I soaked it up, not just the sights and sounds, but also something on the molecular level: a collective exhale, a feeling of having stumbled into a safe haven where we could all be as bold or as dark or as scarred as we were, and it would gain us recognition, not ridicule. I didn’t yet have the clothes to dress like them and was simply wearing a baggy black skirt and an army-green sweater, but I’d found my people: the Goths.
We made our way to the sloping lawn at the very back of the venue and waited. It felt as if all of the dials of my experience had been turned up to eleven, and my skin had been peeled off, and I was standing there totally exposed and more sensitive to input than ever before. It was sort of how I felt all the time, just amplified. But whereas in the real world of my droning school daze and quiet family time it was uncomfortable to be an emotional adrenaline junkie, such larger-than-life feeling was celebrated in this space.
The stadium was outside, and it was a drizzly night in late September, everything slightly damp with the threat of rain. Great gusting fog banks rolled in and out of the air around us, making the faded grass look like a moor out of one of the Brontë books. An epic wash of music rolled over us from all directions at once. Robert Smith slouched over his microphone wearily, his pure white high tops glinting amid a sea of black clothes, black hair, black emotions. The drums, bass, and guitars formed a wall of churning sonic sludge, synths like shards of sunlight, as the band opened their concert with “Plainsong,” the first song on their new album.
Somewhere in the middle of the second or third song, my father appeared out of the mist, smiling shyly when he saw me amid the other teenagers. He’d found a cheap scalped ticket and decided to see what the Cure was all about. Too unused to him being my dad to react with normal teenage irritation, and having long mimicked his tastes and wanted to share his life, I was thrilled at the possibility of introducing him to a band and an experience he might now value. I basked in the feeling of being interesting to him. And then, as I adjusted to his presence, for once in my life I shook it off. This night was not about him. It was mine, all mine.
Eventually, Donyelle and I left my dad behind and pushed down to the edge of the lawn seats. I looked back over my shoulder, feeling guilty, until the fog swallowed him completely. Then I lost myself in the music, swaying my body freely in the anonymity of the damp darkness, singing along to every single word of every single song, enraptured. The band played forever, three encores in all, before disappearing into the wings in a haze of feedback. I quickly looked over at Donyelle, a little embarrassed at having let myself go so completely, now that I found myself back in my awkward teenage body. We trudged up the hill to where my dad waited.
“Did you like it?” Dad asked.
I nodded my head in the curt, conversation-deadening way of teenagers, reluctant to share the moment even with him. The crowd of elated fans pushed us along to the merch tables. I absolutely had to get a T-shirt, and I pulled us into line.
“Which one are you going to get?” I asked my friend.
“I don’t have enough money left,” she said.
My dad looked up from where he stood a little ways off, hands in pockets.
“How much are they?” he asked.
“Twenty dollars,” she said.
My dad reached for his wallet. As he handed her a twenty-dollar bill, I was filled with gratitude that he was being so cool to my friend. I didn’t even get jealous when he didn’t pay for my shirt. I’d had a perfect night, and I thanked him as I hugged him good-bye.
That concert changed everything for me. All of my anxiety about being the kind of girl my dad would want to know, and now a desirable girl boys would want to be close to, had built up inside me for so long. Betty had been a model. Mom was beautiful by any standards, and especially well suited to the earth-mother ideal of the seventies. But I hated my freckles, hated how my skin broke out, hated being almost six feet tall, hated my curves, which I hid with baggy clothes. Here was my chance to say, “Fuck it, I don’t want to be pretty anyhow.”
I bought a black eyeliner pencil and a red lipstick at a drugstore near the hotel where we’d stayed with Donyelle’s parents before they drove us back to Maine. When I went to school on Monday (in my Cure concert T-shirt, of course), I’d made my face into the mask that felt safe, even though it drew attention in a way I never would have been comfortable with before. Now I had been given something to aspire to and the permission to be honest: I was in pain. I wanted everyone to know.
