Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (11 page)

When we first started Blue Angel I was living in Woodhaven, Queens, with my kid brother Butch, not too far from my mom’s apartment on Ninetieth Street. Every night that I wasn’t working in a club or practicing with the band, I’d go back to the apartment. I finally had him living with me like I wanted to do when I first left home. But by that time, he was no longer eleven, and it was hard to be living together when we were both in our twenties. I did my share of knuckleheaded things, and so did he. Except this was his first shot at being an adult—this was my third. I had already tried to live in Long Island, Vermont, City Line, in between Queens and Brooklyn, and wound up coming back home to my mother.

But then I moved out of the apartment with Butch in Woodhaven and into a little studio apartment in Manhattan on East Seventy-seventh Street. I fixed up the place with all of my family’s old furniture and curtains and whatever I could buy cheaply (but looked cute) from McCrory’s, where I worked. It was one of the day jobs I took. Usually they didn’t last because I worked so much with the band, but I had gotten this job through a friend of mine. He told me he was my first fan and had been coming down to see me for years. He was the assistant manager of McCrory’s, a Woolworth’s type of five-and-ten store across the street from Alexander’s in Rego Park, Queens. He introduced me to a woman named Doris, who ran a jewelry concession in the front of the store. At Christmas she personalized Christmas stockings with glue and glitter. She sold T-shirts, too, and you could purchase the picture you wanted her to iron on. My favorite iron-on was a cartoon of a grimy-looking soldier type who had a bubble coming out of his mouth that read, “Though I walk through the Valley of Death I fear no evil, ’cause I’m the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.” That made me laugh. Doris made me laugh, and everyone around her too. I liked her so much right away. She was small and had bright red
hair, the exact shade I used to search the drugstore shelves for in the early seventies (and she didn’t mind that mine was purple and blond, either). She had a big smile and reminded me of the Italian women I used to see on 101st Avenue in Queens coming out of the beauty parlor. She and her mom (also a bottled redhead, but not as deep and rich as Doris’s) used to know Barbra Streisand when she lived in Brooklyn. Her mother would visit and tell me her friend Barbra lived upstairs from her—Barbra, who was just like everybody else.

Doris was a woman who knew how to do a lot of different things. And sometimes if I had a gig, she would let me miss work. I was usually a little late for the job—my friends always called me “the late Cyndi Lauper”—so I’d always be running in at the last minute. But Doris liked entertainers. At McCrory’s, my job was to engrave cheap jewelry. I used to practice my handwriting on a pie plate with an engraving pen. Little kids would be excited about their Christmas present for their grandma and would bring in a little, inch-long silver- or gold-plated heart with rhinestones. They’d ask me to write, “Dear Grandma, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Love, Tommy, Judy, Larry, and Susan.” Then they’d say, “Oh, and can you put the date on it, too?”

But I was doing well, and Doris, who was so funny, liked me. She moved me up to the front of the store one Christmas Eve and had me doing Christmas stockings. She told me to start barking. I had to say as loud as I could (which was pretty loud), “Get ya Christmas stockings! Personalized Christmas stockings!” And the price would go down the later in the day it got. But I remember getting into the spirit with that glue and glitter.

She asked me to pierce people’s ears, too. I figured I could do it because when I was a kid, I helped my mother reupholster the kitchen set. My mother really knew how to sew and could remake anything
(remember, we all came from the garment industry). So we kids helped her with the vinyl and Naugahyde; we’d stretch it over the chair and staple it.

So piercing ears was just another staple to me, right? But when I went to staple the earrings in and it passed through the flesh, it felt totally different from a chair. I forgot that I’m really squeamish—I couldn’t even cut the frog in biology—and I kind of freaked out.

Doris was somewhere else in the store, and it’s not like there was a panic button. I was trying to talk to the lady, but I couldn’t speak Polish like she did, and I was feeling a little sick, and trying to call for Doris out of the side of my mouth, like, “Doris.
Doris.
” I couldn’t leave the lady with the staple gun in her ear and she was a large woman, and then she started to laugh. Which made her sway back and forth, and the staple gun started to sway, too. Which made me feel
really
queasy, so I kept calling for Doris.

