Cool, Calm & Contentious

by Merrill Markoe

  In the name of thoroughness, I had promised myself that I’d stay long enough to see at least one of everything. But by midnight, I felt an urge to slow down a little. I decided to take a break in the quietest room I could find, which turned out to be a second-floor library, empty but for a row of folding chairs against one wall. What a blessing, I thought as I took a seat, to see that nothing at all was going on here. Now I could indulge my own favorite fetish: retreating to an empty room during a party, just before sneaking out the back door. Or that was my plan until I was joined by a woman with a parasol and ruffled bloomers, looking like she’d stepped out of Sunday in the Park with George. She followed behind a Ted Bundy doppelgänger who was leading her by a leash attached to a dog collar. The two of them set up shop on the unused chairs about ten feet from where I was sitting, then began to go through the paces of an S&M (unless it was B&D) playlet, for which I appeared to be the designated audience. At least that was a conclusion I couldn’t help but reach, since I was the only other person in the room.

  This raised an etiquette dilemma that Emily Post had never touched on: When you’re the only one in the audience for a spanking demonstration that involves a bare-butted woman who is looking directly into your eyes, how long must you sit quietly, pretending to be enthralled, before you’re permitted to sneak out? I was reminded of the time an actress I knew insisted that I attend her one-woman show. I put off going for as long as I could. Then finally, during the last week of the run, I gave in out of politeness, intending to sit in the last row of the theater until things became unbearable. That was before I realized that no one else had bought a ticket that day. I was the only audience member, therefore I had no choice but to commit to enjoying the show till its very end. Yet, looking back, my friend and her tale of spiritual awakening was entertainment of the highest form compared to this Bo Peep–meets–Ted Bundy chair-based one-act psycho-drama. Many are the times I have thought, while watching a porno movie, that I was glad I didn’t know anything about the cast. This turned out to be a detailed refresher course in that feeling.

  So there I sat, trying to maintain an amused but not too enthusiastic expression as I watched Ted Bundy teach Bo Peep an allegorical lesson. I tried to look reasonably appreciative to spare them the embarrassment of bombing (or was that what they wanted? Who really knew with this crowd?) yet not so interested that Mr. Bundy would urge me to join the festivities. Then, after about eight minutes, I decided to risk hoping that they might interpret my departure as that of a canny sadist denying them the pleasure of being watched and not a bad review. I got up and walked rapidly toward the door.

  This time I was wildly relieved to rejoin the pulsating carnavale-like throb of the million-odd tribe members out in the hall, as I made my way back toward the stairs, past young nude men dressed only in chaps, past the old geezers in G-strings (where oh where do they get all that confidence?), past a bare-chested guy with a disco ball on his head, arm in arm with his partner, a guy dressed only in a truss. I pushed onward, onward toward the main exit, past the woman in the Little Miss Muffet outfit who looked like Judy Tenuta but wasn’t. Past the woman in the rubber dress who looked like Margaret Cho and was. (“Hi, Margaret!” “Whaat?” “I said, ‘HI, MARGARET!’ ” “Hi, Merrill! What did you say? I can’t hear you!”) Onward past dozens and dozens of women in shiny PVC separates with their grommeted, spiky-rubber-and-leather-clad pals, all of them out for an evening of hotness, extreme foot pain, and photo-opportunity kissing.

  Look—there’s a man with a whip and a bridle and a full-body harness that is meant as some kind of a pony getup! And right next to him is a woman with a broom and a dustpan! Some sort of anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive thing? Finally a weird fetish that I do understand. Oh wait … she’s actually cleaning up.