From that moment, high school was truly unbearable. I never got beaten up, but the emotional assault from my closed-minded classmates was constant. As much as I’d sometimes found school boring, I’d always loved to read and learn, but now every second outside of English class was intolerable. One afternoon, I rushed toward an open stall in the bathroom, having said I had cramps to escape gym class. A group of girls were gathered around the mirror, all skintight acid-washed jeans, feathered hair. They turned their hard, heartless eyes of predators on me.
“I don’t know why she friggin’ looks like that.”
“I know, it’s fuckin’ disgustin’.”
My fingers trembling, I slid the lock closed again and again until it latched.
“I heard she’s a lesbian.”
“I heard she worships Satan.”
I stood paralyzed. Somehow, I was going to get out of this school, and when I did, I was never coming back. Finally, the bell rang, and I heard them slam the door. Still shaking slightly, I delayed my exit, grateful for the empty hallways.
As much as I wanted to be a grown-up, I wasn’t all that into the specifics of being an adult woman. I didn’t want to have my period, which came as infrequently as every three or four months. My skin broke out and my freckles did not go away. There was nothing to do in our little town but eat junk food after school, and I got chubby, which only made me curvier and more awkward. I wanted to live in a rarefied world of ideas—strident punk lyrics, the dark wit of Sylvia Plath, and the old-school romanticism of Charlotte Brontë and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.
Although the Cure concert was pretty much the best thing that had ever happened to me, after the fact, I felt guilty for having left my dad alone to get closer to the stage and I worried he might think I didn’t care about seeing him anymore. So I screwed up my courage and wrote him a letter apologizing for acting like a jerk.
My father answered in late October. He wasn’t the least bit upset by my behavior: “And Sarah if you acted like a jerk I never noticed, if you acted like a teenager with her friends, you have my permission to act like a teenager for the next 7 or 8 years.”
Best of all, my dad had picked up on my mention of another trip to Boston soon, and he actually offered to help make it happen: “This way I can teach you where it’s safe + how to get round, + where everything is, of course it depends on parental approval all around + also I’d like to talk with Sue + Craig first.” I was ecstatic, so much so that I chose to ignore the rest of the letter, which revealed that my father remained a master of making definite promises that left him all possible outs: “That would be sometime in 1990, or later, or whenever + depending on my still being around these parts.”
Suddenly we were having something remarkably like a dad-daughter relationship. He wrote: “Oh yes the weekend would be an exchange, I want to learn how to read music or at least pick out chords in a song. You’re still one of my favorite people in the world.” I was hungry to be acknowledged and thought it was cool he wanted me to teach him something, even though I could barely read music after having briefly studied flute in elementary school. As an added bonus, he’d signed off, “Love Dad,” which was rare for him.
His usual signature was “Love John.” This may seem an inconsequential detail, but at age eight or eleven or thirteen, it was fairly devastating to receive a letter from “John,” especially when I already had a “Craig,” and what I really wanted was a “Dad.”
I was high on that letter for weeks. Even though I�
�d reached an age when most kids had started calling bullshit on their parents, and my dad had certainly given me plenty to call him out on, I believed in him more than ever. The fact that he’d followed through with a ride to the concert, even if it had just been one promise kept in the face of the dozens of times he’d left me at the window, meant that everything had turned around the way I’d always expected. I bragged to my friends at school about how my dad lived in Boston, and I’d probably, you know, be going down to see him all of the time.
Of course, it wasn’t going to be quite that easy. I got another letter a few weeks later. This one didn’t mention a visit, and his tone made me nervous: “Hi Honey, I’m a little disappointed that you haven’t sent me the $20 that I lent your friend. I don’t blame you Sarah or even your friend, nobody asked me, I offered the loan + that’s what I’m feeling bad about now, that I did, if I gave money to anyone, it would be you. So I hope we can clear this up, at least write + let me know what’s going on. I got an idea of something we can do together. But first things first. Love, John”
Mom had sheltered me from my dad’s money woes, never letting on he’d given her less than five hundred dollars of child support by the time I was eight, at which point she’d given up. Now I was part of his financial problems. I never would have asked my mom for a loan to repay my dad, and I was too conflict-avoidant to press the issue with my friend, so I just waited and hoped the situation would resolve itself. But I was convinced this was it—this time I’d accidentally done something that would drive my dad away forever—especially when I didn’t hear from him again that fall.
