Take the Cannoli

by Sarah Vowell

  Once, when Amy and I were fourteen, the three of us were getting out of the car after a trip to the mall. The neighbor woman, who was out watering her yard, saw the shopping bags and asked what we’d bought. Amy showed off her new candy-colored sweater and her hoop earrings and hot pink pants. The woman congratulated Amy. She then turned to me, pointing at the rectangular bulge protruding from the small brown bag in my hand. I reluctantly pulled out my single purchase—a hardback of The Grapes of Wrath. My mother looked at the neighbor, rolled her eyes in my direction, and stage-whispered, “We’re going through a book phase.”

  It’s such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word “phase.” As if any minute “we” would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to “our” senses, and for heaven’s sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don’t Talk to Me. Now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven’t gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now, we own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made.

  Still, I have been called a curmudgeon by Bitch magazine. That’s the image I’m cultivating. But truth be told, I’m not as dour-looking as I would like. I’m stuck with this round, sweetie-pie face, tiny heart-shaped lips, the daintiest dimples, and apple cheeks so rosy I exist in a perpetual blush. At five foot four, I barely squeak by average height. And then there’s my voice: straight out of second grade. I come across so young and innocent and harmless that I have been carded for buying maple syrup. Tourists feel more than safe approaching me for directions, telemarketers always ask if my mother is home, and waitresses always, always call me “Hon.”

  So the last time I got my hair cut, I asked my hairdresser if he could make me look more menacing. I said I admired Marilyn Manson’s new hairdo and could he make me look like that. And even though my hairdresser is German and everything, when he was done with me, I have never in my life looked so sickeningly nice. Is it too much to ask to make strangers nervous? To look shady and untrustworthy and malcontented? Something needed to be done.

  I happened to hear about a group of goths in San Francisco who offer goth makeovers to civilians and then take them to a goth club to see if they can “pass.” Goths, for those unfamiliar with this particular subculture, are the pale-faced, black-clad, vampiric types, with forlorn stares framed by raccoon eye makeup. The name derives, of course, from “gothic,” a style, according to my dictionary, “emphasizing the grotesque, mysterious, and desolate.”

  I’ve always admired the goths. There’s something brave about them. Something romantic and feminine and free—not to mention refreshingly honest. If the funny T-shirt slogans and crisp khaki pants of the average American tell the lie that everything’s going to be okay, the black lace scarves and ghoulish capes of goth tell the truth—that you suffer, then you die.

  So I called Mary Mitchell, a.k.a. Mary Queen of Hurts, and asked for a private lesson in goth. She told me to come to San Francisco and pack some black clothes and she and her team of expert goths would handle the rest.

  Coming up with black apparel for the occasion wasn’t particularly problematic for me. One might describe my closet as Johnny Cash once described his: “It’s dark in there.”

  I reported to a Market Street address where I met the five members of my death-warmed-over beauty squad. I met Indra, a gorgeous blonde in a long velvet skirt; Terrance, dashing in a velvet smoking jacket; the tall, dark Monique; Elizabeth, in strappy black leather; and, of course, Mary, whose seven-inch patent leather heels would relegate her later on to dancing only to the slowest songs, for fear of tipping over. They all turned goth in their early teens and they are, as Indra puts it, “so in our thirties.”

  Prior to meeting Mary Queen of Hurts, I found her sadistic nickname entirely appropriate, as she assigned me “goth homework” to do before my arrival. The assignment consisted of going through a punchy little primer she wrote with Indra and Terrance which outlines the seven steps to “gothitude.” Step number seven? Write goth poetry. One of my poems is a haiku about compost, which I wrote while pondering decay:

  eggshells pulverized

  tossed into the rot of life

  toenails of the damned

  Step number six asked me to go through my records and pull out the darkest, saddest song and play it over and over again—though the darkest, saddest stuff in my collection is all old country music. So my goth soundtrack is Roy Acuff’s godless, drunk-driving, car-crash number “Wreck on the Highway,” in which “there was whiskey and blood all together, mixed with glass where they lay.”

  Before anyone breaks out the eyeliner, we all sit in a circle and go through my homework. The whole thing reminds me of graduate school seminars, except these people are smart and funny and have something interesting to say.

  Step one of the guidelines is choosing a goth name. Indra says, “Most of us have changed our names to be something more gothic. A lot of people legally change their name. Live it!” According to Mary, “If you go into any of the goth clubs nowadays, you’ll find a lot of spooky names—like Raven and Rat and Sage.”

