Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  “Sure, Wendell. I gotta get dressed.”

  I went to my room and got ready for bed. I heard Amy bustling around, then the front door closing and her Camaro driving away. The play was done, and I was finishing up the semester with one B, two C’s, and a D in my costume class—I hadn’t studied for the final because I just didn’t care. It was easier to be a ghostlike presence in my own life, sleepwalking through the days.

  The next night, I went to the station with Amy. The story of Amy’s being locked in the bathroom for nine hours had been on the WBCN news all that day. Amy had been enjoying her celebrity status, and when I got to the station, people asked me, “Oh, are you the one with the mom who couldn’t hear Amy screaming and beating on the door for nine hours?” Yes, it was my mom, my bathroom.

  Oedipus was in the booth doing his show, and Amy was answering the phone and taking requests. I watched Oedipus talking into the microphone, coolly flipping buttons on the board in front of him. He was a mystery—no one knew his real name, where he came from, how old he was. Nothing. He had this iceman persona that I could feel through the thick glass separating him from the rest of us ordinary people. There was nothing special about his looks. He was not handsome or tall; kind of scrawny—the kind of guy you’d walk past without noticing except that his hair was dyed hot pink. He probably got beat up every day in high school, but now he was Oedipus, the world’s first punk-rock DJ. Sometimes he’d flash a reptilian smile at us through the glass, a smile that said he had the power and we were still little girls.

  I was uneasily returning one of these smiles when a group of young men burst out of the elevator into the room, swearing in thick North London accents. Their manager, a middle-aged, fluffy-haired, portly type in a tight checked suit, introduced himself to us and said that the band had an interview on the air. They had been playing gigs in town, and he had brought copies of their record to the station. One of the boys stood out, to me anyway, as he seemed quieter than the rest and wasn’t quite as drunk. He was not much taller than me, with cropped dark hair, pale skin, and incredibly sweet brown eyes. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that said FUCK ART LET’S DANCE, and lace-up Doc Martens boots. We looked at each other, and it seemed to me that we had met somewhere before, but that was impossible of course. He smiled at me like he knew my secret.

  The manager, whose name was Kellogg, puffed himself up and, making a sweeping arm gesture, said, “This is Madness. These are my boys.” They all piled into the studio boisterously to be interviewed, all seven of them. I just kept looking at the one, and he at me. All the boys took turns at the microphone, and I heard him say his name was Lee and he played saxophone in the band. It was their first time in the States, and they were going down to New York tomorrow to play some more shows before touring the Midwest.

  After the interview, they all spilled out of the booth.

  Lee walked up to me.

  “What’s your name?” He had soft eyes like I remembered my dad having.

  “Wendy.”

  “Like in Peter Pan?” He chuckled.

  “Yeah, like in Peter Pan.”

  “Can you fly then? You look like an angel, ya know.”

  I told him I couldn’t fly and I wasn’t an angel.

  “You coming back to the hotel?” He was carrying his sax case. He lit up a Kent.

  “Um, sure.” I had heard Kellogg saying he was going to pick up some more records to drop off at the station.

  “You got a car?”

  A few minutes later, we were in my car driving down Boylston Street to Lee’s hotel. Amy had Kellogg jammed in her Camaro with a few of the other boys in the band in the backseat, and a taxi took the rest.

  The hotel was really a motel and a dump. We sat on the bed in Lee’s room, surrounded by all the other guys and beer cans, and talked. He told me he’d basically started playing the sax because it was either that or a life of crime. He had already been sent to a reformatory for breaking into parking meters, and his dad had died in jail. He told me he had a girlfriend back in England and he’d known her since they were kids. He took my hand and said he wanted to ask me something.

  “What is it?”

  “Can I come home with you?”

  I told him sure, trying to be cool and not show how wildly thrilled I was that he had asked, and he got his suitcase and his sax. We managed to leave without anyone’s noticing us; they were all too busy getting hammered. I saw Amy talking to Kellogg and figured she was a big girl and could take care of herself.