I began petitioning Mom to let me go away to boarding school, as a number of my friends, including Donyelle, had done or would do the next year. I had no illusion that I was a prep school girl. But I truly did not believe I would survive three more years in my local high school. I think Mom was beginning to realize that my misery wasn’t just going to lift one day, nor were the administrators at Lincoln Academy going to do anything on my behalf. Still, she was careful to temper my expectations. The schools were expensive and exclusive. Even though I was still a perfectionist, and I consumed books as if they were potato chips, I hadn’t exactly been inspired to the heights of academic excellence.
My dad resumed contact with me just before my birthday in January. He apologized for having been out of touch, explaining that he’d been preoccupied with trying to get money from the insurance company for a car accident he’d had in April of 1989. His letter included mention of some tapes by the Cure and the Virgin Prunes I’d asked for, which he’d tried to find for me. And plans for a weekend visit soon. “I want to talk to you, about your life, why you’re attracted to punk. What’s their philosophy?” And about a woman he knew in Boston whom he’d told me to get in touch with about my hopes to escape to private school. “She said you never got in touch with her, she could be a big help, she knows so much more about getting into schools than you do.” Although he’d never taken more than a passing interest in anything having to do with my upbringing or education—preferring, generally, to keep our contact on the astral plane—now that he’d gotten involved, he had strong feelings on the matter.
He had a way of beating me to anything bordering on a negative assessment of the situation and apologizing. So it was hard for me to be upset, even if his contrition never came with any attempts to change his behavior. “I love you very much I know it might not seem that way by the little amount of time I spend with you. Love John.”
In many ways, his was the perfect, logical approach. He acknowledged his shortcomings and made sure I knew he loved me in spite of them. But I was a fourteen-year-old girl, and there was nothing measured about my approach to anything. I wanted proof of his love. He missed my birthday, and his belated card began with another apology: “Hi Honey, Happy Birthday, I’m sorry this is late, + my plans haven’t worked out about coming up there yet.” He explained his back had relapsed, and “Everything depends on me getting something from the insurance co, which I’m not certain of, so I’m really not certain of anything right now. As I find out, I’ll let you know.”
My father’s money trouble suddenly, really, became my problem, too, as he became completely consumed by his insurance settlement, which filled his letters and impacted his plans. He did surprise me by visiting that spring, a trip that was so impromptu he hadn’t made a motel reservation and ended up staying at our house like he had when I was little.
My dad and I had not had any one-on-one time together in five years, since before he’d started dating Eva and had my sister, whom he barely mentioned. I did not ask about Asmara; I was still competitive about how much time he spent with her. I found it deeply reassuring that he’d only been to Germany once since Eva had taken her there. Never mind that he hadn’t made the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Maine even that often.
I was overjoyed at his presence, but quickly disappointed when the trip didn’t have the magical ascendancy of our childhood adventures. He did take me to a record store where he lent me money to buy one of the coveted tapes from the list I constantly updated, prioritizing carefully because I had so little money to spend.
My dad and I had more to talk about than ever before, now that I shared his passion for film, books, and music. But on this visit, my dad wasn’t as capable of getting lost in his tangential musings on culture and the cosmic side of life. He was preoccupied with his insurance settlement. On his last day with me, when I was hoping for a final, more special adventure, he took a nap. Although I didn’t dare show any displeasure, of course, he addressed the matter in his next letter: “I’m sorry we didn’t spend much time together Sunday, my nap set me up good for the ride home, in fact I had this spiritual experience riding back, it was very nice.” But then, after expressing gratitude to Mom and Craig, he resumed his by-now-familiar complaint. “I’ll have to see how things go. And that brings up something I’ve wanted to talk to you about, money. I bought that tape for you + you said you were going to give me the difference when you got home + we both forgot, then on the way home I figured Sue + Craig saved me the price of a motel room, so let’s call it even, but I just don’t like you forgetting, it’s a sore point with me right now because I don’t have much $. I’d like to be able to give you some or buy things for you like your friend’s parents but I can’t. And that brings me to the $20.00—I’m a little disappointed, not in you but your friend. If I thought I wasn’t getting it back, I never would have lent it to her. You can understand right Sarah? If I give money away, I much rather give it to you, so that $20.00 is yours if you ever get it. Maybe that will make it easier to collect. I love you. You don’t have to write to me, or answer this card, don’t feel obligated to do so. But if you need someone to write or talk to, please do. John”
I wrote back, ignoring his tone about money, and feeling like I’d been rewarded for the persistence of my devotion. Now that he and I were corresponding directly with each other, our relationship enjoyed a renaissance. I think the safety and distance of the written word allowed us to overcome the fact that we were incredibly close on one level, but in the reality of our daily lives and experiences, we were essentially strangers.