  When I was pondering a good goth name for myself, I paged through my reference books on death and dying looking for something gruesome. Nothing felt right. Maybe it’s because I came of age in the ’80s and I’ve seen Blue Velvet too many times, but to me, the really frightening stuff has nothing to do with ravens and rats. The truly sordid has a sunny Waspy glow. Therefore, I tell them, the most perverse name I can think of is Becky. It turns out that by saying the magic word “Becky” I have suddenly moved to the head of the class, gothwise. As Monique puts it: “You are understanding the pink of goth. You’ve skipped a couple levels and you went straight to pink.”

  The group’s consensus is that pink is the apex of expert goth—that newcomers and neophytes should stick with basic black but those confident enough, complex enough, can exude gloom and doom while wearing the color of sugar and spice. Indra argues that pink can be “an intelligent, sarcastic color,” though Terrance says of experimenting with pink, “Proceed with caution. I can’t warn you enough.”

  As if they need to warn me. It would never occur to me to wear pink, just as it would never occur to Michael Douglas to play a poor person. These, I realize, are my people. Simpatico. I think that’s why, at that moment, I’m willing and able to do something with them that I was never able to do with my mom: namely, sit still while they poke and prod and paint me without complaint. I know I’m in the right hands when Terrance reassures me, “When we’re done with you, no one will call you ‘Hon.’ ”

  And then, there’s a magical moment when Indra applies the critical first layer of bloodless powder and foundation. When I see the transformation in the mirror—out, out apple cheeks!—I ask Mary if there’s a word for this whiter shade of pale. She tells me, yeah, that I look “Laura Palmer dead.”

  It’s an astonishingly slow process. Indra decides to make me up like the silent film star Louise Brooks, shading in concentric circles of eye shadow and then liquid eyeliner, which takes a full five minutes to dry. She agonizes over lipstick, applies a birthmark in the shape of a snake on my cheek. Then, they dress me. By the time they’re done cinching up the corset and stabilizing my bustle, I’m in so many layers of black lace scarves and fringe and fishnet stockings that I could play strip poker for three weeks straight without baring my belly button.

  The finishing touches are applied in a full-on pit stop. I sit in a chair and Monique curls my hair while Terrance fusses with my lipstick and Mary paints my nails black. All at once. I find I enjoy this loving, methodical attention. All these people are putting all this thought into how I look. They kept cooing, “You look great! You look fabulous! I
looooove the snake!” I am so pleased with the results that I keep looking in the mirror and smiling. I smile so much that Elizabeth reminds me that, technically, a good goth is supposed to pout. But I’m too giddy.

  Something occurs to me: What if all those years my mom wanted to do just this—sit me down and fiddle with my hair—not because she wanted to torture me or because she was embarrassed about how I looked or because she missed her job? What if she wanted to do this for me to show me that she loves me? If all along she was trying to give me the feeling I’m getting from these strangers?

  I thought she was the oppressor and I was the victim, but it can be just as true the other way around.

  At 10:30, it was time to go to the club. But after two hours of primping, I was tired. I asked them if they ever spend so much time doing their hair and makeup that they’re too pooped to go out. They said that for this very reason, there’s a goth rule: You have to stay at the club at least as long as it takes to get dressed up.

  The club we go to is called Roderick’s Chamber, cheerfully named for a character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Everywhere: blackness, leather, lace, frowns.

  The first thing I notice about goth’s public face is that, while the women are almost uniformly stunning, the men look, to a man, pretty stupid. There’s a lot of jewelry and goofy cloaks and silly tights. And fellas, a word about jackboots: Ick. Indra tells me that if I want to check out a subculture with a hunkier class of men, I should look into swing dancing. “Oh. Daddy. Oh,” she says. What is she? Some kind of traitor? Maybe she’s alluding to a more profound point. The character and charm of the women here emanates from the way they playfully stick it to the idea that women are supposed to be sunny and upbeat. But the men, adopting the accoutrements of medieval knights and Nazis, come across as little boys; they might as well be running around the dance floor shooting cap pistols at one another’s G.I. Joes. “That’s why my husband isn’t goth,” adds Monique.

  The thing I love most about the goth club is how passive it is. Hardly anyone talks to anyone else. It is free of the normal social pressures to smile and interact and appear content. There’s none of that getting-to-know-you pickup crap. In fact, the mood is antithetical to pickups; it’s more like stay away. No one cares if you dance. No one cares if you don’t. As someone who often dreads strangers, the antisocial nature of this social situation makes me feel communal and part of something—one of us. Like, hey, I hate talking to you too! The mutual disgust is completely liberating.