  We drove down Storrow Drive along the Charles toward Belmont. We rolled down the windows and Lee fiddled with the radio, finding some Stan Getz on a jazz station. The wind whipped around us and the music played and I wondered if I was about to have my first groupie experience. Then Lee told me he didn’t want me to get the wrong idea. He was tired of hotels, and the rest of the lads would be up all night partying and he just wanted some peace and quiet. He wanted to get some sleep. I was a bit disappointed that he wasn’t going to try anything. I was quiet for a time and then he said, “Besides, I couldn’t do that to you. I’m going far away and who knows what’ll happen.”

  When we got to my house, it was two in the morning and all the lights were out. Since my relationship with this man was doomed to innocence, I didn’t think twice about bringing him home; it was my house, too, and I was twenty years old. I took Lee into the guest room on the first floor. He pulled back the covers, lay down, and fell asleep immediately. His saxophone was parked in the corner in a case. I went upstairs and tried to sleep.

  I woke up to find Mother standing over me, glaring at me like a cobra before the strike.

  “Who the hell is that?” she hissed, making her eyes all schrinchy as a cloud of cigarette smoke filled my small, dark room.

  “Oh . . .,” I stammered. I had forgotten about the sleeping sax player in the guest room. “That’s just a friend, he’s just sleeping in the guest room so he can get some, um, sleep.” I explained that he was a musician and that I had met him last night and offered him a quiet place to sleep for the night. The quiet part was quickly coming to an end I could see.

  “It’s that girl with her fucking rock ’n’ roll lifestyle!” she shouted. “You fucked him in my house!” Her voice kept getting louder.

  For a brief moment, I pondered the irony of this accusation. How many times had I woken up to an unidentified, furry-backed sleeping mound in our guest room, or a complete stranger at the breakfast table? Guys named Ted, Norman, Roger, Dick. Men in tailored suits with silk ties and cuff links, or blazers and Gucci loafers, or the one in the flannel shirt who drove a pickup truck and kept his conversation to single syllables. I couldn’t even remember what he looked like, let alone his name. And yet, here was a man with whom I had not had sex and that was a big problem for her.

  I denied that anything had happened between us in the house, and she didn’t believe me and told me to get him out. She had apparently talked to him, because she made some snobby reference to his accent, which was working-class Camden Town. I actually think that this was what bothered her the most. If I had brought home someone wearing an ascot with a posh accent, she would have brought him breakfast in bed on a tray.

  I dressed quickly and crept downstairs to find Lee, looking sleepy but perfectly content sitting on the end of the bed.

  “I think your mum doesn’t like me.” He yawned and scratched his head and smiled. “I suppose she has someone special and she knows it.”

  It was sweet that he viewed my mother’s lunacy as loving protection. I thought about this for a second, then realized that his saxophone case was missing from the room, gone from the corner it had been in last night. Mother had obviously taken it, probably sneaking in when Lee was asleep or in the bathroom.

  Lee was expected back at his hotel within the hour, as they were all heading down to New York to continue their tour. I raced through the house looking everywhere. Finally, we had to go or he would miss the band bus. We went through the
garage to get to my car, and there on top of the woodpile was his sax. We grabbed it and I drove him back to the seedy motor court. I stood with him in the parking lot while the roadies loaded equipment into a big bus and the rest of the band straggled by in various stages of hangover.

  “What did you two get up to last night then?” said Chris, the guitar player. “Up all night reading poetry?”

  Everyone snickered.

  “Why don’t you come down to New York with us?” Lee took my hand and squeezed it.

  “I really can’t.” I didn’t see how, as I had school and crazy-mom patrol.

  “I just want to talk to ya. Come on, please. I told ya, no funny business.” A pop star with principles. I wanted to go with him; I ached to go. I wondered in a flash why I was so responsible. Who had made me this way? I wrote my phone number and address on a matchbook I found in my jacket pocket.

  “Call me? Or write to me, okay?” I pushed it into his palm.

  He tucked it in his pocket. “Yeah, I will. I’ll call ya in a few days.”

