I grew up an hour outside of New York City and then when I was 10 we moved another hour further away to Delaware. But my father and I still came to the city at least once a month to see my brother at NYU and my mother and I sometimes drove up to visit my much older cousins Allen and Melissa. Melissa's long term boyfriend was a man who bought and ran a seafood restaurant in the heart of the Village and both Allen and Melissa and Allen's wife Margareta worked there at one time or the other. Allen was 14 years older than me and Melissa 17 years older. Greta was 11 years older. This was back in the late 1970s and into the 1980s and back then the Village was controlled by the Mafia. When I asked Allen if that meant I should be scared when I'm walking around, picturing Wyse Gyse around every corner whom I might, even as a 9 year old, unwittingly offend, thus getting myself "put on a list." Allen said that it was just the opposite. While New York in the early 1980s could be a pretty dangerous place, you could walk around the Village at any hour of the day or night because the criminal element knew the Mafia was in charge there, was watching all the time and would take care of any criminal foolish enough to rob or assault someone on their patch.
It wasn't until my cousin Melissa's wedding when I was 13 that New York went from 7 to 100 on the exciting scale. Sometime around May my Mom informed me that Melissa was getting married to her longterm boyfriend in New York that summer and that she had asked for me to be a bridesmaid. I am a not traditional girl, so I hadn't spent my childhood dreaming of being in a wedding party or imagining myself as a flower girl or bridesmaid. In fact, the thought had never crossed my mind. That being said, it struck me as a very exciting proposition, partly because I always love trying new things, partly because I was flattered and honored that my cousin would think of me when I was so much younger and we'd only seen each other every few years. Lastly, because it meant spending not a day in New York, but several days and overnights! Even more exciting, I was informed that my cousin Allen and his wife Greta would like for me to stay with them when I was in town for the wedding. Bliss! I had a crush on my much older cousin and I found his wife funny and glamorous and mysterious, with her blonde Swedish starlet looks and accent and her sardonic sense of humor. To get to spend time with two extremely cool people in their twenties and be taken seriously by them was a dream come true.
All this was also taking place with the backdrop of my having finished the fourth year at the rather repressed and conservative private school I went to for five years, a year in which for the first time I had been singled out for bullying for nearly the entire year. At the end of that year I was like a pressure cooker of unexpressed emotion, sadness, anger, shame and a desire to get out into the world and away from the petty dollhouse world of school. I had gone from reasonably happy if never popular, with the same two good friends I had had from nearly the beginning, to a sentence of daily misery and humiliation where every move was watched, measured and judged, where you couldn't breathe the way you wanted to, where if you didn't dress exactly the way the other girls did you would be shunned, and where at some point I had become so self-conscious that I no longer knew how to walk correctly down the hallway. I mean that I was second-guessing my gait, whether to leave my arms at my sides or in front of me, where the actual act of walking casually no longer felt natural and I had to think about exactly how I was going to walk that wouldn't be made fun of. A place where I could never break the unwritten code against going to a teacher to say what was going on, where hate messages would be left in my locker every day, crank calls at my house at night saying I was ugly and my breath stank, and the ultimate humiliation, the invention of a code name for me whose meaning they made so obvious that they knew I would get it, so that they could trash talk me in the third person while I was standing there. That and my self-imposed goody-goodyness, always getting As, never having one detention, getting along better with teachers than with students, always living in fear of "upsetting the Gods." I was ready to explode.
So I got to go up to New York for my first weekend staying with Allen and Greta without either of my parents so that we could have Bridesmaids' fittings and rehearsals and then when we weren't doing that Allen and Greta and I would "bum around the Village" as he called it, just walking aimlessly, taking in the sights. Punk was still in then, so there were far out looking hairstyles and piercings everywhere (all of which is so commonplace and banal today that it's hard to explain how fresh and exciting it was then.) Everywhere was the seediness and glamour of the old dirty New York before it got cleaned up and turned into Disneyland. You had to be careful on the subway, watch where you sit, don't make eye contact. I looked at a woman a little too long once - she was in her 30s but at first I thought she was a 15 year old boy. Her hair was in a teenage boy type haircut and she had a New York Yankees top on and her arms were big and muscular, her jaw kind of jutting out like a boxer. She was a strikingly unusual looking person. But I hadn't trained myself to look away fast enough and she came at me, like someone in a movie but this was real, "What the hell are YOU looking at, eh? EH?" I shrank back instinctively, looked down at the floor and folded my hands, prayer like, across my stomach. After a long moment passed, she gave up.