  The whole point of coming here is to stare and be stared at. Someone walking in off the street might think, What’s the fun in that? And the answer is, all the interaction, all the fun, all the real moments happen at home, when you’re getting dressed, talking about how you’ll look with your friends. The club is about being seen—which is so inferior.

  At least my goths don’t seem to mind being seen with me, though that may be more of a testament to their sartorial wizardry than to any assimilation skills on my part. Even I can see who the sore thumb is here. Like a scene straight out of The Munsters, all goth contempt is beamed onto the dance floor, where a happy blond Fawn Hall looka-like in acid-washed jeans is smiling the night away, oblivious. Compared to her, at least outwardly, I am as goth as a Cure album dipped in blood.

  I’m a completely new person until I look at my watch right before midnight and realize I’m missing Nightline. I’m having a good time, but I don’t really need elaborate costumes and nightclubs for an evening of gloom and doom: I’m perfectly capable of having a dark old time in my black pajamas watching the news. After the mandatory two hours, I hug my goths goodbye. They give me the kind of smiles professors reserve for their favorite students on graduation day, like they’re proud of me for pulling this off, but they’re just as puffed up about having done so much with so little. There should be diplomas for keeping that much eye makeup in place.

  I hail a cab. Usually, I am a cab driver’s dream—polite, small, non-threatening. Perhaps that is why cab drivers always talk to me. But tonight, I am Becky. I am goth. Not a word from the driver. Bless him, he keeps staring at me and my eye makeup in the rearview mirror, watching his back. She is menacing, he’s thinking. I can tell. His fear pays off. I tip him extravagantly. So extravagantly that I blow my cover. He turns and gives me a look that says, “Thanks, Hon.”

  These pieces first appeared, often in different form, in the following: “Shooting Dad,” “Music Lessons,” “The End Is Near, Nearer, Nearest,” “Take the Cannoli,” “Michigan and Wacker,” “What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill,” “Thanks for the Memorex,” “Drive Through Please,” “Dark Circles,” and “American Goth” on This American Life on Public Radio International; “These Little Town Blues” and “Chelsea Girl” in GQ; “Ixnay on the My Way” in Salon; “Your Dream, My Nightmare” in Request.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Most of these pieces were shaped, contorted, pummeled, and harangued into viability by my hilarious and heroic editor, friend, and driving teacher Ira Glass of This American Life, along with producers Julie Snyder, Nancy Up-dike, and Alix Spiegel, and fellow lifer Paul Tough (Canadian). I’m also grateful for the editorial stylings of Cynthia Joyce at Salon, Jim Nelson at GQ, and Susan Hamre at Request. Many ideas and anecdotes herein were lifted from my former San Francisco Weekly column, edited by Bill Wyman. And considering there’s no excuse for my pilfering of the previously private lives of my father, Pat Vowell, my mother, Janie Vowell, and my sister, Amy Brooker, they’ve been good sports. For their assistance and insights, I am indebted to Dave Eggers, Marion Ettlinger, Jim Fitzgerald, John Flansburgh, Nicole Francis, Marcy Freedman, Barrett Golding, Robin Goldwasser, David Gomez of the New Echota Historic Site, the goths (Mary Mitchell, Terrance Graven, Monique Motil, Elizabeth Reardon, and Indra Lowenstein), Nicole Graev, Nick Hornby, my guardian angels Greil and Jenny Marcus, Tony Millionaire, my late uncle John A. Parson, Nightline, David Sedaris, my agent Wendy Weil and her assistant Emily Forland, Ren Weschler and Sara Weschler. Honorable mention to David Rakoff, who over the course of this book endured my whining, Disney World, and my whining at Disney World. Finally, the scrupulous Geoffrey Kloske at Simon & Schuster was committed, can-do, and usually right.

  Sarah Vowell is the author of The Wordy Shipmates, Assassination Vacation, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Take the Cannoli, and Radio On. A contributing editor for public radio’s This American Life, she lives in New York City.

  ALSO BY SARAH VOWELL

  Radio On: A Listener’s Diary The Partly Cloudy Patriot

  The Partly Cloudy Patriot

  Assassination Vacation

  Worldy Shipmates

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  Copyright © 2000 by Sarah Vowell

  Illustrations copyright © 2000 by Tony Millionaire

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  DESIGNED BY JILL WEBER

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY BENNETT MILLER

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Vowell, Sarah [date].

  Take the cannoli : stories from the New World / Sarah Vowell.

  p. cm.

  I. Title

  AC8 .V76 2000

  081—dc21      99-056330

  ISBN 0-684-86797-4

  ISBN 0-7432-0540-5 (P
bk)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-2651-6 (eBook)