That was last year. Now I took a bus home, too, and Sharika wouldn’t be able to taunt me out the bus window about the made-up flatulence problem she was so kind to endow me with. I took a tiny bus, known as a “tart cart,” driven by a nice obese woman named Randi. Randi liked to discuss the details of her impending divorce with us, and as the child of happily married parents, I really got into the juicy details of it all. Her ex seemed like a real scumbag, and I told Randi every morning that today would be the day he’d finally sign those divorce papers. When that day finally came, I was over the moon for Randi. Our morning discussions then moved to how she would bridge her way back into the singles scene after all these years. I had no idea what kind of singles scene my town offered, but if anyone could make it happen, it was Randi.
I loved my bus, and not just because the majority of its passengers were picked up in front of a bar. What type of school system sets up one of their early-morning bus stops in front of a bar? As the drunkest of the drunk would stumble out in the morning, Randi would pull up the extra-small bus to pick up the kids from that neighborhood just in time so they wouldn’t have to interact with the alcoholic locals. I often wondered if Randi’s ex was passed out somewhere in that local dive bar. The way she talked about him, I wouldn’t be surprised. My bus may have been small, but it surely had character.
I loved it because it was filled with dangerous teenagers, like Craig Sandowski, who wore a Megadeth Peace IS SELLING BUT NO ONE’S BUYING T-shirt and a fresh hickey to school every day. A few months into the school year, Craig Sandowski got expelled for putting an explosive device in a school toilet. I stand by Craig and believe him that his intentions were nothing major. He wasn’t intending to blow up the school; he just wanted to make the toilet explode, and to cause a spectacle, which he did achieve. But the school didn’t see it as a successful science experiment; instead they viewed it more as a death threat to students, teachers, and faculty, so they expelled him. I never saw Craig Sandowski again after the incident, so I mostly socialized with Randi and encouraged her to get back in the saddle. The bus wasn’t the same without him.
Over the course of our first six months in middle school, Amanda and I drifted apart. There was no fallout, but our middle school was much larger than our elementary school—kids from four different elementary schools were combined into it—and that simply gave her more options for friends. To my chagrin, Amanda drifted naturally toward the normal-size girls who brought Lunchables to school. There was no room for a towering friend whose mom packed cream cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel. It didn’t help that I had just discovered my father’s record collection over the summer and was now eschewing the fashion and musical trends of my own generation. While most kids donned Hypercolor T-shirts and Starter jackets, I wore fringed vests and flared jeans.
My father, however, was thrilled. As a man who bought his entire wardrobe at Costco, he was overjoyed I was not becoming a slave to fashion. And as the ultimate music buff, my dad was incredibly pleased that someone was finally getting some use out of his formerly dust-collecting record collection. The only thing that would have made him happier would be if I actually started using the tiny soaps and shampoos from his business hotel complimentary toiletries collection. When my father told me all about the controversial protest methods during the Vietnam era, I wondered how he could be so happy stuck in the suburbs after doing something so supercool as barely escaping the draft. I had never heard of anything so dangerous and I wanted nothing more than to be transported back to his glamorous heyday of the ’60s and ’70s and escape the impending lameness of the Jersey Shore in the ’90s.
At the start of the decade, on New Year’s Eve, when the clock struck midnight, I had been at a grown-up party with my parents watching their friends get drunk. Too young to have my own plans that night, as my older brother had, and too old to be in bed, I was forced to hang out with the aging Rolling Rock swiggers as they rang in the ’90s with great hope.
My mother came over to me right after the ball dropped and said, “This is going to be your decade, sweetie. Your ’60s. You’re going to fall in love, figure out what you want to be when you grow up, find out what you really care about, and take a stand. This is your time!”
Then she ran off to drink Bahama Mamas with her college roommate.
