The university ski club provided a whole new supply of boyfriends with good balance and chapped lips. As usual, Mary was in charge of procurement. She was still more of a lodge bunny, the toast of the chili-con-carne crowd, and so by the time I’d made a few runs and come in for a snack, Mary had several possibilities lined up. Usually some guy would be flirting with her, and because most people ski in pairs, his friend would be getting antsy to go back out and do a few more runs. Mary would conveniently send me off to ski with the friend. He’d have had a few beers by then and not be feeling too particular. We’d talk going up on the chairlift. By the time we arrived back at the bus, I had a new boyfriend.
***
In high school I had a battery pack of extra energy, and if it wasn’t going to be put to use masterminding bank robberies and bookmaking, there needed to be another outlet.
Humor has been part of my life as far back as I can remember. Dad used to play the social parody songs by Allan Sherman and Tom Lehrer on his guitar. Though I couldn’t seem to remember much that was taught in school, by the age of eight I knew all the lyrics to not only Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” but also Lehrer’s “Poisoning
Pigeons in the Park,” “The Old Dope Peddler,” and “We Will All Go Together When We Go.” This last number was about a nuclear holocaust and included such inspired lines as “No one will have the endurance to collect on their insurance.” I also took to heart what Lehrer said in his introduction to that song: “Life is like a sewer—what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”
My early material consisted mostly of telling jokes about teachers, mimicking teachers, drawing cartoons lampooning teachers, and writing poems and songs making fun of teachers. Additionally, I had a number of props—rubber animal noses, headbands with attached wings, and a nun’s habit.
My high school class was fortunate to get in under the wire before mimeographed dittos became photocopied pages. Dittos had bright purple ink and when fresh off the machine they radiated an intoxicating smell of ink, alcohol, and chemicals. We’d press them to our faces as if getting high on airplane glue. When students walked into a classroom and saw a batch of them that had just been run off, they gleefully shouted, “Dittos!” and like a bunch of crackheads we’d fight to get them under our noses.
I specialized in laying my hands on the dittos before they were run off and making a few alterations. For instance, I’d write fun (but true) facts around the edges, such as this gem: While Henry David Thoreau was supposedly living off the land in solitary confinement at Walden Pond, outlining his philosophy of self-reliance, he was going home to have dinner with Mom practically every night and probably bringing along his laundry.
The teachers always knew who was behind such mischief, but they never actually caught me, and it was just silly stuff anyway. If we were studying an author or historical figure in school, I’d look them up beforehand to find some inappropriate detail that wouldn’t be served up in school, such as Edgar Allen Poe having married his fourteen-year-old cousin, and then ask the teacher about it. While studying the French Symbolists, I asked about Paul Verlaine leaving his wife for Arthur Rimbaud and then shooting Rimbaud and being imprisoned for two years. As we read Main Street, I inquired about Sinclair Lewis’s alcoholism and how he finished several of his novels in rehab clinics. Had this in any way been a result of Lewis having suffered from bad acne as a teenager and being terribly pockmarked?
For livening up the school bus, I was fond of any sort of pig paraphernalia, whether it was attachable ears or glasses with a snout. On the soccer field I usually wore a pig T-shirt and a headband with wings stitched to the sides that I’d crafted myself (about as far as home economics took me). My purse had a moose on one side and a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt on the other. I usually had some ridiculous drawing inside my notebook that I could flash to crack up a friend at the exact moment a teacher was delivering some important piece of information.
Aside from the soccer team and helping Pete with the musicals, I wasn’t much of a joiner, though I liked to drop in on events according to my own schedule. For instance, Mary and Heather both volunteered at Millard Fillmore Hospital in downtown Buffalo. They were registered, and they had name tags, uniforms, training, and schedules. I’d often accompany them and grab a candy-striper smock out of the laundry room, wheel the gift cart around, tell a few jokes, and do coin tricks for some of the kids. After an hour or so, my attention span would be exhausted and I’d wander around the city until it was time to meet them and leave. The only telltale sign that I wasn’t supposed to be in the hospital was that I didn’t have a name tag. Heather and Mary referred to me as “the unknown volunteer,” because whenever the gift-shop manager or volunteer coordinator would ask about their blond friend, they’d pretend not to have seen any blond girl. We did this for many months, and eventually the staff probably volunteered themselves for psychiatric testing.
