Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (7 page)

Then we kept going, to Vermont. Sometimes I would have dreams
before things happened, and a long time before we got to Vermont, I had one where I saw Jesus in a field with my dog Sparkle. Jesus was opening his arms and smiling, and the dog was jumping all around in the grass. When we got to Vermont, my dog ran down a hill and there was this field and she was jumping around in it, and the only thing that was missing was Jesus with his arms open. Vermont was so beautiful. It looked like a nature show, or like
Walt Disney Presents.
I had never seen anything like it, so I stayed.

But Richie had to leave when we arrived in Vermont, and I was on my own. I went to a youth hostel in Burlington. When the other kids in the hostel heard me approaching, they would say, “Here comes New York.” They didn’t like my accent. I met some people who said they would help me, and they enrolled me in this program to establish myself in an apartment. They put me on welfare and got me a job. First, I was a mother’s helper. The people were very nice and had these two little boys. They bought an old farm but had this modern house, and they had two cows, but they were pets. They had a room for me in the basement, and that’s where Sparkle and I lived.

I tried to be what the lady wanted, and the two little boys were all right, but one day she gave a party for one of her sons, and twelve kids came over. The father had given the kid a tractor, and the kids piled into the large shovel attached to the front, and the son was driving them around. While this was happening, my dog was running back and forth, and it was making me nervous. I kept telling the kid to watch out for my dog. I went to the mother and told her things were getting a little out of control, and she said, “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

Well, the five-year-old kid driving the tractor ran over the dog. I couldn’t believe it. I loved that dog. We slept together. We lived together. She was my family. The tractor ran right over her ribs. The father and a friend of his drove me to the vet and they talked about
how they lost their dogs. I’m thinking, “Nice, can we see what the vet says first, you silly old goats?” We took her to the doctor, who said, “Listen, if she lives through the night, she’ll live.” I was really shaken up. They brought me back to my cellar and that night I had another dream, that I saw the Blessed Mother, only this one didn’t look anything like I was taught. She had a kind face, and freckles, and sandy hair. She was smiling at me, and the dog was there, too, and there was a rainbow in the sky, just like there had really been earlier. It was as if she was superimposed over the scene from that day. It was a great comfort to see her in my dream. Growing up as a Catholic, Mary and Jesus are kind of like your secret friends who you can call in times of trouble. And the next morning when I woke up, I got the news that the dog lived, so it was a miracle.

I quit the job—big surprise—took the dog, and left. Eventually I got another job and an apartment in Burlington, but I was so lonesome. I remember when it was Christmastime, I kept hearing that Joni Mitchell song “River” bleed out of the bars on Church Street. You know the one: “It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees.” I was so sad, and I met this guy in a bar. He seemed to be a kindred soul, and he came back to South Burlington with me. We began seeing each other, and soon enough he was moving in. My feeling was, “Okay, whatever.” (Remember, it was the seventies.) We both used to paint, but his paintings were so raw that they were almost childlike. I thought it was like van Gogh. He wasn’t working, but I had recently found a job, after I went to the welfare office and said, “Can you just give me a job, please?” I really did not want to be on welfare.

They got all excited and brought me to this one man at the office, who asked me what I’d like to do. I told him I wanted to be a painter. He said that if I lived in South Burlington for a certain amount of time, I would be able to apply for a grant and go to school. In the
meantime, I’d have to work. He asked me what sort of things I liked, and I said animals. So he got me a job at a kennel/pound. I used to love to work in the pound more than the kennel because those dogs were so much more loving and sweet, and appreciated everything. I loved those animals so much. The woman who owned the place used to like to put them to sleep (she had this weird thing going on). Whenever I would see that she was coming to put one to sleep, I’d take the dog for a walk. Then she kind of got wise and killed them on my day off. There was one dog that I just loved. He had a broken leg, and I nursed him back to health. I named him after an actor called Herschel Bernardi. He was very funny. He used to run around all the time and the owner would catch him. Well, the last time she caught Herschel, she put that poor dog to sleep, too.