  And so, at one o’clock in the morning, I said goodbye to the Fetish Ball, knowing it was not even close to being over, relieved to feel the fresh air outside the building and so happy to get back into my car that I almost cried. My body continued vibrating and buzzing like an electric razor as I decompressed on the drive back home, even as I marveled at the sheer madness, absurdity, and creativity of my species, the only creatures on the planet that do anything remotely this preposterous. We, the humans, who contemplate dark matter for our work and then, for our relaxation, want to be immobilized by latex, tickled with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and fed our air through a tiny tube. No imaginary life on any theoretical other planet could be any odder or more full of strange details than this. Maybe each and every male bowerbird attracts a mate by decorating his nest with an individually chosen assortment of beautiful berries, flowers, shiny pebbles, and insect wings, like an ornithological equivalent of a Las Vegas hotelier; but name another creature who volunteers to wear a bridle, a harness, and a horse tail and who also isn’t in any way, shape, or form a horse!

  As I merged onto the freeway and left Hollywood in my exhaust, I felt like I always do at the end of a vacation: happy to have gained more perspective, but stressed. And glad that I lived somewhere else.

  When I Was Jack Kerouac

  BY EIGHTH GRADE, AT NORTH MIAMI JUNIOR HIGH, I WAS under the impression that I was a made man. I had just been inducted into a secret sorority run by my many best friends: a group of clothing-label-obsessed girls who all lived in beautiful homes that were right on the water. We were thirteen and only too aware that spending seven hours a day together at school and then talking to each other on the phone for a few more hours at night offered barely enough time to discuss and analyze how many pairs of Pappagallo shoes each of us had.

  Pappagallo shoes were, for us, many things: a wardrobe anchoring point, a yardstick of fashion savvy, a sought-after collectible, a weekend shopping destination. In our group, my personal supply fell embarrassingly short. I had only two pairs, both patent leather slip-ons. I was unable to raise my total because my mother didn’t like the idea of a bunch of eighth-grade girls telling her what kind of shoes she ought to be buying for her kid. She preferred to shop at Pixx Shoes for Less, where we could buy five knockoff pairs of Pappagallos for the price of one real pair. “They’re the same damn shoes,” she would argue. “All the stores buy them from the same warehouse and then they sew in their own label. There is absolutely no difference.”

  She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  My friends prided themselves on being able to spot a whole range of nearly invisible details that separated a knockoff from an original. If a single stitch was the wrong shape or color or in the wrong place, they would catch it. To be seen in fake Pappagallos was a bigger shame than owning none at all.

  “Maddie has twenty-three pairs,” my friends would announce every time her name came up in conversation. And the rule held for all of us: “Deedee has sixteen. Kathy has eleven.” They had memorized the stats for everyone’s closet the way the boys memorized home runs and RBIs. And in this way, they provided me with a measure of safety. As long as I followed their rules and regulations to the letter, I would always fit in.

  I was proud of the way my sorority sisters were fashion geniuses. At our most memorable sorority meeting, someone’s aunt—a part-time model—came to offer us her helpful hints for living a better life. The evening began with her strolling slowly down the aisles between the desks in a borrowed classroom, addressing each of us individually to let us know, for our own good, if we were “too fat” or “too thin.” Not that any evening ever needed more, but this one ended with an exhaustive lesson in eyebrow shaping. “You want to take a pencil and outline the arch, then pluck around it,” she advised, while I sighed with relief at having managed to avoid being labeled as too fat. Luckily for me, I had grown nine inches that year.

  I had only begun to scratch the surface of this wellspring of social expertise and grooming advice when in the middle of ninth grade, my mother and father called my brother and me into the living room one evening after dinner to explain that the family was moving to California. In that awful moment, the bottom fell
out of not just my brand-new plucking studies but my hard-won secret-society standing as well.

  California threw me for a loop. First of all, there were no Pappagallo shoes, period. It was hard to imagine, but no. There were none for sale anywhere. I conducted an exhaustive telephone search.

  Even more disturbing, the cute girls at my new high school were working from a whole different style catalogue connected to surfing, a complete mystery to me even though I had been living exactly as close to an ocean in Florida as I now was in California. But back in North Miami, when we talked about “the beach,” we were referring to the best shopping mall for buying Pappagallos.