The grown-ups at this party all seemed elated at the promise of a new decade. The lavish ’80s had not sat well with my parents’ baby boomer friends, and they were optimistic for this new time. They weren’t so keen on Reagan or the past decade’s extravagant spending and excessive lifestyle. From a distance, to an overdeveloped tween in central New Jersey, the sluttiness of the ’80s seemed pretty rockin’ to me. But as the year played out and Wilson Phillips, Bell Biv DeVoe, and Nelson topped the charts, I wondered if this was, in fact, “my time.” It seemed like a pretty stupid time to me and didn’t hold a candle to my mom and dad’s. Where was the war? Where was the good music and fashion? Bart Simpson was voted “Entertainer of the Year” by Entertainment Weekly. Not Bob Dylan, not Joni Mitchell, but a small, yellow, cartoon boy voiced by a woman was the entertainer of the year! And everyone was still wearing those stupid Simpsons T-shirts everywhere I turned. I resented that Jesus Jones was telling me “Right Here, Right Now,” when there were many other places I would rather be. This was not my ’60s. This was not my time.
The horrific nature of current music made me desperately in need of an artistic outlet. Thankfully, after much cadging, my mom did agree to upgrade my modern dance classes to more advanced sessions in the arty town of Red Bank, ten minutes away. The girls there weren’t my types—they had names like Penelope and Theodosia, and although they were also tall, they wore their hair in buns so tight they were painful to look at—but my teacher, Julie, was a cool free spirit who was more into feeling the dance than being technically good. I wasn’t technically good at anything, but I did have feelings. And I loved dance apparel in and out of the studio. To me, nothing looked hotter than a ballet skirt over jeans. So between “feeling the dance” and wearing footless tights, modern dance became my favorite hobby. It was the only true passion I had.
Back at home, I started isolating myself upstairs and rebelled against the cool-girl uniform of the time: Umbros (fluorescent long plastic shorts), Skidz (basically pajama pants with a road sign patch on the butt), and Z Cavaricci pants, of which the only thing sexy was the designer label right down the crotch. After each treacherous day at school, where I dodged hallway fistfights and buffered a daily dose of teasing for my ’70s-inspired outfits, I’d enter my mint-green sanctuary, pull on leg warmers, and put on a little “Ziggy Stardust.” I made mix tapes of my favorite classic rock songs off my father’s record collection on the hand-me-down record/double cassette player from my grandmother. I cut out pictures of rock stars from vintage Rolling Stone magazines and hung them up on my metal closet doors with magnets, because I wasn’t allowed to put tape on the walls. I wrote lyrics from the Doors, Lou Reed, Allman Brothers, and David Bowie songs on my door and all my notebooks. I hung inspiring quotes from cinema (“So be it,” from Pump Up the Volume starring Christian Slater) and literature (“I belong! I am important! I am somebody!” from Go Ask Alice—my favorite book and an anthem for all misunderstood teens) on the inside of my closet. Mostly I’d sit up in my room and brood, then write in my journal, secretly hoping that one day it would be read and I’d be touted as literary genius in the way that lucky suicidal teen from Go Ask Alice had been. Other than dance, my dream was to be as famous a journal writer as Anne Frank, without having to endure the Holocaust.
At school, I flip-flopped among social circles, but none seemed to fit. Most girls wore Champion sweatshirts in bright orange and deep purple, while I wore my deceased aunt’s vintage black velvet blazer. I was teased for wearing velvet during the warm-weather months but I just ignored it. No one in my town had any taste and for whatever reason I’d decided it was against my moral code to sell out for them. I did things my own wa
y. Who says black velvet can’t be worn after Memorial Day?
Eventually, I hit it off with a girl at my bus stop, which was, just my luck, not situated directly in front of a local dive bar. My bus stop was a boring old safe-neighborhood corner. Her name was Alyssa, and she had really big boobs. She lived in my neighborhood and I was grateful that she took a liking to me, though this was probably only because she was new to this school district and desperately needed a friendly face . . . that, and there was barely anyone else at our bus stop.