No one had heard of anything called attention deficit disorder when I was growing up (forget restless legs syndrome). If ADHD had been part of the lingo, I imagine my name would have easily made the Ten Most Wanted list. I had such a case of disco arms and ankles that my fingers could drum out the entire “Star-Spangled Banner” while my shoes wore down two spots on the linoleum floor. It was impossible to pay attention to anything for more than a minute unless I was extremely interested, and then the limit was five. In photographs from these years I am the blurred spot.
It’s safe to say that the only area where I distinguished myself throughout a decadelong academic and sports career was in playing Boggle, a game where you see who can make the most words out of sixteen random letters. I searched to see if a college scholarship existed for strong Boggle players, and though there seemed to be ones for everything else, including welding, knitting, and aquatic entomology, I found nothing.
***
The student body at my school was less financially gifted and more casual than that of the nearby Amherst and Williamsville districts. Where we leaned more toward sneakers, jeans, T-shirts, and sweatshirts, they preferred Shetland-wool sweaters, Dockers-style khaki pants, loafers, and Pappagallo purses. Along with the requisite preps, burnouts, brains, geeks, and musicians, we specialized in towel-snapping jocks and vivacious cheerleaders.
But the lines were not drawn as strictly as in a Hollywood movie. Neighborhoods were small, and most of us had known each other since childhood, so once we became teenagers it was difficult to forge a whole new identity on a low budget. Few kids owned cars in high school. About the most we could do to claim a clique was buy a shirt with a little whale on it, smoke, attach a chain between our jeans and wallet, join the mathletes, or carry a lacrosse stick.
The other problem with creating a particular look was, of course, the weather. There were a number of items in which we would simply freeze to death—leather jacket as outerwear, any revealing top, a short skirt. Likewise, certain footwear was prone to land us prone in a snowbank, particularly high-heeled shoes. Even Bastad clogs, all the rage when I started high school, posed a challenge when navigating more than a few inches of snow and slick patches of ice. In order to traverse towering drifts, one developed a kick-shuffle step that used the closed toe as a shovel to keep wet snow out of the open back. Tattoos and piercings? Better put them on your eyelids if people are supposed to see them more than four months out of the year.
No matter what social group one was in, everybody avoided hats, mittens, scarves, and boots. These items were decidedly uncool, except for baseball caps. Teenagers with vigilant bathrobe-clad mothers (who watched from the window as their charges left the house in the morning and were ready to leap into highly embarrassing action) tossed the offensive items behind a neighbor’s bushes before arriving at the bus stop, and then retrieved them after school. Similarly, girls who attended Catholic school wiped their lipstick and eye shadow off before entering the building, and then reapplied it at the end of the day before being seen by the boys.
In the early eighties, my high school was about 5 percent black, and, though the black kids tended to hang out in a certain place between classes and do the secret handshake, everything was integrated and I don’t remember any tension. There were a few interracial couples, which was okay with us, but usually not with our parents.
Ninth grade was the first time I ever heard rap music. In September 1979, Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was the first rap song to hit the top-forty charts. It was the precursor to hip-hop and, with assistance from the by-now-ubiquitous boom box (aka ghetto blaster), spread like rock and roll had in the 1950s. Soon all the kids, black and white, could recite the lyrics with the “rock it to the bang bang boogie” chorus. And the boys taunted girls with: “If your girl starts actin’ up, then you take her friend.”
