Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  But it’s never like that.

  The lingering image is that women have to fend for themselves, that the father is just a shadow in the house and that this sweet moment, this family dance, is all the more precious because it’s nostalgic—far from being a return to innocence it is only a brief reprieve from confusion that is only going to get worse with the years, it is as awful as the final sentence of The Good Earth when the sons promise the father that they’ll never sell the land, “but behind his back they smiled.” These are smiles that imply everything that will go wrong in China for the next century. And the foreboding left at the end of Smooth Talk is so thick, thick as anything Pearl Buck could have imagined, because it predicts damage done to daughters for generations.

  And yet, for all that Amy Fisher reminds us of teens in trouble, she also stands for all that is riveting and funny and fascinating and riotous about teenage life, of the reason why all subversive art and rock music—much of which is made by people in their thirties and forties—gets grouped under the rubric of “youth culture,” as if all that is alive and kicking can only be of and by the young. Ms. Fisher’s autobiography, My Story, reads like an instruction manual for teenage disaster disguised as a cautionary tale. Its style is picaresque, but also grand, an Italian opera in a shopping mall, with all the stock characters and props that we’re all too familiar with from all those recent-immigrant-made-good movies: the plucky, scrappy elders who are street-smart but barely speak English; the simple working stiffs who make enough money to own a boat and a Benz even though all they know is cement or plumbing; distant fathers; doting mothers; churches that all seem to be called Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow; last names with too many vowels or too few; and children who change Debbie to Debi, Cindy to Cyndi and Amy to Aimee. In the cinematic imagination, the place is always the Bronx or Brooklyn, but in real life, we all know that it is Long Island, the most densely populated Italian-American region in the whole country.

  My Story could be the story line for a Russ Meyer movie, or in its darker moments, the treatment for one of those late-sixties biker flicks that star a young pre-acid casualty Bruce Dern, or a not yet respected director John Cassavetes, or a fictional Maria Wyeth as B movie biker mama in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (the movie version of which starred—touché!—Tuesday Weld). But instead of Didion’s flat tones on the blacktop, imagine the wreck everywhere, the wreck on the highway, the wreck all over the place, the motif of Andy Warhol’s Accident series, the pictures that showed multiple exposures of the casualties of—to put it in epic terms—America, stock photos transformed into art in that dry, denatured Warhol way that makes their violence and destruction seem somehow only worse. That early work—the electric chairs and car crashes—is so upsetting, so detached at a time when detachment was not mere mannerism, that it explains just what Warhol was retreating from in all that Campbell’s Soup, all those consumer goods, those images of Liz and Liza and Jackie and Marilyn, in his invention of a detachment that was mere mannerism. The flat, one-dimensional beauty of his silk screens, and the way the women whose images he used were flattened and contained by photographs—ironically, as icons they were larger than life but as people they seemed so much smaller—always struck me as a way to manage the world, to make it nothing at all like Amy Fisher, who as a teenager practically luxuriated in hysteria and melodrama. This girl, an absolute adolescent, is a control freak’s nightmare, an accident waiting to happen, a land mine no one knew about until one day someone took the wrong step and woke up the whole neighborhood. She was planning to go to Nassau County Community College to study God knows what, she was worrying that Paul might not want to go to the prom with her, and then she got a gun and shot someone in the head.

  If I were the mother of a teenage daughter, I would find reading Amy’s autobiography simply too upsetting, the implications too terrifying, because it is hard not to notice, amid so much in it that is so crazy, there is so much more that is all too typical. All the hours spent at the Sunrise Mall, the boyfriends in and boyfriends out, the pathetic attempts at self-dramatization summed up with lines like “I am a female James Dean” or the Blanche DuBois-ish “It doesn’t take long for a girl to destroy her own life.” Even Amy’s outsize feelings for Joey, a man who, it seems to me, only a mother—or a teenager—could love, are just business as usual for the besotted babe in the woods. The fact is that teenage girls, suffering heartbreak or a failed crush or even a yet-unrealized rejection, often feel as if the world is coming to an end. Everything seems THAT BIG at that age. In her short story “Lust,” Susan Minot’s unnamed narrator captures the delirium that teenage girls experience with each new crush: “I could do some things well. Some things I was good at, like math or painting or even sports, but the second a boy put his arm around me, I forgot about wanting to do anything else, which felt like a relief at first until it became like sinking into a muck.” The beauty of the Amy Fisher story is that finally a teenage girl gets her heart broken and contrives events such that no one can blame her for feeling like it’s the end of the world. She really has sunk into a hell of a muck! The worst thing a nice Jewish-Italian girl from Long Island can experience, barring actual apocalypse, has got to be prison time (contrary to common belief, it is not having your Bloomingdale’s charge cards canceled). By going to jail, a girl that’s known as jailbait can finally have problems on the magnitude of her emotional life.

