by Alina Simone
I shuffled into the living room and slipped the first VHS tape into the player. I was eating a yogurt—an activity that mercifully required no back muscles—and the cat jumped up onto the coffee table, politely drilling me with his stare. The cat was fat and I wasn’t supposed to give him any yogurt. He kept staring. I gave him some yogurt. The cat went cross-eyed with pleasure. And the tape began.
I was back in Lexington with Amanda again, in the passenger seat of her old silver station wagon. It was autumn and brilliant-colored leaves swirled across the lawns like scratch tickets blowing through a Shell station.
“Should we start in chronological order?” I am asking Amanda, who for some reason is wearing a wreath of tinfoil stars in her hair.
“No, there’s too much,” Amanda says. “We should pick a few choice sites. Let’s see … there’s the bridge above Grant Street and the story of Randy Jeffries, there’s the Hastings grave where I broke up with Jason, and then there’s the bungalow by Granny Pond where I gave my first blow job, but I didn’t know how, so it wasn’t a real blow job …”
“More like a tentative licking?” I supplied.
“Yes,” she agreed, nodding. “More a tentative licking.”
We needed some heartbreakingly raw footage of Amanda recalling her tawdry upbringing on the streets of Lexington to juxtapose against all the footage that would come later, the postfame footage. I had decided it was better to tape it now, before the Givenchy ads and charity telethons, the plastic surgeries, addiction to prescription painkillers, and botched third-world adoption schemes. Yes, better now, while Amanda was still relatively fresh-faced and unself-conscious. I had planned to intercut this footage with another interview, where I’d asked Amanda to describe Lexington, the colonial town where we’d both grown up, for someone who’d never been there before.
“Lexington is so safe. It’s the safest place in the world,” Amanda exhaled heavily before continuing in a sing-song voice. “You can leave your bike out on the lawn, you don’t really have to lock your house. It is so clean and so well manicured and the people there are so well manicured. They all have a prop. Whether it’s their baby carriage prop, or their newspaper prop, or their intellectual book prop. They all convene at Starbucks and they all order triple short lattes with a shot of hazelnut and no whipped cream and low-fat milk. And they say it so quickly. It arrives in their cup and they pay their four dollars and they walk out into the sun and they sit on a bench and they watch their neighbors go by and they smile and wave and the dogs stop to sniff at each other’s asses. And everything is perfect. Not a thing is amiss, not even the little punk kids in their little punk clothes that cost them lots of money, also sitting outside of Starbucks talking about how fucked up Lexington is and how fucked up the world is.”
Then I remember the dilemma that Amanda faced growing up in Lexington, once the site of revolutionary bloodshed, now the site of Philip Ciampa Salon & Day Spa, Evolve Pilates, and La Riviera Gourmet. She wanted trouble—the one commodity in short supply. The year I graduated from high school, a woman who lived out on Ridge Road was stabbed in her home and ended up bleeding to death because the guy on duty at the local fire department assumed that hers was a prank call. Which is just another way of saying that Amanda had her work cut out for her when she launched her own private war of independence. She was arrested at fifteen for shoplifting, the same year that she had an affair with her thirty-five-year-old piano teacher. But these were run-of-the-mill transgressions, the stuff of after-school specials. By graduation she had perfected the art of being a fuckup, attracting police attention for stunts like crashing Lexington’s legendary Patriot’s Day parade with a group of friends dressed in tutus and ski goggles calling themselves the Scottish Socialist Tea Party. Myself, I’d always been jealous of the simple fact that Amanda managed to get out of taking math in high school. “It just wasn’t going to happen,” she’d replied briskly when I asked her about it once. This was something I’m sure I could never have accomplished, not if I’d shown up at school with a harpoon sticking out of my eye.
We drive to the bridge above Grant Street where her parents once caught her making out with a “wayward” youth, really just a kid from our high school who lived on welfare with his mom in the Battle Green Inn. We stop at Dunkin Donuts for coffee because it is not Starbucks, and then continue on to Battle Green Square, which might best be described as New England’s most historic traffic island. I train the camera on Amanda as she climbs up onto the Minuteman statue and spends a good minute up there groping the Minuteman’s crotch.