Hip-hop’s diverse expressions—dance, music, and visual art—may have been going strong in the Bronx for several years, but this was the first we’d heard of it in the Midwest. Subsequently, boom boxes grew in size, weight, woofer, and effectiveness, along with other characteristics heretofore associated with the arms race. They reigned supreme in every park and parking lot, spreading communal music until the mideighties, when the Walkman (and noise laws) made such blasting obsolete.
Tenth-grade biology class was the first time I ever heard a full rap song recited a cappella as a form of recreation, instead of being played at a dance, complete with cutting and scratching. While our teacher, Mrs. DiCenzo, was out of the room, Sam Nixon sat on one of the granite islands we used for lab experiments and rapped “8th Wonder” for twenty straight minutes. Only, Mrs. Dicenzo had been in the doorway, and she gave him hell about memorizing such a litany of song lyrics while being unable to recite the first two steps in the photosynthesis process. So much for his shot at most-improved student.
The punk rock scene was jarring big cities between 1979 and 1985, but mostly passed Amherst by. No spiked hair and tight black T-shirts for us, unless it was at the high school’s production of the musical Grease. One night after skiing, I tagged along with some University of Buffalo students to the venerable, but shadowy, Buffalo dinner-
theater-turned-downtown-nightclub called the Continental (which later launched the Goo Goo Dolls) and experienced my first punk band, along with fans who appeared to have landed facedown in a tackle box over at the bait shop. It left no lasting impression aside from a lingering deafness, and I certainly had no urge to hurry home, steal safety pins from my mother’s sewing basket, and thread them through
my cheeks.
My most enjoyable high school experience had to be escorting a blind student from one class to another in the afternoon. This journey was particularly entertaining because he used his complete lack of sight as an opportunity to grope every girl in school, profusely apologizing as he made his way through crowded halls while landing all the breasts he could lay his outstretched hands upon.
Home economics was fast becoming anachronistic in a school where tiny computer labs were taking over storage rooms, the first tutorials in this new discipline being patched together by math teachers and taught during their free periods. Meantime, calico-aproned home-ec teachers were assigning projects that we couldn’t undertake because we didn’t have the basics in cooking and sewing. Former bake-off champions now in their late fifties were training us to be homemakers,
envisioning a world that only existed in The Adventures of Ozzie &
Harriet reruns. One educational filmstrip (before movie reels, filmstrips were akin to slide shows, but with a bulb that would overheat every five minutes, catch fire, and melt the celluloid) instructed us how to be ladies: arrive fashionably late, blend foundation makeup into the neck so there wasn’t an orange fault line, and appear slender—wear the color black, vertical stripes, and A-line dresses. We sat there in overalls, holding field-hockey sticks, and laughed our heads off. By then, a Burger King, 7-Eleven, KFC, Wendy’s, or McDonald’s was within walking distance of all our homes. Mother-daughter dresses had gone the way of the bouffant hairdo. Clothes could be bought at nearby Kmart for less than what we’d pay to purchase the fabric and sew them. Bye-bye, Butterick, bye-bye.
Twenty-Seven
Can’t We All Get a Lawn?…
Pedersen v. Pedersen…Telling It to the Judge…
The Play within the Play
Dad first announced that he was planning to divorce my mother when I was twelve. He said he hadn’t wanted to leave until I was old enough to take care of myself, so that’s why he’d waited the extra ten years. He reminded me again that my mother was crazy, while my mother never missed an opportunity to remind me that my father was the crazy one. Just as my father liked to say that my mother drove like a maniac, my mother insisted that my father drove so slow that we’d be killed by traveling under the speed limit.
I was actually rather stunned by the news because, yes, we were without a doubt an odd family, but then we’d always been so. What had changed?
During the seventies and early eighties, divorced couples went from being statistical outliers to commonplace. Still, none of my friends’ parents were divorced. The word had unpleasant connotations, and even kids knew that. People whispered, “broken home” as the child walked past. A small town outside Buffalo wasn’t exactly Berkeley. My neighborhood didn’t have a reputation as a hotbed of wife swapping and transcendental meditation. It was better known for bowling night, bingo night, and Time-Life books.