I tried to get my boyfriend work at the kennel, because they wanted some help. Then one day the owner came to me with her husband, and they sat me down. He said, “Cyn, listen, I did some checking on your friend. You know that he got a discharge from the army because he had a mental breakdown, right? You know those childlike pictures of his? There’s a reason for them.”

I was like, “Ooohhh.” It made sense. There were times when I would talk to him and he was very quick to get angry over nothing. And when I asked him to leave, he got a little weird with me. He was very upset and was yelling while I was helping him pack. He was still yelling when I was helping him to move his stuff into his car, and then he pushed me into the Christmas tree. I got up and continued to help him, and when he finally got out, I locked the door. Because I grew up seeing violence, I remained calm.

I went through a lot in that apartment. I had no television, no stereo, nothing. I was still a kid, and I was alone. A lot of times I couldn’t take it anymore, so I just lay in bed all the time. When I really couldn’t
deal with anything, I used to get the shakes, just complete anxiety attacks. When they happened, I’d hold myself and try to talk myself down. I’d say to myself, “You’ll be okay—take a deep breath.” Then, if I was feeling like I really needed to feel protected, I would empty out the cupboard underneath the sink and crawl under there. I’d stay in there because it was enclosed, and slowly I would begin to feel better. Because I was alone, I’d allow myself to do things that had they been done in front of other people, they would have said, “Whoo, she is
crazy.
”

Sometimes I would sit in a closet if I felt really fearful, and I’d tell myself, “Okay, now you’re sitting in a closet—good. Go ahead, sit anywhere you want in the whole apartment. It’s your apartment. Wait until you feel better, then come out. If you want to sit in that chair over there, sit wherever you want until you feel better. If you can’t handle it, and you want to get into bed, stay in bed. When you feel better, get up and try again.” That’s how I got better: I allowed myself to fall apart.

One of those days when I stayed in bed all day and all night, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw an angel in my head. He was sitting at a desk with a big fat book and he was showing me the scene of a courtroom. My mother was in it and she was crying. Then a mean judge told me that I judged my mother too harshly. The angel was sweet looking, with wings and curly blond hair. I looked over his desk to read the book and in the pages, I saw myself just lying on the ground with chariots running over me.

As time went on, I got really sick. Apparently, the guy with the mental breakdown had given me hepatitis. He had been throwing up a lot, but I was used to cleaning up puke because I always cleaned the vomit from the dogs. Hepatitis was going around in Burlington that year. I went to work anyway but got very, very sick one day when I
was there and they had an ambulance come. They took me away in a stretcher. I was so tired but I could feel Krishna inside of my body as a young boy showing me how to rest, and I knew it would be all right. When I got to the hospital, I was told I had hepatitis. As I lay in my hospital bed with an IV in my arm, I heard the nurses talking and one of them said, “How did she get hepatitis?” And the other nurse turned around and said, “An affair.” All of a sudden I felt like I was in a Bette Davis movie—I had an
affair.
I called my dad and he was going away on his honeymoon with his new wife. “Poor thing,” he told me. “Please call your mom.” It’s not like anyone could really help me; I was fine, I was in the hospital.

When I got out, I was too weak yet to work. Sometimes if the hostel had some interesting people I might like, I’d put them up at my place for a while. There was a kid named Ann Marie who stayed with me once who was a runaway. She had an older boyfriend—who was really a pedophile, if you ask me. They were going to put her in a correctional juvenile place for delinquent kids unless someone adopted her. I wanted to, but I couldn’t because I was too young, I was still nineteen. I felt so bad. She never forgave me.

And while I was trying to get better, a couple came and stayed with me—a guy named Tommy and his girlfriend—and they took care of me. And then she left and he stayed, and he became my boyfriend after a while. He wouldn’t leave (I know, again with that). Tommy was such a charmer and could talk you into anything. He wasn’t working, so he spent a lot of time hunting. One time there was nothing to eat for dinner, so Tommy went out with his gun, shot a squirrel, and brought it home.

