Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (6 page)

On the one hand, feeling like I walked with one foot inside and one foot outside myself could be called crazy. But on the other hand, it could be called a much-needed perspective to create. It has been a great tool for me, whether I write or draw or sing or act or art-direct. Being in touch with your insides and understanding how to see from the outside gives you a broader view—what people now call “thinking outside the box.” As a dear friend of mine, Bob Barrell, said (you’ll hear more about him in a minute), I would become a student of life.

After my job at the Roosevelt Field Mall, I worked at a racetrack. I was a hot walker. It’s just what it sounds like: You walk the horses down when they’re hot. I had never been around horses before, but it didn’t matter to me. It was a job and I love animals. I would sing to the horses, too, which would kind of calm them down. I’d sing Hare Krishna chants in their ears and walk shoulder to shoulder with them. And the sunrises over the track were really beautiful too. I thought the scenery was so stunning that I could have painted it. I thought at first that the job would be perfect for me, but the hours were hard, and the older men hated the young girls for taking their jobs away. Eventually, the older guys would spook the horses on me as I’d come into the shed row, and the last time a horse reared, I did a figure eight in the air on the end of the lead. That was enough for me. I didn’t go back and was fired.

I was still living with Phil at that point, but it wasn’t going too good. I thought I loved him, and I felt betrayed when I realized he didn’t love me. Because the only reason I actually moved in with him was to be loved. And when we’d fight, he would always throw me down, sit on me, and say, “Can’t you hear?” I started to think, “This isn’t a good idea. I’ve got to get out of here.”

At the time, I had been going to visit my friend and great teacher/mentor Bob Barrell. I had met him when I was flunking out of high school. It was after one of those more hopeless days that I found this unlikely ally, in an unlikely place—under the El in Richmond Hill/Ozone Park, Queens, on 106th Street. I was walking home and there, in a little storefront, were all these paintings in the window. They were beautiful and had a depth, soul, and passion to them. They didn’t just speak to me, they screamed to me, “Wake up!” These were pieces of genuine art in the vast, desolate landscape of those who were too busy struggling to exist to be bothered with culture. Next to one painting
was a sign that said,
ART SCHOOL, UPSTAIRS
. So I went upstairs and met Bob. He wasn’t just a wonderful artist, he was a wonderful teacher. He taught me to paint, and he thought I had talent, and that gave me a newfound courage.

He also taught me about history and politics and life. He gave me a glimpse of who I could be. He had a whole gaggle of misfits that came to class on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Who knew? I had thought I was all alone. He was a great philosopher and talked to me about things that I never learned in school—about Gandhi and Martin Luther King and civil disobedience and Thoreau. So I’d go back and visit him, and we’d paint and talk.

Bob put a name to what was going on around me. He would say that the struggling masses were a “product of misery.” He said that misery begets misery unless we break the chain. And that’s where the title of the song “Product of Misery” that I wrote all those years later, on my album
Hat Full of Stars,
came from.

I told Bob about how Phil used to go camping with my other friends, but that I couldn’t ever go, because I didn’t have any equipment. But Phil didn’t know that I took two unemployment checks that I got after I left the hot walker job and bought camping equipment, because I thought, “Fuck it, they don’t ever take me camping, I’m going to go camping and I’m going to leave him.” Then I got some friends to help me move out on Phil, so that he couldn’t try to hold me down and shake me or whatever.

Bob helped me work out what I was going to do. He said I could go to Canada, to a provincial park, and do a tree study. Everyone was hitchhiking in those days, and I could live on an apple and a dollar a day. So that night we knelt on Bob’s kitchen floor with the map opened up, and he helped me draw out where I was going in Canada and how I was going to do it.

I told my sister, Elen, about my trip, and she thought it was a good idea. She had been going through a rough time herself. I thought then, even though at the time I would never have said it, that she loved Wha. (Elen’s gay, but she felt pressure to act straight then and was living with a fellow named Mitch.)

