlock Holmesian mission. The town of Cornish was tiny, and the central crossroads of all things Cornish appeared to be the gas pump cum mom ’n’ pop convenience store. We sidled up, smiling, and sweetly asked if they knew, by chance, where J. D. Salinger lived.

  “WHO’S ASKIN’?” said an old codger in a black-and-red-checked flannel shirt. I want to say he was in overalls, but I might be making that up.

  “Uh…we are just harmless fans, and—”

  “LEAVE ’IM BE!” he grunted.

  Vanessa and I turned around with a look on our faces that resembled the emoji with all his teeth in a grimace, like, sheesh. No matter. Protective townsfolk, that’s all. The pa who ran the show has undoubtedly had his place replaced by a Cumberland Farms or 7-Eleven by now, so there.

  With me, map in my hand, as navigator and Vanessa at the wheel, we began to methodically go slo-mo, street by street, on a type of grid, hoping there’d be a mailbox that said SALINGER. No such luck. We continued for an hour, and, gee, I was getting hungry. I’ll just take this here one little Munchkin, okay?

  No sooner did we crack that fucking Happy Meal–shaped box than I knew poor J.D. would be left with scraps. One became five became ten, which we justified by saying if we actually lined up the doughnut holes in a circle, six would make a doughnut, so we’d really only had a couple of doughnuts each, right? Finally Vanessa forced me to close the container so we would have a few to offer our idol; about twenty sad holes rolled around audibly inside.

  We were about to give up when we spied a friendly-looking fella taking a walk. We pulled over and said we were New Yorkers exploring the area, adding a casual “Hey, someone just mentioned that author—Uh, what’s his name? Who wrote Catcher in the Rye?—lives around this area.”

  “Oh yeah, sure, right on Saint Gaudens Road.”

  BIIIII­IIIII­NGO.

  Just like that! We were so chill and at ease, no one would ever think we were Fatal Attraction stalkers like Glenn Close. Which is good because we’re so not! We just wanted to trespass and invade someone’s privacy, that’s all!

  We circled back to the beginning of the street and went house by house, examining each. Some had swing sets or kiddie tricycles out front—nope. Others had flashier cars, which was so not him. Finally we pulled up to a house that fit every detail of description we could scrounge. The rusty mailbox was unmarked. We both knew this had to be the one. I popped out of the car with the Munchkin box.

 
Vanessa asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Go knock.”

  “Wait—what if he calls the police?”

  “He won’t! We are young, normal girls.”

  “I don’t know about this….Young and Rubicam will fire me if I am arrested.” She had a point.

  In the end, our life of crime was aborted by a combo of respect for the author and fear of jail. But we somehow felt accomplished just setting eyeballs on what was surely his home. Who knows if he was there or what he was doing, or how many untold novels and short stories sat within that rustic bunker he never left. We took lots of pictures—early selfies—and managed to use up all the film on those cardboard cameras. I later made an album for Vanessa to remember our zany crusade. We may have come home empty-handed in terms of a Salinger sighting, but it was a total Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance adventure, proving the journey is more important than the destination. My best friend and I made a new memory that embodied the kookiness of that moment in time; we were still free but on the cusp of being real grown-ups. We had no way of knowing, but only a few years later we would both be wives and mothers and something that impetuous could never be a possibility.

  When Salinger died twelve years later, Vanessa gave me a first edition of his short stories, which I treasure to this day. And while we make new memories every day with our kids attending the same schools, that rural road trip remains a time capsule of a long-gone side of our personalities. Don’t get me wrong—we are still kooky and adventuresome, but we just don’t do interstate stalking. Thank goodness not all the nuts are in the nuthouse.