The store did not have an intercom. Instead, it had Big Mary. Big Mary sat in the back of the store in the office behind a sliding door, and she would open it and holler down in the store for whoever. So Mary caught wind of what was going on and opened the door and hollered, “Doris, I think Cyndi needs you!” And Doris came running up the aisle and made it all fine for the lady and finished the other ear, and I never pierced another ear in my life.

Doris worked in two locations: Queens and Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I started in Queens, but later they needed me to fill in occasionally at the store in Brooklyn, too. But it was in Queens where I met two older gals: Minnie and Margaret, the sweetest-looking older woman with the filthiest mouth. They were what were known as returnees. New York was having a fiscal crisis at the time, and people had their pensions cut, so a lot of people over sixty-five suddenly had to return to the workforce. My boss Steve, who had hired me,
got such a kick out of these women. So did we all, because they were hysterical.

They would say things just to shock you. Margaret worked at the food counter. She looked like a sweet auntie, but then she’d hit ya with “Cocksucker.” As for Minnie, if I went over and talked to her, she’d start out perfectly normal—until I kept questioning her about something she didn’t feel like talking about. Then she’d say something like, “Look, you seem like a nice kid, but go fuck yourself.” That one Christmas Eve when I was selling Christmas stockings, I asked her what she was doing that evening. She said she’d be waiting for Santa on a bearskin rug, naked with nothing on but a bow, and some milk and cookies by her side too. She said she’d be waiting for Santa to come up her chute.

Now, Minnie was an older woman—around seventy. Not that Santa’s a young guy or anything but Minnie was heavyset with (very) wide hips. She wore black every day. Now that I think about it, she was actually kind of punk and she didn’t even know it. Her hair was dyed dark brown and she wore stockings that went above her knee. She always had on the best platform orthopedic shoes that looked just like the ones that Pearl Harbor (of Pearl Harbor and the Explosions) wore. Later on, when I wrote my Christmas album, I had a song called “Minnie and Santa.” That was Minnie.

There was this one woman who looked like a vision every time she entered the store. The first day I met her, it was nasty out. I was watching the rain pour down and bounce off the bus shelter by the corner and up off the sidewalk. Doris’s counter was right up in the front of the store, and if there weren’t any customers, I could stare out the big front windows. Well—in walks this tall woman, with her platinum hair tied up in a tall French knot in the back and curled in the front. And a kerchief with a pink and red floral print, framing
those high curls in the front and her face. She wore a bright, cobalt-blue raincoat and had on the prettiest bright pink lipstick too. It was very sixties. And I said to her, “Wow, you look great.” And she said back to me, “I always wear my brightest colors on the darkest days.” It made my eyes happy to see her against that gray day. For a long time, what she said stuck with me. And years later, I kept it in mind when I stood in front of the old wax museum in Coney Island and took the album-cover photograph for
She’s So Unusual.
I thought of that woman when I was dancing barefoot, in a piss-stained alley, dressed in red, against a bright yellow door and bright blue brick walls that I knew would strobe against the red. I thought, “In the darkest place, shed the brightest light.”

The best part of working with those women was how much fun they made it. These were woman who would be nice to you all day, and at the end of the day they would get really lewd and rude. And they knew Steve and I loved them for all their nastiness. We always felt they were kindred spirits and I just thought I was extraordinarily lucky to have the job and to know those people, and for the people who ran that little department store to have enough kindness and room in their hearts to hire such characters. There was so much personality and humor in that store. It’s not the same anymore. Everything has gotten so corporate that the humanity is kind of gone from those shops.

So I spent my days working at the department store and my nights doing gigs or recording. Then I’d go back to my apartment in Queens. I’d take the Woodhaven Boulevard bus, where you’d transfer at London Lennie’s, a restaurant that my mother loved. She thought that the shrimp was incredible. I just loved the name “London Lennie’s.”

Going to any of my apartments was a challenge because I always had tons of bags with all this shit in them for my gigs. I’d bring this heavy stainless steel pot with a hot plate so I could steam my throat
because I was so worried about losing my voice, and some Vicks, and a vibrator for my neck to make sure it wasn’t tight, and vitamins, and God knows what else.