  Writer Betsy Israel, who chronicled her own Nassau County teenage pregnancy and eventual reformation in a memoir called Grown Up Fast, described in a New York Times Magazine article her identification and repulsion with Amy Fisher. “As someone who grew up two canals over from—and left high school two years after—the Buttafuocos, I have long had a strangely personal interest in the case and a fascination with the purply haired protagonist, the girl described, as was I in about 1976, as ‘totally uncontrollable,’ ” Israel writes. “Once ‘uncontrollable’ meant carving words into your skin with a dull-edged razor and devouring the contents of your parents’ medicine chest. I could not imagine factoring into that emotional free fall actual guns, or rather I could imagine it, and the idea, decades later, had the power to terrorize me …” But the ability to feel both distanced from and strangely sympathetic with our Hard Copy heroines is rather usual these days. The tabloid events involving men—Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, Mark David Chapman—tend to lure us with their luridness because we simply cannot imagine being them, cannot identify the killer in me; but women’s tabloid histrionics—Lorena Bobbitt, Jean Harris and, I would even argue, Aileen Wuornos—draw us in because we all feel that we are one step away from the same thing, a slight shift in circumstance, a move of our emotional trajectories by just a degree or two, a few IQ points more or less, a missed estrogen dose, and we might do the same. Or worse, we might not do the same, but wish we could.

  These women, somehow, always seem oddly justified, the motive always a bit more, well, grounded than I was reading too much J. D. Salinger or the prophet Ezekiel came to me in a dream and told me to wipe out all women with red hair, or whatever. The women tend to be motivated by heartbreak, and they tend to attack the victimizer or the perceived rival rather than some abstract stand-in. We understand this, and of course we would never do it ourselves—thus giving us permission for righteous indignation—but we get it. (I often think that if O.J. Simpson could admit guilt, he might be in jail, but he might also earn some amount of public sympathy because we all can understand a crime of passion.) As Amy herself points out, the prison she is in seems like a purgatory for women in trouble because of their dependencies on men. Let’s face it, if men’s prisons are full of guys who are in because they killed their wives as self-defense against getting beaten or who sold their bodies on the street because their girlfriends forced them to, no one is telling. It is no surprise that Jesus spoke the words “He who is without sin may cast the first stone” to prevent a mob from killing a woman: her sins—in that case, adultery—would never be those that no one else could
identify with.

  Now, of course, there are people who will, for whatever reason, admire Mary Jo, the woman who stood by her man, got breast implants while he served a statutory rape sentence and has the good fortune to have a half-paralyzed face, so that no one will ever know what she’s really thinking. Camille Paglia does this. “Mary Jo even sang praises about their ‘better than ever’ sex life on Howard Stern’s radio show,” Paglia wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. “It was an astonishing display of female triumph of the will. A betrayed wife had won back her man and defeated her young rival.” But Mary Jo partisans are the people who identify with the strong, with the fighting Irish girl who defied even the most optimistic medical prognosis by living after she was shot and left with a bullet permanently lodged in her head—and who, by living, put her husband in a position of permanent guilt, permanently beholden to the woman who took a bullet for him (which, by the way, did not keep him from getting arrested for soliciting a prostitute a couple of years later). These people, these strong people, they don’t need our identification, oblivious as Nero fiddling about, marching along like nothing is wrong when everything obviously is, they will always be fine. Their plight is not only uninteresting, it is also one of bare-knuckled survival, and in that way it is rather troglodytical, not unlike Joey Buttafuoco himself. All that stuff that Thoreau once said about most men living lives of quiet desperation—well, if you turn up the volume on that paradigm, and give it a South Shore (of Long Island) accent and a tendency to wear loud, acrylic print outfits, you’re left with Mary Jo Buttafuoco.