  I gave him a kiss while the band hung out the windows whooping at us. The bus started up and the driver honked the horn. Lee got on, then stuck his head out the bus window and smiled at me until I couldn’t see him anymore.

  Amy moved out shortly after Lee’s departure. She had found an apartment near Emerson. “You know, your mom blames me for your so-called trampy behavior.”

  I only wished I had had the opportunity to be a tramp. “Yeah, I know. Sorry about that.”

  Amy loaded her stuff, packed in milk crates, into the trunk of the Camaro. “No worries, Wendelson. I do have a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and I love it.” She threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug.

  I watched her get into her car.

  “And I don’t give a shit what your mother thinks.” She scrutinized me for a second, then added, “And you shouldn’t either. See ya, girlfriend.”

  A week later, I got a big greeting card with red roses all over it postmarked from Detroit that said FOR MY WONDERFUL SWEETHEART. Lee wrote, telling me that he had tried to call me three times, but had talked to Mother, who wasn’t very happy about it, especially when he had called once at two in the morning. Of course, she hadn’t told me that he had called at all.

  chapter fifteen

  PUCK PANTS

  I didn’t so much drop out of Boston University; I just sort of stopped going. Somehow it seemed pointless marking time in school when I could just get a job and be paid for it. I started working at Out of Town News, a big international newsstand in the middle of Harvard Square. I froze my butt off that winter, standing outside taking change for newspapers and magazines. As a job, it was a bit boring, but the people were nice and I liked being in Harvard Square. Sometimes I worked the cash register inside, where it was warmer, and called my sister in Missouri on the office phone when my boss wasn’t around. She was doing well in school and thinking about a career in journalism. I was glad someone in our family had direction. It certainly wasn’t me.

  At the newsstand, I also got to look at all the British fashion and music magazines. I would scan the latter for news of Lee. Things were going well for Madness. They were starring on Top of the Pops and playing to packed houses.

  One day in the spring I was at work when I overheard two people talking about a new theater that was going to be starting up at Harvard. It was going to be run by Robert Brustein, who had previously run the graduate theater program at the Yale School of Drama. He was bringing a lot of people from Yale to Harvard, and the buzz was big. The Loeb was just a few blocks away on Brattle Street, so on my lunch hour I walked over. I went through the glass doors into the theater lobby and spied a tall, brown-haired man dressed in black, rumpled clothing. He was in his late twenties and looked as if he hadn’t bathed in a while. He was wearing a tool belt with lots of rolls of different-colored tape hanging on it, and he was swearing and loading batteries into a flashlight.

  I smiled at him, trying to look both cute and capable. “Hi. Um, I was wondering if I could apply for a job here at the theater.”

  He kept fiddling with the flashlight. “Piece of shit,” he muttered under his breath at the flashlight.

  “I heard they were looking for people.”

  He looked up at me. “You have any tech experience?” He snapped the top on the flashlight and tossed it into a big, black wooden box at his feet.

  “Not really, no.” I was too embarrassed to tell him I had once run the light board in high school.

  “Great. You’re hired. Come back at noon on Saturday.”

  “Wow, really? That’s fantastic! Thanks.”

  “Sure. When you come back, ask for me, my name’s Randy. I’m the technical director.”

  “Okay, Randy. And thanks again!” I resisted the temptation to kiss his hand and skipped out of the theater amazed at my luck. Here was a chance to work in the theater behind the scenes, an opportunity to listen and learn and be around talented people. I would have taken a job cleaning the toilets if they had asked me.

  I immediately gave my notice at the newsstand, excitedly telling everyone there about my new job at the American Repertory Theater, as it was to be called. I reported for work and Randy put me on the scenery crew with four other pretty young women who were all around my size and all blond. We were like Randy’s harem stage crew or something.