So off I went to the airport with my dog Sparkle. I was eighteen and I had never flown anywhere before. Beforehand I brought Sparkle to the vet to make sure she could make the trip. The doctor said the dog would be fine but asked if I would be okay. I thought I’d be fine, so I put Sparkle in a crate with some sleeping pills and told her I’d see her on the other side. I had never camped in my whole entire life, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to let fear stop me. I had a backpack on filled with camping equipment and canned food for both human and dog. I had some charcoal drawing sticks and drawing pads, a Bunsen burner, jeans and T-shirts, a pup tent, and a sleeping bag tied to the bottom of the backpack. I guess I just never travel light. But those were the things Bob said I’d need. I paid $125 for that ticket and an ax—because I’d have to chop wood. I had a window seat and got a tuna sandwich, too. I thought it was delicious, and the stewardess was very pleasant. I was living large!

When I landed in Toronto, I went to get Sparkle. There she was, barking her head off. The poor thing must not have cared for the ride. I would never do that to a dog anymore, now that I know how cold it is where she was in the plane. Then I went to customs, and a lady said, “Anything to declare?” I had a crumpled pack of Marlboros in my pocket and I said, “Nothing but these.” I was promptly sent to a more intense customs check, because nobody likes a wise guy, as the lady in the hospital told me.

There they asked about my trip. I told them I was an art student going to the Algonquin Provincial Park to do a tree study for about
two weeks. I guess I was a sight. With my dog in tow, I had on the red-brown suede jacket I had stolen from the department store in Roosevelt Field the year before, and a floppy red-brown suede hat that I flipped up so that I could see. I wore green jeans and a yellow T-shirt and some walking boots that tied at the ankle (so that I wouldn’t turn it when I was up in the park, which is what the man who sold them to me said).

I was so excited and scared all at once, I could barely hear what the other customs man was saying because I could hardly wait to finally go camping. I thought about all those times that Phil said I couldn’t go because I had no camping equipment, and now I was going camping big-time. And I was going without him and his friends—I was going as the artist I had always felt I was, the one trying to live and make ends meet in a nonartistic world. I had always struggled to live in a world whose language I couldn’t speak and didn’t want to know. In that world, everything about me was wrong.

I was going over and over in my head the plan that Bob Barrell drew out on that map that led to Algonquin Park, my destination. I was to take Thoreau’s
Walden
with me and read it. It was part of my assignment. It was what he called “walking on the path as a student of life.” On that path, it didn’t matter if I was different or stupid or lost, because I was going to find myself on my terms. That day, at the border of Canada, I was on my way to find out who, and what, I was.

My plan was that Elen was going to wire me my unemployment check while I was in Canada, which would give me enough money to eat and to stay at youth hostels. But at the moment, all I had in my pocket was twenty-five dollars, and the customs agents said I’d need more than that to enter the country. They suggested I call my parents and ask them to front the money. So I called my dad. My poor dad didn’t understand why I had to do the things I did. When I called
he said, “What are you doing in Canada? And why are you there in the first place?” He couldn’t afford to front the money, and I think he felt I’d stiff him anyway. I wouldn’t have, but everyone in my family thought I was trouble walking.

When my father couldn’t help me, I was a little heartbroken.

I tried to explain it to the customs agents but then I just started to cry a little. The funny thing about that group of customs agents was that when they heard how I had planned it and what I would do, they were rooting for me. They began to try and figure out how I could still do this tree study. My recollection of Canadians is how kind they were to me when I had nothing and I was nobody. I’ll never forget it. They allowed me to come in and told me, “Listen, get some bug spray because it’s June, which is blackfly season.” Another told me where to go in Toronto for a youth hostel. Then they wished me luck and let me go. I was in love with Canada.

Then I hitchhiked to the park. It was so wild. When you’re in the woods and you don’t know anything, you do everything stupid. Like I brushed my teeth and spit in the water. I didn’t know. Somebody who was canoeing past me gave me such a dirty look. Okay, the spitting in the water: not good. When I built a campfire, I remembered how my sister and I used to watch the Smokey the Bear “Careless Camper” commercial and reenact it under our kitchen table. We’d take turns being Smokey the Bear and the Careless Camper and light a fire, then recite, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Then my mother would come home and ask us about the new dark spot under the table, and I’d say, “I don’t know what that is, maybe you should use Comet.” I’m glad that before I left for Canada, Wha taught me how to build a proper fire pit.