  I guess the point is that Amy Fisher has emerged as a heroine—and even a martyr—in this story, at least as far as I am concerned, because it seems far preferable to be Amy Fisher in prison than Mary Jo anywhere on earth—even before she was shot. It seems better to have Amy serve as our surrogate for the mistakes we will never make than to identify with Mary Jo about the ones that there is a good chance we will make. Amy represents that certain thing that separates us from animals: she has a conscience. It is misdirected, of course, and it may even be a bad conscience. But somewhere in her overwrought, libidinal brain, she sensed that something was wrong with her behavior, with Joey’s behavior, with what was going on around her, and she decided to do something about it: she got herself a gun. It was most certainly the wrong thing to do, but this protest against the treatment she got, and that she willingly accepted from Joey and other men, was not as she herself believes the sign that she had lost all self-respect: to the contrary, it was the beginning of her refusal to take it any longer.

  Meanwhile, Mary Jo, living in the same house with Joey, with her face sagging on one side and two plastic Baggies of silicone lifting, separating and dividing down below, is refusing consciousness. It is the denial that Mary Jo lives in that keeps the world from falling apart—for if any more people acted out against what goes on around them, all stability would cease, the 50 percent divorce rate would skyrocket, the likelihood that most members of most families would still be able to get together on Thanksgiving and Passover would plummet, we would become an army of emotional desperadoes doing just what Amy Fisher did. And still, we need the occasional Amy Fisher, just as Thomas Jefferson posited that democracy required the occasional rebellion, to remind us how much we deny.

  But who cares if Mary Jo Buttafuoco lives or dies. As far as anyone can tell, her consciousness is not much more than that of an alligator who has been flushed down the toilet bowl and must only fight its way out of the sewer. Only she is not fighting. And that is why I am sorry she isn’t dead. Look, if she and Joey came to whatever agreement they have that shit happened but their marriage, their kids, the years gone by are more important, that’s their problem. But Mary Jo’s constant public refusal to admit that her husband might have actually had an affair (unless, of course, her presumption is on the basis of who would want him?) makes it everyone’s problem. Because her continued insistence not that she has forgiven him, but rather that he never did anything wrong, makes idiots of us all. When the couple appeared on Donahue shortly after Amy went to prison, Mary Jo’s demeanor of denial was such that, had there been a sandbox anywhere nearby, I’m sure she would have stuck her head in it and remained in this ostrich stance for the rest of her life before she’d concede the possibility that Joey did anything wrong; finally, one woman in the studio audience, frustrated with what seemed like the obvious obtuseness of this wife, pointed to Joey and yelled, “If it looks like a snake and acts like a snake, it must be a snake!” When police detectives showed Mary Jo at least thirteen receipts for four-hour stays at the Freeport Motor Inn & Boatel, signed by Joey and documenting that he was there either with Amy or with someone, Mary Jo just stonewalled the evidence, saying that “if they or anyone said they had a dozen motel receipts, then a dozen times I’ll just say that I was in that motel with him.”

  Here’s how it looks: there’s one woman in jail and another woman with permanent physical damage, but in all this Joey Buttafuoco appears to have been punished not at all. In fact, he’s gone Hollywood, and is making appearances on Geraldo to talk about his new career, with roles in upcoming films as a bouncer, a Mafia heavy, a villain in a horror movie—playing to type, you might say, though his agent was quoted in Esquire as insisting, “We just want to prove that Joey has an incredible amount of talent.” And Mary Jo comforts herself with the knowledge that the enemy is in jail. But that’s where she is wrong. Amy is not the enemy. Mary Jo is sleeping with the enemy.