There it was, on the kitchen counter. All I could think of was that one time when the Magic Bus had made a stop on the way to New York, and I saw a guy fishing, and he taught me how to clean a fish.
Thank goodness, I remembered how to do it, because that’s how I took care of that squirrel. So I did what I had to do. I cut its head off and peeled back the skin, and I thought, “Hmm, there’s not a lot of meat.” But I took whatever was there and chopped it up. Then I cut up an onion, put olive oil in a pan with some basil, a little garlic, and a bay leaf, and sautéed the squirrel. Then I threw in a can of tomatoes, some wine, a little sugar, and a little salt and let it cook for a while. Tommy took a cab home and invited the cab driver to dinner. The cabbie loved it, and after dinner he said, “This is really delicious. What kind of meat is this?”

I told him it was chicken and he said, “No, it’s not.”

I said, “Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not, it’s gamier.”

I said, “All right, it’s squirrel.” He didn’t believe me and we went back and forth a couple of more times. The squirrel’s head was in the trash, and the pelt, too, so I showed him the pelt, and he got really upset.

After a while, I realized that Tommy was never going to work. It hit me that although there was something very charming about him, he was a bum, and he was really dirty. He didn’t like taking baths or showers. That got old pretty fast.

In the meantime, the people in the welfare office worked it out so that I could go to Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont. They had this thing called the PROVE Program where you could get a scholarship if you proved yourself through your work. I just wanted to take art, but they wanted me to take English and history. As I mentioned, I always had a lot of trouble with English and didn’t want to take it. I couldn’t write a paper or read the amount you needed to in college. I couldn’t focus on a page. I had attention deficit disorder or
something; I still don’t read a lot. I could do things visually then and I could write creatively. But I never learned the basics of writing out a report.

Of course, at the time, I didn’t know that what I might have had was ADD. And I couldn’t figure out if my problem was from a traumatic childhood or if maybe I was just fuckin’ stupid. I just thought that maybe my short stint in a convent school where the nuns got a little brutal might have contributed to my condition. That lovely boarding school run by what I’ve always called the Sisters of No Mercy or Charity at All, especially if the children wore their patience a little thin. Maybe I was just hit in the head too much. And listen, I got by as a stupid person pretty good, because I could do other things and I could verbally articulate some things well. Sometimes I would get up in class and talk to the teacher and ask questions, and then when I sat down I would hear, in my head, “You really are brilliant.” I would think, “I’m not brilliant; I’m actually kind of stupid.” Then I’d hear, “No, you’re not.” I’ve always felt like there was this really strong presence of a guardian angel around me. Either it was a guardian angel, or I had to completely schizoid out to survive.

While I was living in Vermont, I still made trips back to New York. I’d hitch, and take my dog and my easel. I would be on that big highway that goes from Vermont, and I would be so scared. It was cold, and I was frightened for my life all the time. I got in this one car with a guy who brought me back to his house and let me rest before he took me to the next spot. He was very kind. I was very lucky that I wasn’t killed or something. (But, I mean, I had the dog too. It’s kind of hard to kill you
and
the dog, right? Well, I guess if you’re motivated, you could.) When I made it back to New York, I would visit Bob Barrell, and we’d paint, and he would teach me about painting. He once told me that a painter is a great liar because you’re taking a
flat surface and making it look like it’s three-dimensional, not flat but something with depth. It’s the craziest thing, but some of the techniques that he taught me I use in my makeup when I paint my face or when I’m adding color to my blond palette of a head.

So as I was taking courses for this art scholarship at Johnson State, I got a job as a nude model in one of the classes. I modeled in the watercolor class. I loved watercolor but didn’t get into the class, so I worked there so I could watch the teacher. Unfortunately, artists hardly ever view the models as people who might be attending a class they couldn’t get into. The great thing was that because I was also taking art history classes, I was able to pose like the models in the paintings I studied and then watch how the students translated those poses in pen, ink, and watercolor. Which I loved.

Most of the art history books I read were dreadfully written though. I had a hard time reading them but I loved the paintings so much I made myself get through the writing that made no sense. And I was making art with my body. I would twist myself to make a line that would run down the page or pose in a shape I would have liked to draw myself. And I could stay that way for a long time. Then I would watch the students draw and paint, and listen as the teacher came over and talked to them. I don’t think any of them really realized how much I was watching. They probably thought I was an exhibitionist or some kind of tramp.