As a teenager, I could also be intimate with my dad in a way I hadn’t been able to as a child. I knew from Mom that when they were together, my dad had been obsessed with the Beat writers and insisted they drive the winding back roads of New England in search of first editions and obscure, hard-to-find works by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and my dad’s absolute favorite, Jack Kerouac. When my dad unearthed one of these books, it was a momentary victory for both of them, especially in such isolated rural towns where it felt like the cultural revolution had never happened. Once my father devoured the book, he released it back into the universe. He did not believe it was his to possess. This was frustrating for Mom, given the time and effort that had gone into acquiring the books for him. Not to mention the money.
Because Kerouac was my dad’s favorite, I started
there, with On the Road. He later sent me copies of other Kerouac books, including a second-edition paperback of The Subterraneans that remains one of my prized possessions. I made a big show of loving On the Road, because it was counterculture and cool, and I felt a bit in the know, not only for having read it, but for being able to say I had been turned onto it by my father, who had hitchhiked the country like its heroes. My dad’s irresponsibility was something like social currency, and I cashed in, overjoyed that others might see him with even a fraction of the admiration I had lavished on him. He was a cool guy. He was remarkable. And so maybe I was, too.
I also recommended books to my father that I had read and become enamored of—including The Mists of Avalon—to which he responded with a list of the books he was reading along with brief descriptions: “Fury on Earth, a Wilhelm Reich biography, remember the place we visited at Rangeley? Biogenetics—the guy who wrote this (Lowen) was in therapy with Reich in the 40s. Primal Scream + Primal Revolution, Rebirthing in the New Age, Rebirthing (The Science of Enjoying All of Your Life), these two are about breathing a certain way + it’s more of self-therapy, Occult Conspiracy. I’m also having some good meditations. Well just to let you know what I’m into right now. If your interested in any of it, we can talk about it when we see each other. And feel free to write anytime. I’m glad your so busy, well I’m glad if your glad. Love Dad”
Outside of the landscape of ideas, our relationship limped along much as it always had: with apologies, and explanations: “Bare with me. I’m also generating income very slowly because of my back.”
Meanwhile, every day at Lincoln was like being stretched on the rack. Thankfully, my horizons broadened through older friends, and the drama club, with which I traveled to festivals at other high schools, where I met like-minded students. We drew sustenance from one another to weather the animosity and violence we faced from the majority of our classmates. I started visiting a couple I met at one of these drama outings, Rob and Hanna, who lived an hour away. I’d been drawn to them at first sight, Rob with his dyed black mop, nose ring, and tattoos, and Hanna with her short, spiky hair and bright red lipstick, and had made sure we became friends. I was fourteen when he gave us acid, which I was eager to try as yet another experience, and a way to understand my father better. I had no anxiety as we sat in Hanna’s parents’ kitchen one weekend when they were away, loving the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than myself, and the ritual, as Rob ceremoniously sliced oranges for us, instructing us on how to rest the tab of acid beneath our tongues and then eat the fruit, the vitamin C from which would supposedly spike our high. The trip itself was lovely, including a hallucination that Hanna’s home was a dollhouse, the roof lifted off by a gentle giant. We were in no danger, cozy as we were together, nestled in the safe nest of the universe.
Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) Page 6