  A radical reassessment of everything I knew to be true was now in order.

  “I am the world’s most thoroughly out-of-it teenager,” I fretted in my diary shortly after we moved to the other coast. “At North Miami Junior High, all I wanted was to be a member of the popular group. But since I got to California, I am no longer interested. I guess I’m the big weirdo here. Plus I am shy and self-conscious around boys, which is mainly their fault because they don’t like me and I know it.”

  I wasn’t really telling the whole truth. Where boys were concerned, at North Miami Junior High I had been having the same exact problem. I wasn’t sure why this was, but it definitely wasn’t because I didn’t care. I was always deeply in love with someone. Unfortunately these relationships were never reciprocal. And the situation was made even more difficult by the fact that the boys I loved most I had never actually met.

  “If you looked at last year’s reports I was positively swooning over RG,” I had written back in North Miami in the beginning of ninth grade about a guy I had never talked to. “I got goose bumps just looking at him. But it is interesting to note that he means nothing to me now. Even less, perhaps. Now I like Michael. I wish he’d like me. But of course he really hasn’t even met me yet.”

  Next thing I knew, there I was, trapped in California: three thousand miles away and, socially speaking, back at square one. Not only did none of the boys at my brand-new school know of my existence, but there was no secret sorority of fashion wizards who had my back. For the first few months, I drifted, briefly hanging out with the Mormon girl down the street and her friends from church, who called each other “Brother” and “Sister.” But while floundering in a world where I clearly did not belong, I began to detect a more interesting social strata inside the drama class I had taken as an elective. Not only did it include appealing members of both sexes but it also came with its own intriguing dress code.

  It took me a couple of weeks of scrutinizing these kids to get the lay of the land. Then I made a run at emulating two beautiful, haunted-looking drama class seniors, who wore black turtlenecks, black tights, dangling earrings, dark eyeliner, and long, straight hair parted down the middle. They were the pale, hollow-cheeked, teenage avant-garde devotees of every artistic rebellious subculture the United States had to offer at that point: part Greenwich Village, part Haight-Ashbury, part Carnaby Street. “Nonconformists” was what my mother called them, with a sneer. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I wanted to be just like them.

  So I dove headlong into an overnight transformation from sorority girl to jaded boho chick, hoping to make it instantly appear that I’d been like this for years. When one of my new role models helped ease my transition by giving me a couple of pairs of her old dangly earrings, I was so appreciative that I tried to sit at my desk exactly the same way she sat at hers, bouncing one shoe off the end of my foot. If I could have gotten her mother, who was an author, to agree to let me join their bloodline in progress, I would have turned my back on my own family in a heartbeat. Especially since I was already very concerned that the stable, boring lives of my middle-class parents were fatally undermining my artistic credibility.

  “I come from a happy, middle-class family of above-average intelligence and we live in the most supremely mundane and mediocre of all possible horrible suburbias,” I wrote in my diary in the winter of my sophomore year. “I don’t know why I used the word ‘happy’ because it is an environment that has never made me happy. I don’t think, feel, or want what the rest of my family wants. I don’t even want to want what they want. I hate going on long drives with them and listening to my father explain about how boys are attracted to feminine, neatly dressed young ladies who take pride in their appearances.”

  I was banking on my father being wrong, because that definitely wasn’t my agenda anymore, even though that pesky boy problem was far from under control. “The first and only relationship I have ever had with a boy was this year,” I wrote, “if you can even call it a relationship.”

  I was talking about Bob, a long-haired, redheaded, freckle-faced, pre-drowning Brian Jones look-alike who went to another school. On the bright side, Bob represented progress, since I had, in fact, actually met him! He was friends with my new drama-crowd friend Ned, a guy so cool that he had an American flag for a bedspread. (And don’t forget: this was the sixties, when a kid using an American flag for room décor meant rebellion and nihilism, not conservative family values.) Ned was a dazzling compendium of hip, artistic details. He wrote with a Rapidograph pen, using colored ink. Pretty soon, so did I. He wore a real navy peacoat with jeans and a scarf and a cap and motorcycle boots. I got as many of those as my mother would pay for. And because he worked after school in the scenery department of a small community theater, I volunteered my services there, too.