  We were responsible for moving huge pieces of scenery onstage to transform a child’s playground, where the first act took place, into a prewar apartment on the Upper West Side of New York, for the second act. All this was to take place during the fifteen-minute intermission for a new play called Terry by Terry that was opening the season. It was to be in repertory with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We dragged the towering walls of built-in bookshelves and windows by ropes. The set actually had a ceiling, which, once we had locked the walls to each other, had to be lowered with pulleys from above the stage. The first time we did the change, it took forty-five minutes and we were all crying by the end of it. Randy seemed to relish his role as slave master. All he needed was a whip.

  “Okay, girls, let’s try it again!” Randy boomed.

  This required putting the set back to its original position and then repeating the change. By the end of that first day, the guy who had designed the set, some Yalie named Andrew Jackness, had been dubbed by his short, blond, non-weight-lifting crew “Jackass.” Jackass sat in the theater eating a sandwich while we groaned, pushing and pulling the set back into place. Randy licked his lips and seemed to get off even more the sweatier we became.

  “Jesus, Randy,” said a girl named Lisa, who was mopping her brow with the bottom of her T-shirt. Another girl, Linda, started to cry harder.

  “I said one more time! We need to get this sucker down to fifteen minutes, tops!” Randy hollered at us, brandishing his stopwatch. Jackass broke open a bag of Lay’s potato chips and propped his feet up on the chair in front of him. I imagined him being drawn and quartered in Harvard Square.

  Even though every day of my new job was like reporting for duty on a slave ship and having to row for twelve hours, it was still the theater and I never missed my old job making change at the newsstand. Our crew worked hard all during technical rehearsals until, on opening night, we had finally got the change down to half an hour. Only then, with a full house waiting for the second act to begin and the stage manager and the house manager backstage arguing with Randy, did Randy see the error of his ways. It wasn’t really our faults: Jackass had designed the Moby-Dick of sets. It was enormous and took up the entire stage. And the play sucked.

  The next day, Randy went out trawling on Brattle Street for beefy men to join his set crew, and we little women were relocated to different departments. Granted a reprieve, I was given a job in wardrobe that even came with a small raise. With this extra money, I was able to finish paying off my gargantuan therapy bill to Dr. Keylor.

  I loved my new job as a wardrobe assistant, even though I knew almost nothing about s
ewing. My boss was a hilarious gay guy named Don Swanson. He was a little, puckish man-with a raunchy sense of humor and a laugh that sounded like the Wicked Witch’s. He chain-smoked Kools and had one of those beards that made him look like a beatnik version of Satan. Soon we were best friends, and he didn’t care that I didn’t know how to sew or fix wigs. “Oh, just beat it with a stick!” he would cackle.

  My duties included doing the laundry for all the actors and actresses, any repair work that needed to be done, and helping with quick changes backstage. I had to sew up holes in Carmen De Lavallade’s bodysuit that she wore as Titania and strap Mark Linn-Baker into his flying harness for Puck, then test it by standing on a chair and trying to lift him. After the show, I fluffed the white, furry trousers he wore as Puck with a wire hairbrush. I held a flashlight in my teeth and helped the lovers change backstage for the wedding scene. And I watched the play—every night. The onstage chorus, dressed in iridescent green robes, sang music from The Fairy-Queen by Purcell. It was a wonderful production of the play—comical and well acted, with touches of sadness and darkness, too. I loved just being at the theater, the way it smelled, looked, and made me feel. Watching the shows from the wings every night, I felt that I was home.

  I liked to deliver the laundry to the men’s dressing room, which was more lively and less serious than the women’s. The actresses seemed more interested in their preparation, whereas the men’s idea of a warm-up was to have a cigarette and read the paper. It reminded me of going backstage to see my dad at the Guthrie when I was a little girl. He’d be in his dressing room after the play in his undershirt taking off his makeup and having a beer. Which probably explains why I had innocent crushes on all those guys at the A.R.T.

  During rehearsals for Midsummer Night’s Dream, I had started talking with an actor in the cast. We were both backstage—he was waiting for his next entrance, and I was waiting for my next costume change. He was playing one of the fairies and wore a green bodysuit that covered all of him, including his face. It was like talking to a giant stalk of celery.