Because of her C-cup breasts, Alyssa was immediately popular at school, but she didn’t care. Like me, Alyssa received attention for a physical trait, and while hers garnered flirtation from cute boys and mine inspired taunting from cute boys, we still had an instant connection. A few weeks after I befriended her, she invited me one Sunday afternoon to true popular girl Jessica Rosenstein’s bedroom. Jessica Rosenstein was popular for doing all things right, like knowing how to fold her notes in the most complicated folds that were impossible to ever fold back. There, in Jessica Rosenstein’s domain, I was surrounded by gum-smacking, fake-nail-wearing teenage girls, and they didn’t look pleased to see me. (The only gum I ever had was packs of my mom’s Violet gum, a purple gum scented like floral perfume that tasted exactly like hand lotion. She’d moved on to that after our local drugstore discontinued her beloved Clorets.) As Jessica Rosenstein’s four-foot-ten mom looked up at me, showed us to Jessica’s room, and said, “Have fun, ladies!” I tried my best to hide behind Alyssa and her huge rack. But all eyes were on me, the oddly dressed, flat-chested tall girl, and it took everything I had not to take my five-foot-eight-inch lanky body and run gracelessly through the streets of Jersey. I knew immediately this wasn’t going to be a fun afternoon. As I scanned the room, taking in Jessica Rosenstein’s Bell Biv DeVoe cassette tapes and massive lip-gloss collection, I wished I had chosen to stay home and hang out with my parents’ weird Trivial Pursuit league instead. I fiddled with my vintage brooch as Alyssa introduced me to eye rolls and confidently joined the group.
I didn’t want to be at Jessica Rosenstein’s house; I would much rather have been writing depressed musings about how alone I felt in my cat journal. Jessica Rosenstein, on the other hand, lived for awkward teenage activities like this, things like school dances, sleepovers, and Bar Mitzvahs. She loved having braces, she loved going through puberty, and she loved the ubiquitous cologne Drakkar (which I’d learned I was allergic to after sitting next to the football coach’s son on a long bus ride. Thank God Drakkar didn’t make a chewing gum, because my mom probably would have bought it in bulk at Costco).
After a few minutes of discussing Clearasil versus Noxzema, Jessica Rosenstein introduced to her rapt audience what may have been the cruelest game ever. I don’t know who invented it, or what it’s called, or if it was really even a game, though I imagine it’s familiar to mean girls everywhere. The game went something like this. Jessica Rosenstein said in her Valley Girl/Jersey accent, “Okay, let’s all sit in a circle and say what we honestly think of each other. I mean honestly, girls. Like, don’t hold back. This is our opportunity to tell each other what we really think, you know, to help each other.”
I knew this was a bad idea. I had nothing in common with these descendants of the White Lipstick Posse—a clique of teenage girls who hung out at the neighborhood swim club wearing zinc oxide as a lipstick. These girls were younger sisters of those teenagers; I was the younger sister of a wiry-haired, movie-loving bookworm of a brother. I shouldn’t have even been at this get-together. I was just tagging along with Alyssa. I wasn’t sure if Alyssa had ever played a game like this in her old school as she sat there stoically. My guess is she was trying to remain as invisible as she could despite her good looks, so they wouldn’t choose her. Alyssa was so cool the smell of fear could not be detected through her just-tight-enough tank top. Her strategy worked.
Instead, of course they began with me.
“Margot, you could be the prettiest girl in school if only you dressed normal,” said Jessica Rosenstein through hot-pink braces and Dr Pepper lip gloss. “I mean you’re tall like a model, you have reddish blonde hair, blue eyes. Sure, you have gross freckles, but you could cover those up if you learned how to use makeup. Guys would love you if you dressed like a normal human being and not some freakazoid.”
This wasn’t fair. When you’re tall, no pants fit right. I wanted to tell Jessica Rosenstein that I would look like a freakazoid no matter what. In order for pants to be long enough, you have to buy a large size, which makes you look frumpy. If you don’t want them baggy, you have to buy a smaller size, which would be too short, making you look like Michael Jackson in the “Billie Jean” video. And no shirt looks hot on an extra-long, flat-chested torso. So I wore vintage clothes, yes, partially because I believed I was born in the wrong time period and would have preferred an era when flat, lanky bohemian women like Joni Mitchell were the standard of beauty. But I also wore vintage clothes because poet’s blouses and bell-bottoms were extremely flattering to my shape; I immediately wanted to defend my ’70s-inspired, androgynous rock ’n’ roll ensemble. Somewhere there was a world where people agreed that thirteen-year-old girls looked wonderful dressed like Eric Clapton. Unfortunately that world existed several decades back.
Jessica Rosenstein continued, “Girls, do you even know what I mean? Margot’s kind of pretty, right?”
The gum-smackers nodded reluctantly. They most certainly did not agree that I was “kind of pretty,” but they knew their intervention could be next.