“I always thought he had the best ass ever of anyone in the world,” she calls out, slipping back to the ground. “It’s, like, so perfect and rounded and firm, you know?” Without a beat, she turns to point at a stately brick Colonial across the street. “That’s the rectory of the church I went to. I should totally take you there.”
But unsurprisingly, we head in the opposite direction from the church, over to the Old Belfry, where Amanda smoked her first cigarette. Then we drive to the site of the aborted blow job, a little stone bench nestled in a patch of woods that happened to be located on someone’s private property. There, Amanda tells me how it ended, with Peter Tortelli zipping up his pants and refusing to ever speak to her again, even after she sent him the lyrics to “The Same Deep Waters as You” by the Cure, painstakingly written out in longhand on romantic paper. We make our way back to the main road. New England autumn, at its tourist trapping peak, explodes all around us. The camera shakes as I follow Amanda out of the woods, back to her car. And that’s where the footage suddenly breaks off. There is some static, and when the picture comes back into focus she is gone and suddenly I am back in the kitchen of my parents’ house, where I find them arguing over a casserole.
I was sorting through the tapes, looking for another good bit to watch and remembering that the road to fame was a twisty one, and there was a time when Amanda, like me, was all talk and little traction. She would wax on about writing songs, forming a band, playing shows, getting famous … but whenever I checked in, she wasn’t doing any of these things. What she was doing was falling into bed with guys she happened to sit next to at Café Pamplona and standing on a milk crate in Harvard Square while tourists took her picture for a dollar. Maybe this is why we came up with the idea of the road trips—because aside from shooting Amanda performing as the Eight Foot Bride or mooning around coffee shops, there wasn’t much of a story here.
But there must have been some deeper explanation for why we decided to drive aimlessly around the country for weeks, videotaping the Eight Foot Bride in a series of increasingly improbable locales. My loneliness? Her desperation? A mutual desire to live out some kind of Jack Kerouac, On the Road fantasy? The tapes were poorly labeled, though, so I managed to find only one other clue, from the night we spent in a trashy motel near Niagara Falls. We had gone to a strip club downtown earlier that evening, where Amanda had kissed me. She did it right there at the table as we were nursing our watery cocktails and watching a Chippendale’s wannabe grope a drunk Buffalo housewife on her birthday. It was the first time I’d ever kissed a girl, but after a few days of life on the road with Amanda, such things had come to seem normal. It would have been more shocking, I think, had we just watched some Full House reruns and gone to bed early. Anyway, we returned to our motel room, where a photo mural of an island paradise was fighting a losing battle with the very real landscape of urban decay just outside our window. Amanda dumped half a bottle of bubble bath into our heart-shaped Jacuzzi and let the hot water run. When the tub was full, she crawled in. I am off to the side somewhere, as usual, taping.
“Why are we here?” I ask her. “What is the purpose of this trip?”
Amanda leans against the red plastic lip of the tub, arms akimbo and pit hair in full bloom. A delta of black mascara has formed beneath each eye. There is a pause. And then she shrugs.
“I just love the idea of putting things where they don’t belong.”
/> I was one of those things, I thought to myself. The less-glamorous hanger-on. I had been twenty pounds heavier back then and now cringed whenever I saw myself on tape. I hit fast forward and watched Amanda watching rainbows suspended in the mist of Niagara Falls until the tape ended. There were other questions that I wanted answered, but the tapes defied any kind of logic. Whenever I cued up a new one, it invariably started in the middle, in some weird and disorienting new place. Like this scene, here, where I am crashing over a carpet of dead leaves, then stopping to zoom in on a hand-painted sign that reads: IN BAD WEATHER, STUMP SERVICE WILL BE HELD IN THE AUDITORIUM. We were in Lily Dale, a small community in upstate New York that was home to the world’s largest community of “Spiritualists,” tromping through a pet cemetery, looking for a good place for Amanda to set up the Eight Foot Bride.
“We haven’t gone to the Healing Tree yet, have we?” I call ahead to Amanda.
“No,” she shouts back over her shoulder.