  But Mary Jo and the rest of the family’s reaction to this case pretty much proves that men will band together and defend each other even when it’s wrong (an atavistic tendency from a more militant time when “my country right or wrong” led us into Vietnam and all that), but women not only rarely bother to band together with each other—even worse, they tend to band together with the men. So that not only do you have Mary Jo with the IQ of a fence post defending her husband—you’ve also got her mother calling John Gambling’s morning radio show on WOR in New York just to say that her son-in-law is a son to her, she’s known him since he was sixteen, and in her mind he’s just perfect, Jesus of Massapequa. “I told you before, John, and I will say it again,” Mary Connery said with insistence, “I will lay down my life for my son-in-law. And they’ll have to go through me to get to him.”

  Long Island: where the men are men, the women are men, and the pets are scared.

  To read accounts of the Amy Fisher story, one is extremely struck by this strange collective denial on the part of all who were close to Joey, that same playing pretend that we mostly associate with Mafia movies—and with Jonestown. Or Waco. Amy herself, the dope, was said by police to have protected Joey even after they told her in interrogation that he turned her in. Attorney Eric Naiburg claims that when he took on Amy’s case, he “spent the first two weeks convincing her that Joey was not going to come to the rescue.”

  But even though neither Betty Friedan nor the justice system nor her own father did much for Amy Fisher, a funny thing seems to have happened: the world of the teenage girl suddenly opened up at the same time that incarceration shut Amy down. The adolescent age group is a huge market—with a population of 25 million ‘which will be more like 31 million in 2006), it is worth $89 billion a year to industries—and teenage girls are renowned for spending like crazy. Even Humbert Humbert, with characteristic glee and disgust, noted little Lolita’s status in the marketplace: “She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.” So it’s not like the teenybopper world, at least from the consumer perspective, was not a full one, not like there wasn’t enough Maybelline and Clairol’s Herbal Essence and Benetton to go around.

  But the glaring absence in mass-market goods for girls was, for lack of a better word, darkness: shopping malls were filled with glum, sullen, alienated girls being sold cheery, pretty things. The world of the girl was still believed to be big pastel ribbons and acrylic appliqués for blue jeans and Claddagh r
ings exchanged between friends and The Baby-Sitters Club and prom dresses by Gunny Sax. My God—even Amy Fisher had a roomful of teddy bears and stuffed animals! The brutal truths—that girls drank whole bottles of Robitussin to get high, that they cut up their legs with razor blades for fun or psychic relief or whatever, that they were into scarification, that they gave themselves homemade tattoos with India ink and sewing needles, that they hated their parents, that they lived at the food court of the mall—all this ugliness was not reflected in the popular culture aimed at them. Seventeen was for twelve-year-olds; New Kids on the Block was for ten-year-olds; John Hughes had abandoned Molly Ringwald for Macaulay Culkin; and exactly who were all those people buying all those Tiffany albums? Now and again there were movies like Heathers or Mystic Pizza or Sid and Nancy, and if you lived in a big city or college town there might be a radio station that played Minor Threat or Green River or something other than pedophile Michael Jackson, but “alternative” did not yet exist as a noncategory catchall, much less as an entire culture. Archie comics were starting to seem more realistic than most of what was coming at the typical teen.

  So sometime in the early nineties, the girls all by themselves, with no assistance from any international conglomerates, invented the Riot Girl movement, starting punk-rock bands and fanzines in suburban garages and rec rooms just like boys used to do, linking up with other girls in disparate cities like Washington, D.C., and Vancouver and Olympia and Toronto through Internet chat rooms and newsletters. And they forged a manifesto, a two-page document that declares, “We seek to create revolution in our own lives every day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.” Indeed the drafters of this manifesto had read Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown’s book and urged their constituents to “resist psychic death,” to “cry in public” and to plan for the day when “girls rule all towns,” when “all girls [are] in bands.” And in zines like Chainsaw and Girl Germs they wrote about why they loved Kristy McNichol and why they hated Twin Peaks and how even though they were just teenagers, they knew enough to tell that Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within was completely dopey and had nothing to say to them. And they made their own tapes and put together their own tours, started their own labels like K Records with bands like Bratmobile and Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill, which were great even if they couldn’t play for shit. And they called what they were doing “revolution grrrl style.” And they sang about how just because you want to get laid doesn’t mean you want to get raped, and they were fun and feminist at the same time.