“But, like, where do you get your clothes? Why do you make yourself look like that? Just like get some Cavariccis, get some Skidz, and get with the program. You could even have a boyfriend.”
I was at a loss for words. No one spoke and my heart started racing. I wanted to have a Spencer Tracy Inherit the Wind moment when I discussed tolerance and justice and made a room full of ignorant people do the right thing. Yet I knew giving an overdramatic speech would make the next few years of middle school even more unpleasant than they already were. But still. Jessica Rosenstein didn’t have a boyfriend; why was she giving me advice as to how to get one? A boyfriend wasn’t a priority for me in seventh grade. I had only three goals at that point in my life: I wanted to rock, I wanted to stop growing, and I wanted to get the hell out of New Jersey. I was going to be a brilliant singer/actor/dancer/fashion designer in some faraway utopia I hadn’t discovered yet.
Even though Alyssa, my big-boobed neighbor, was a fun girl, I didn’t need these girls’ approval. As soon as they were done “helping me” and moved on to the next victim, Alyssa and I made up an excuse to leave and headed back to our neighborhood to listen to White Lion and shave our legs.
I opted out of the next few White Lipstick Posse group activities.
Luckily for me, Jessica Rosenstein was wrong, as there was one boy in my town who seemed to truly appreciate me in all my towering corduroy glory (aside from the Ecuadorian immigrant with a manperm who had started writing me love notes in seventh grade). Jonah Hertzberg was the only guy in my entire middle school who shared my passion for classic rock. He was kind of cute, too, if you found Joe Perry from Aerosmith attractive, which I totally did. Joe Perry was a great Keith Richards to Steven Tyler’s Mick Jagger. He was all right in the background to a point but also had his own following, appeal, and story to tell. This was the year that Aerosmith’s power ballad “What It Takes” hit the charts (which is still my go-to karaoke song to this day), which really added to Jonah Hertzberg’s appeal. “What It Takes” helped me understand that hard rockers also had a soft side, and that made me love them even more. Hearing long-haired recovering drug addicts sing about broken hearts was almost as exciting to me as Bobby Brown’s “Roni” video. I couldn’t help finding every hard rock/hair metal star sexy—living in the town next to where Bon Jovi grew up, and the town above the town where Skid Row was from, it came with the territory. Jonah Hertzberg also felt misunderstood and misplaced in t
he wrong era and wrong town. He was not troubled by the fact that I was five inches taller than he, so I decided to let it go that he was missing a finger. So what if the only guy who liked me had only four fingers on his left hand? He could still play guitar, and knew how to French kiss, and that was really all that mattered.
I was seeing Jonah here and there outside of school, but during school, I tried to keep to myself. I didn’t need the White Lipstick Posse telling me that I could do better if only I dressed “normal.” While I watched the other kids write I WANNA SEX YOU UP on their binders, I would think to myself, This is a stupid era, while drawing I LOU REED on my notebook. I fantasized about going back in time and having front-row seats to the Band’s The Last Waltz concert.
Partway though seventh grade, though, something happened that gave me hope. A war. The Persian Gulf War. Finally there was something to give us a reason to protest and make meaningful music. Finally, my fashion choices made sense! I was excited to go to my generation’s Woodstock, to be one of the willowy flower girls, and to begin experimenting with hallucinogens. Finally I would have something to talk about with my parents’ cool former hippie friends. Now we were equal; we had all been through the tragedy of conflict. Except my war had trading cards with images of Saddam Hussein, George H. W. Bush, Colin Powell, and “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf alongside a stick of stale, pink, sugary gum.
Jonah Hertzberg was already composing antiwar ballads and I was interested in organizing a walkout like the one I’d seen on The Wonder Years. Music instantly improved. Yoko Ono had made a remake of “Give Peace a Chance” featuring all the biggest names of the time: LL Cool J; Kadeem Hardison, who played Dwayne Wayne on A Different World; Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Lenny Kravitz; and, best of all, Sebastian Bach of Skid Row. I had fantasies about running my fingers through Sebastian Bach’s long, flowing mane, which was pretty narcissistic, considering we had similar hair. Despite my proximity to Skid Row’s hometown, the best my town had to offer was Jonah Hertzberg, the wiry-haired Jew who looked like Joe Perry from Aerosmith, if you squinted hard enough.
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