Amanda is dressed like a trick-or-treater minus the paper bag, in a shiny purple cape with leopard-print trim. By the time we arrive at the Forest Temple, it is too late. The sun is setting through the trees and there isn’t enough light left to shoot. So we get back in the car and then drive to Cleveland. We sleep in Amanda’s station wagon, in the parking lot of a Days Inn, and set off to try our luck again in the morning. Time jerks ahead. We are pulling into the tranquil landscaped grounds of the Our Lady of Lourdes Shrine and Grotto in Euclid, Ohio, with Swollen Members’ “Paranoia” blasting through our open windows. Amanda turns to flash a crooked smile at my ever-ready Hi-8 cam and then slows to give a nearby statue of Jesus a jaunty thumbs-up. We pause to make an offering of fifty cents at the grotto altar. Good insurance, I suppose, considering what was to come.
No, I thought, as I watched myself loudly debating the pluses and minuses of various camera angles with Amanda, pointing first at the stone-faced grotto, then at a row of nearby pews. No! But yes, in the next shot there is Amanda, emerging from the backseat of the Volvo in her wedding dress, black wig slightly askew. She checks her makeup in the window of the station wagon one last time before grabbing the milk crate and setting off for the shrine, a dirty bride’s veil trailing several feet behind her. Amanda sets up in front of the statue of the Blessed Mother, at the base of the grotto. The words “I am the Immaculate Conception” hover above her head in a gold halo. She gets up on her milk crate, bows her head, and assumes a prayerful pose. What is wrong with you? I screamed silently at myself. Put that fucking tripod away! The shrine was not only a site of religious pilgrimage, it was also home to an order of nuns, the Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity. Did we ever stop to think what might happen if one of them chanced by and found us there? But I had a feeling that even if John the Baptist himself had dropped in for a flagon of holy water, in our supreme arrogance we wouldn’t have stopped filming.
We kept pressing west, putting things where they didn’t belong. There is the Eight Foot Bride, blending in as one of the ears in a field of concrete corn sculptures in Dublin, Ohio; in a forest in Hell, Michigan; wedged between a griffin and a white-robed goddess at the Lawn Ornament Capital of the World in Lenox, Michigan; standing on the dusty floor of an abandoned farmhouse we find off the highway somewhere in Illinois. The cops finally catch up with us in Indiana, where we are filming Amanda on the railroad tracks running alongside I-65. Someone had called the police from their cell phone to report that a bride was trying to commit suicide. They laugh at us and let us go, and when the footage starts up again, I have no idea where we are.
The opening shot is a shaky close-up of a cup filled with what looks like dirty bong water. It turns out to be coffee. We are at a diner eating breakfast and yet it is clearly nighttime, the sky outside the windows is dark, punctuated only by the acid glow of distant streetlamps. Wan plants dangle from the acoustic ceiling tiles. The table is covered with loads of food—home fries and eggs under a layer of cheese that looks as natural as vinyl flooring. We are salting it liberally. A man with close-cropped hair sits across from us. His arms are covered in tattoos and he is wearing a crucifix over a sweatshirt that says FLORIDA in big red letters. But I know we are not in Florida either.
“Why are you here and where are you going and who are you?” the man is asking Amanda.
“Thas sree quessions,” Amanda says through a mouthful of potatoes. “Ass one.”
“Okay,” the man says. “I’ll ask the most important one. Who are you?”
Now I remembered. The car had broken down. We were in the Midwest somewhere. We’d gone looking for a mechanic earlier, but couldn’t find one and had to wait until morning.
“I’m Amanda Palmer,” Amanda says, and then adds, smiling through her food, “Narcissist.”
But I must have filmed something besides this march of determined weirdness: Amanda as the Eight Foot Bride on the balcony of a castle made of tinfoil in Florida, Amanda’s veil illuminated in the ghastly half-light of an underpass in Montreal, Amanda bisecting the O of a giant illuminated sign spelling HOPE on the lawn of a suburban church in Michigan. I recalled that vague period of time between our first road trip and our second, when Amanda suddenly started taking songwriting more seriously. There were fewer dreamy walks spent airbrushing the days of some ill-defined future. Now the talk was of concrete plans. The band she was forming. The shows she was playing.