Furthermore, no one on TV was divorced, just widowed, like in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. The opening song to The Brady Bunch didn’t make it clear what had happened to the original spouses, though one assumed it wasn’t divorce, but cancer or, from a Buffalonian’s point of view, hypothermia, or perhaps an industrial accident.
So in the middle of a summer day, I climbed into bed with my dog, Fifi, to cry because I was soon to be The Child of Divorce. After a few minutes of being sad, I realized that my parents probably couldn’t be more miserable than they’d been up until then, and that they’d been staying together to try and make my life a happy one. Furthermore, my situation wouldn’t change much, unless someone suddenly decided to start cooking. My main concern was that I wouldn’t have to move. I went back to my dad’s room and asked if I’d have to move. He said no.
Little did we know at the time that Dad wasn’t going to be moving either, at least not for several long years. According to New York State property laws, if one spouse leaves, the other can claim abandonment and will most likely gain possession of the house. This turns homes into war zones, forcing years of bitter cohabitation as divorce cases slowly grind their way through the courts. Over the next four years, we continued living together, my parents’ lawyers both advising them to hold their ground.
Everyone came and went as usual. Dad lived in his bedroom/office in the back of the house, but he’d always done that, since he wasn’t allowed to smoke anywhere else. Mom used the garage for her car and came and went through the back door; Dad used the driveway and the front door. I like to think of it as one of the first reality shows—a couple locked in a court battle and forced to live together in the hopes of getting a fair settlement.
Thus, the divorce started when I was twelve, and by the time it went to trial and the appellate division, I was almost sixteen. While reading The Odyssey during that time, I remember thinking that the Pedersens might just beat old Homer when it came to tales of dragged-out misery and adventure.
Divorce was especially difficult in New York State for additional reasons. There wasn’t anything like a no-fault provision (which it so happens the Catholic Church opposes), thus one had to have grounds for divorce. One party had to allege cruel and inhuman treatment, adultery, or abandonment.
Dad installed a lock on his door. Mom could open it with a credit card, but he didn’t know that. This was a safety issue rather than an espionage tactic, because she worried about the room catching fire and burning the rest of the house down. It seemed to me that the lawyers worked overtime to crea
te a sense of paranoia, suggesting that my parents were maneuvering and hiding money. They weren’t. They’re not tricky people.
After the proceedings got under way, things had a weird way of happening on holidays. My parents had married on Saint Valentine’s Day. Now my mother was served with divorce papers the Friday before Labor Day weekend. Heather and I were sitting in the living room playing the board game Masterpiece (still no video games) when the doorbell rang and a woman with an envelope wanted to see my mom in person. After the woman left, my mother was visibly upset. Though we knew this was coming, I guess it didn’t seem real until that moment.
I said, “I thought you said that Dad is crazy.” She said that was true, but it didn’t mean she wanted a divorce. This was my first glimpse into the human psychology of preferring the known, even if it was known to be crazy, over the unknown.
Mom soon came to terms with what was happening and said, “I could never be married to anyone who voted for Nixon anyway.”
***
My parents’ divorce was the only shadow to cross my otherwise enjoyable and easygoing high school career. Perhaps one reason we didn’t do much together as a family and the entire “dorm” living situation arose in the first place was because my parents hardly did anything with each other. I tend to think they landed in one of those fifties marriages that seemed like a good idea at the time, and then later realized they weren’t very well suited to each other. Complicating matters was the fact that much of the thinking in the sixties and seventies suggested that unhappy couples should have a child, and when that didn’t work, they should stay together for the sake of the child.
Soon both lawyers began asking me if I would meet with them, as my parents were fighting for custody. I had a little insight into how the court system worked, since my father had worked on numerous matrimonial cases over the years. I remembered him regularly saying that judges were old-fashioned and tended to award children to the mother unless some charge of neglect could be proven, and even then, the claims had to be awfully strong.
Buffalo Gal Page 27