I was scared, but the one thing I always felt was that I wasn’t alone. I felt like I had some protective force with me. I drew, I wrote poems,
I acted out things, I made myself laugh. At one point I bent down in front of a little tree and said, “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as this tree.” Stupid things. I could do that because I was by myself and it didn’t matter.

I was there for maybe two weeks. I wanted to find myself. Like I said, I felt that I would never find anyone who would understand me if I didn’t understand myself, so I needed to make this journey. It’s kind of dangerous in the end, when you think about it. There wasn’t a spot on me or poor ol’ Sparkle that wasn’t bit by blackflies. I don’t know how the hell I lived (although I was carrying that ax with me and would have killed somebody if they fuckin’ came at me). It was an interesting time. That was still at the end of the whole hippie thing. There still were people who were gentle souls.

I don’t know how I got from the campground back to Toronto, but when I did, I met a guy there who had a bus and he was going to drive down to New York. It was a magic bus, like a hippie bus. A few people were going, so I figured I’d go, too. On our way there, he stopped at the Saint Lawrence River and we all got out. And I took off my shirt because in my whole life I had never had the wind blowing on my chest like a man. I thought, “Wow,
that’s
what it feels like to be that free.” Then I put my shirt back on and met a fisherman in the Saint Lawrence River. He taught me how to clean and fillet a fish. That came in handy later on. Then we got back on the magic bus with everybody and we drove to New York.

I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
, I visited my sister, saw some old friends, and wound up coming back home to my mother, who had divorced her second husband. That was one of the great things about my mom. She always said, “You could come riding in on horseback—you’re still my kids.” I took her at her word. I didn’t exactly ride a horse back home, but I’m sure my outfit made just as strong an impression.

My mom didn’t just get a divorce, she was moving away from the house she and I grew up in. It was a little traumatic and freeing all at once. She found a place on Ninetieth Street. It was a little bit of a fixer-upper. My younger brother, Fred (who we called Butch), was still living at home too. I got a bedroom, and my brother was staying in what would have been the living room, as is usually the case for folks without a lot of means. So our bedrooms were right next to each other. Yikes! No privacy. It was kind of like college. We also lived with Ralph, my mom’s one-day-to-be-third husband. Because Ralph was in construction, there was always a project to be finished, which is always the case for folks who like a fixer-upper opportunity (my mom loved that).

I also saw Phil, who decided he wanted to get back together. He said, “You made your point. You can come back to live with me now.”
I thought, “Are you kidding me? You didn’t love me, and actually, from a distance, I realized that I didn’t love you, and I can’t live your kind of life.” I had been through so much that I just felt free of it and stronger—although I didn’t really have a plan beyond that. I took the dog to the Village and panhandled for money. I always panhandled. You know: “Can you spare some change?” Sometimes people would tell me to sell my dog. I didn’t care what anybody said. You’ve gotta understand, it didn’t matter to me, because I had had horrible things happen to me before. You’re going to give me money? Good. You’re not going to give me money and you’re going to insult me as you walk by? Fine.

I had my guitar, so I used to busk, too, but I only knew how to play two Joni Mitchell songs—“Carey” and “This Flight Tonight”—because I tuned the guitar to them, and once it was tuned, that was it. I got a couple of dollars, which is all I needed (although it would have been great if I had a bigger repertoire). Some guy came up to me one time and gave me two dollars and said, “This is for your second album—remember me then.”

After Phil, I met a guy named Richie, who used to date my sister’s friend. Then he hit on my sister, and then me. I said, “Hey, Richie, not for nothing, but that ain’t gonna happen. We’re friends.” He was a terrific illustrator but a troubled soul. We decided to hitch to Massachusetts to find a place where I could live. I couldn’t live in New York by myself because I was eighteen, and you have to be twenty-one to sign your own lease, and if my father wasn’t going to give me money, he was not going to cosign a lease. So Richie and I headed to Massachusetts, and we would set up camp and sleep in the woods along the way. We were sitting by the fire one time and he said to me, “You know what? You shouldn’t spell your name ‘Cindy,’ you should spell it C-Y-N-D-I.” So I did.