I searched through the box of tapes until the dust made my fingers itch, but I found what I was looking for. We are back in the parlor of Amanda’s parents’ house in Lexington, and I am facing Amanda at the piano, in the same spot where I sat through countless rehearsals of On Their Own. A year has passed since our first road trip. Now Amanda is living in a low-rent artists’ complex called the Cloud Club and she’s started playing shows at the smaller clubs around Cambridge. During that same span of time, I had gotten a second cat and continued working as the director of special projects. Amanda wants to play me a new song she just wrote that she’s clearly excited about. I must have come over first thing in the morning, because her purple hair is mussed and she is wearing a t-shirt and shorts that look slept in. Soon she is hitting the keys so hard that every note is accompanied by the heavy klung of ivory slamming wood. The veins in Amanda’s neck are bulging and her gaze is turned inward. It’s a good song, but I don’t seem to be listening. Or maybe the spectacle makes me uncomfortable. Either way, the camera drifts away. It spends a while bobbing around the room like a drunk mosquito, before finally coming to rest on a light fixture overhead, where it stays until the end of the song.
And then there is some footage of one of Amanda’s first shows. I recognize the place. We’re at Zeitgeist, a tiny art gallery that used to be two blocks from my grandmother’s apartment. The place has been shuttered for years, plywood nailed over the windows and painted black. I still drive by it every time I go home to visit. Amanda is dressed up like a Claymation figure from a Tim Burton movie, with black curlicues painted around her eyes in a spidery hand. The cellist that she may or may not still have been sleeping with at that point is on stage too, his hair in pigtails. There are maybe ten of us in the audience, arranged on a smattering of folding chairs, but from the way Amanda carries herself, you’d think this is Madison Square Garden. Everything about the way she moves—the exaggerated arc of her wrist hovering above the keyboard, a single finger dropping to a high C like a hungry bird plunging into water—has a mysterious weight to it that commands attention. But because the gallery is completely dark I have the camera in night-vision mode, which turns Amanda an unfortunate shade of radioactive green and her eyes into zombified laser beams. Also distracting were the two friends I’d brought with me, people who wouldn’t have enjoyed this kind of music under the best of circumstances and could barely contain their eye-rolling. As soon as we are back out on the sidewalk one of them turns to me, pushing his big green face into the camera.
“That SUCKED!” he yells. And then there is just the sound of my laughter, echoing gr
eenly down the empty street.
Finally there is this, an interview on a beach somewhere on the southeastern seaboard. Amanda has just returned from peeing in the ocean and now we are lying down on the sand, where she shades her eyes from the midday sun, framed by the wind-whipped ocean and a shore drained of color. We are talking about work.
“What do you say when people ask you what you do?” my disembodied voice asks from behind the camera.
“The answer really depends on who’s asking me. Generally I tell them that I’m a mime for a living, but I’m really just supporting myself as a musician with street theater.”
“You seem so immune from the outward pressure to get a normal job. Could you talk more about that?”
“I’m just against doing something for someone else for money that I don’t care about—I think most people are. I don’t think that’s so strange.”
“But most people do it …” I prod.
“I don’t want to get down on people,” Amanda begins, shifting to one elbow, “but I think there are hundreds of creative ways to make money and people are just not into exploring them. I like not having to depend on anyone. You are totally responsible. If it fails, it fails—and that’s fine. You do what you want to do. If you want to make X amount of money you obviously have to put in X amount of effort, and I like things that way. It’s simple. I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be working in an office and be totally productive or nonproductive and still get your twelve-fifty an hour. That must feel fucking awful.”
Twelve-fifty an hour, at the time, was fifty cents more than I was making directing special projects—none of them my own. And the thing Amanda didn’t realize was that the frustrated office people, the ones not exploring making money in nonconventional ways, the ones feeling fucking awful, were me. And the thing I didn’t realize at that moment, lying on the beach, was that the conversation I was having with Amanda was actually a conversation I was having with myself. It did sound so simple when Amanda put things that way. Knowing what you want and then doing it. Cause and effect. Effort equals outcome. Then what was it that stopped me from even trying?