Allen and Greta took me to their favorite Village Mexican place, where Allen told me the secret to their nachos was, "They blend the beans with butter." Having lived in California and Arizona, Allen admitted this wasn't authentic Mexican, but it was damn good. It didn't matter what we did. I was on a three day high from all the freedom. We walked to St. Mark's Place and checked out hundreds of pairs of little earrings in designs I'd never seen before - dice, skulls, lightning bolts, all made of silver. We watched a pickup basketball game where the guys seemed to go as hard any college game, having stripped down to shorts in the soupy New York summer weather, sweat drops flying this way and that. I spotted Billy Idol across the street by the Waverly Theatre. On Saturday Greta took me to the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the 8th Street Playhouse, a legendary New York movie theater known as mecca for RH fans. It wasn't the kind of film I usually watched at age 13 but I loved it (except for the end where it dragged, if you'll excuse the pun.) We brought the rubber gloves, rice, lighters, newspapers and other required paraphernalia. There was a second "cast" of all the characters from the film acting out the scenes at the front of the theater. It was crazy and hilarious to me. I found Tim Curry insanely sexy in this role. In the line for tickets some guys behind us kept loudly making fun of "virgins," which is what people who haven't seen the film are called, but then I heard them say that they hadn't seen it yet either. I was sort of rolling my eyes when one of them said, "Look at those two virgins in front of us. They don't have a clue!" In a completely uncharacteristic move I found myself turning around and saying, indignantly, "As far as I can tell, you are also a virgin, so maybe you should keep your mouth shut!" I don't know what came over me. The guy actually apologized.
The next day we slept in and then Allen suggested we go for a champagne brunch at a local restaurant. At this point I should probably introduce the fact that back then Allen was a (mostly) functioning alcoholic. He drank a lot. None of this really occurred to me as a problem back then. Greta didn't drink as much, meaning she drank within reason, and some of what they did just struck me as what people in their 20s in a big city do on weekends. Well, probably in small towns, too. And I'll also add that while I know Allen would have never let anything happen to me, especially if someone had been threatening me or later when men would come on to me he would step in immediately and make me safe. But if I were a parent now and had a 13 year old I would probably be pretty horrified by the things that we did. But I didn't care. I still don't care. This weekend was the first of many many weekends when I got to go up to New York and spend time with Allen, both with Greta and after they divorced, and these were some of the most blissful, exciting and carefree times of my life. I wouldn't trade them for anything. I feel like after the years of depression after my parents' divorce, the repression of that school and the year and a half of being the outcast there, that these visits saved me. They saved my spirit from being crushed.
So we want out to brunch, just the two of us. We each had Eggs Benedict and "bottomless Mimosas." Yes, I got tipsy when I was 13. And I'll have to explain one other thing. Not only were standards much more lax back then and the drinking age only 18 in New York, but when I was 13 I was already full grown and people usually thought I was anywhere from 18 to 22. I was 5'9" and filled out but was still slim. Basically I was in the best shape of my life - I'd love to go back to that body now! I wore the usual tight Levi's of the time and Greta had outfitted me with some "punk" t-shirts like a faded black one that said "Shoot the Beegees" on it (this was at the height of the anti-disco backlash.) She helped me rip the sleeves off and create some other rips at random, and then pin the rips together with multiple safety pins. Hey, it was a look. Once when we were walking through the Village there were some teenage boys, clearly born and raised in New York. who followed us for a while and one of them gave me a big smile. And I'm not sure I can ever explain this next bit, but one of them came up and lightly tapped me on the butt, saying, "Shoot the Beegees!" and laughing, and contrary to every instinct and all logic where under any other circumstance I would have been a bit angry, a bit humiliated, I felt like this was a symbolic pat of approval from the Youth of New York. It was just a mythical moment to me where that pat was like a stamp of belonging. He barely touched me and he walked away immediately, so it didn't feel threatening or even lascivious. Even though it doesn't make sense, I could feel his intention was just that, approval. I'll always remember that moment.
So much more happened on many more visits that I think I'll have to leave it for next time.