When I moved to the city, my sister, Elen, came with me. On the mailboxes she saw the name of a friend who used to be a neighbor of hers. She had lost contact with him, and incredibly, there he was, right downstairs from my apartment. So she knocked on his door and said, “My sister’s moving in upstairs—can you keep an eye on her for me?” His name was Carl Eagleston, and that’s how I met him and his boyfriend, Gregory, who became a really close friend and later inspired my song “Boy Blue.” He was called Blue because his eyes were so blue. I never called him that, but his cousin Diana, who was a transgender woman, did, and another woman who took him in off the streets when she saw him sleeping in the park.

It was 1980 and Elen had just moved away from NYC to Newport News, Virginia. She was working as a pipe fitter at the shipyard there. El always wanted to learn how to do things and went about her life like an explorer trying different jobs and lifestyles. I guess I did too. El and I wanted to change the world for the better, wanted to be all we could be (who knew the army would take that line?).

El is older than me by a year and a bit. When we were small, folks would ask my mother if we were twins (mainly because she dressed us alike) and my mom would reply, “Almost.” I can’t even get into what the heck that means, because either ya are, or ya aren’t. Some people called us Irish twins, which is really confusing since we were Italian and German/Swiss. But whatever the case, my mom always said I was born to be Elen’s friend and told my sister to always watch out for me. When we were small children I took everything very literally, and because she was supposed to watch out for me, I became Elen’s shadow. And as much as she tried to push away her tantrum-y, demanding
little sister who felt the need to be with her every second, she still watched out for me. Basically, I thought I had to have special consideration because I was born to be her friend. It’s a long story. Maybe that’s what my mom meant when she said we were “almost twins.” I probably would have squeezed into this world
with
her if I could have. So here she was, once again watching out for her little sis, who was moving into the big city for the first time. And if El couldn’t be there for me all the time, she felt Carl would watch out for me.

Before I met Carl and Gregory, I had a dream about two little old ladies who lived in a shiny pink castle. Then when I met them, I saw that they had painted their apartment pink—like cotton candy, Pepto-Bismol pink, and they put crushed mirrors into the paint. It was just about the most amazing thing I ever saw, and I realized that these guys were the two little old ladies. Carl would cook, and I would go downstairs and eat with them. I had no money, but I’d bring something, and they’d say, “Oh, don’t bring anything.”

I used to wear muumuus all the time with flip-flops, and then I’d tie my hair up in a turban. Carl would look at me and go, “Mrs. Feeney!” He just thought I looked like a Mrs. Feeney, so he made up the name, and that’s who I became.

They used to play all these old records and show me how to dance the fox-trot. They had a studio apartment and built a loft bed and moved most of the furniture out so there was more room to dance. They put pillows on the floor and we sat cross-legged to eat dinner. Every day it was a picnic. They’d always change the paint in the loft. Like one year it was a garden terrace so everything was bright yellow and green. Once Carl came up to my apartment, looked around at the white walls, and said, “Cyn. Mrs. Feeney. Look at this place. You’re not a white-wall gal. We’re going to the paint store, and we’ll find out what you like, what you are.” So we went to the store and I painted one wall
of my apartment rust and the other walls light tan, and I covered them with, like, twenty antique mirrors, and he built a loft bed for me. My apartment also had a floor that was slanted, so whenever you dropped anything, it would roll to one side. Then they would say, “Mrs. Feeney is bowling again.”

After I moved into the city, I went to the store Trash and Vaudeville and bought clothes that I liked. We were playing Manhattan clubs, and I didn’t want to dress like somebody from Queens anymore. I bought this really cute black and white sheer vintage blouse with a black vest, and drape-y pants with stars on them that kind of had an Ali Baba look, but not as severe. And I would go to Screaming Mimi’s, a vintage clothing store where I later worked, and try on vintage clothes, turning and swirling to see how I could perform in them and what they would look like onstage. I used to go out and find the clothes, but now I’m so busy that I have a stylist who shops for me. I look through what she brings to see what speaks to me. She and I have worked together since 2004. She’s a kick-ass stylist. I always tell her, “Elegant, but not conservative—ever.” And she gets it. We do have different mind-sets. For her, it’s about style, but for me, it’s about the performance and how the clothes will move when I’m dancing onstage.