  And there was Bob: a shy, morose, peace-pin-wearing conscientious objector. Once I learned he could draw, I didn’t need to know more. I was deeply in love.

  But it was after he held my hand during a Smothers Brothers–Pete Seeger concert at Stanford that our love was firmly etched onto the pages of history. Eventually that turned into a kiss that played in a constantly repeating loop in my head, uninterrupted, day and night. No need for any more thoughts. Just this one was a full-time job.

  “Last night I felt like, ‘God, he is so neat. I just love him,’ ” I wrote in my diary the next day. “Although I doubt I really meant love. But it sure seemed like it at the time. Okay, yeah, I meant it.”

  Still, despite my unquenchable passion, nothing in my flimsy fifteen-year-old playbook gave me the slightest clue about how to transform him from a one-time make-out into my boyfriend forever.

  I was briefly encouraged when he turned up unannounced one night to visit me at my parents’ house. As I showed him my record collection—which was, oddly enough, identical to Ned’s—I knew exactly what I wanted to see happen: a riveting conversation on topics of deep personal importance, perhaps involving the roots of the blues, that would somehow lead to a lot more passionate kissing. Unfortunately, a few minutes after I started to play him my new Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee album, Bob fell asleep facedown on my bedroom floor. At first I was puzzled. Then I was touched: Aw! See how relaxed he is around me! Then I was puzzled again: Why would he come all the way over here to fall asleep? Then I was rattled, unable to decode what a sixteen-year-old boy passed out on the floor of my bedroom might possibly mean in the bigger romantic overview. “Last night I spent one of the most depressing evenings I have ever experienced,” I wrote in my diary. “Maybe I gained a little insight into things, but I doubt it. It’s strange, but the more I am with Bob, the less I seem to know him. It is impossible for me to determine ahead of time just how he will act around me. Not that I would ever want him to be predictable. It’s just that … I never know what is going on inside his head. I would love to know what Bob considers this relationship to be. Am I his girlfriend or am I just his friend? Does he always make out with all his friends in cars? Tonight as he was lying on the floor of my room, asleep, how did he expect me to act? When he woke up and I sat with him, he seemed very far away. I want him to like me so bad but I never seem to know what he wants. Oh fuck. Now no one likes me again.”

  The dilemma I was facing was obvious. Unfortunately, the solution was not. What oh what did I have to do to rewrite this sto
ry with a better ending?

  How could I become the kind of charismatic figure that could inspire Bob to stay awake in my presence? I didn’t know where to turn.

  I turned to Jack Kerouac.

  A few times a week, after school, my new best friend, Debby, and I would put on our shredded cutoffs, our striped T-shirts, our leather sandals, our leather earrings and bracelets (which Debbie had made), and ride our bikes to Kepler’s bookstore, about two miles from my parents’ house, to hang out. I loved this bookstore. It had all the right cultural trappings: enormous weird posters of French cinema stars, an espresso machine, a dish full of peace symbols for sale next to the cash register. And, for an infinite amount of extra bonus points, it was owned by someone named Ira who was said to be a close personal friend of Joan Baez’s. That was the fewest degrees of separation between me and someone awesome … ever.

  I spent hours and hours browsing through the aisles of Kepler’s, picking out books to read based solely on the artwork they chose for their covers. But what I was really doing was searching for something … a novel, a play, a poem that could offer me a vivid diagram of who I should be. I was looking for a three-dimensional blueprint, a manifesto on how to be a real authentic artist and therefore nothing at all like my parents. Because the name Jack Kerouac was mentioned in most of the roundups of things that were hip, when I saw his books featured on a front table, I was drawn to them.