Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (7 page)

B
y the time I was thirteen, music had become my tether to the big, sparkly world beyond my hometown, which had begun, more than
ever, to feel like my bell jar. I had just entered my freshman year of high school. The novelty of a new school and classmates had worn off a few hours into my first day. Bored by my classes, oppressed by the small-minded meanness of my classmates, I was miserable.

Home life also tested my patience. My favorite movie of that time was
Labyrinth,
starring a young Jennifer Connelly as a fifteen-year-old girl named
Sarah, who felt her father and stepmother unjustly expected her to care for her baby brother. And so, she wished the goblin king, played by David Bowie, looking gorgeous in blond, bird-of-paradise hair, would take her brother away. One day, my brother drove me past the breaking point. Not by being bad, but by being cute, and being a toddler who needed patience from me. I had never been more of an impatient, impetuous perfectionist than I was at the age of thirteen. I drew on
Labyrinth
as the ideal alternative to our current life.

“If I had the choice between saving you and being David Bowie's goblin queen, I would choose David Bowie, and you would be a goblin forever,” I snarled.

Andrew began to cry, more upset by my tone of voice than my words, which were essentially meaningless to a three-year-old.

“I don't know why you'd want to go with David Bowie,” Mom said, picking my brother up and soothing him on her hip. “He'd just give you diseases.”

That shut me up. Her tone wasn't mean, even though I had certainly warranted at least a minor comeuppance for being a brat to my brother. Clearly, I was in over my head in the adult world, no matter how much I tried to pretend otherwise.

On those nights when I was trapped at home, I felt ready to burst the seams of my skin. After dinner, I went up to my room, threw myself down on my bed, and stared through my skylight at the vast pearlescent dome of the twilight sky. A molten fury rose up. It wasn't anger so much as pure energy, the desire to run and never stop. I sang along to Sinead O'Connor, aching for such power: “I don't know no shame. / I feel no pain.”

In the silence after the tape ended, I could hear the wind in the trees and the flat, dry voices of
The MacNeil/Lehrer Report
on the television downstairs. Ripping myself off my bed, I put on my Walkman and turned it up
loud.
I was hungry for anything angry, sexy, wild—the darker and more shredded with feedback and profanity, the better.

As I clomped down the stairs, I shouted in the general direction of Mom, who was playing with Andrew in the living room: “I'm going for a walk.”

The music worked its magic, making me feel that much more alive: “If you got some big fucking secret / Then why don't you sing
me
something?”—“Little Angelfuck / I see you going down on a fireplug”—“One day something funny happened / But it scared the shit out of me . . .” The angry lyrics gave me an air of bravado I didn't naturally possess. Blasting the sound of the big wide world into my very being, I paced the quiet country road that ran past the land, walking down to the harbor and back, feeling like I could tear up the asphalt with my desire for everything ferocious and free.

I wanted life to be bigger, louder, deeper, more intense. Punk rock was all of these things, so listening to it leveled me out. It made me feel normal, which was a relief. Not that I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. But while I worked up the guts to try to do something, anything, even though I had no idea what that might be, it helped to hear others release their barbaric yawp; the music let me know the tumult within me was an echo of larger forces, of intelligent life in the universe; I was not alone.

Although I loved punk, the band that inspired my deepest ardor was the Cure. In 1989, they released their eighth album,
Disintegration,
which voiced every dark, romantic longing in my overly dramatic mind and heart. They were touring to promote the album that fall, billing their Massachusetts show as their last ever; their swan song. I had to go.

My father hadn't been up to visit since his last trip with Eva, and his few letters were largely filled with mentions of his new family or
questions about mine. Better than the notes, though, were the cassettes he sometimes sent. As my primary access to the counterculture that existed beyond Maine, he was supplying me with the oxygen I needed to survive, as he'd always done.

My desire to see the Cure show trumped my usual discomfort at asking my dad for anything bigger than a cassette. I was still a little nervous about making any demand on him, but I wrote and requested that he drive a friend and me from Boston to the show, about twenty minutes outside of the city. He agreed right away.

It was as if all my waiting by the window had been rewarded. And now that I had the power to go places, if he would not come to me, I would go to him. All he had to do was stay put, and we would be the companions I had wanted us to be for so long. It never occurred to me to be cautious. I was so hungry for my father, and the validation I thought a big life would give me, that I was willing to risk everything in their pursuit. Because I valued time spent with my father—and now, time spent in the lustrous world at large—more highly than anything else, I almost didn't care whether these experiences were bad or good. Yes, good was better, but bad could be okay, too; at least it was something. I was already learning the kind of tricky thinking that would allow me to pursue whatever I wanted, relentlessly, without any concern for the consequences.

F
eeling oppressed by the daily routine of my high school life—rising in the bleary early dark, riding the bus to school, enduring the long, tedious hours of entrapment—I focused all of my attention on the gilded adventure glinting in my near future: the Cure concert. The day of the show, my friend Donyelle's parents dropped us off on the stretch of Mass Ave near Berklee College of Music, and we got sucked into the great maw of the city. A black man with long dreadlocks sold incense on the street. The dusky, fruited scent made my stomach dip with anxiety, reminding me I was in my father's city, and I was about to see him for the first time in more than three years. We wrestled our way along the crowded sidewalk to the corner of Newbury Street, where the epic two-story Tower Records held court.

As we rode the escalator up, up, up, as if toward heaven, I was soaring with anticipation, wide open to every new band name I needed to pretend I already knew while filing it away to be researched later. Every T-shirt could identify its wearer as a member of the special tribe
I was eager to act as if I'd already joined, even though I was learning everything on the fly, dizzy with the effort of trying to incorporate so much new information into who I was. I felt opened up in a way it wasn't normally safe to be in my hometown, able to admit how deeply I cared about music and art and the desire to express some of what was deep and raw and real in life, which was just beginning to kick me from within.

Even though I somehow never doubted my father would show up, I was anxious as we waited for him. This concert was important to me, yes, plus I was seeing my dad for the first time in years, which always made me excited in that fizzy, nerved-up way.

My dad pulled up in the white Toyota sedan Eva had gifted him when she left for Germany. It was instantly as it had always been: the smell of incense, the notebook of tightly filled pages of ­affirmations—none of which had happened, but which he still believed in, as he believed in the track, as I believed in him. He seemed smaller, and his eyes quickly shifted away from mine when I tried to study his face, but he looked the same, and we quickly settled into our old way of being together.

My dad didn't do small talk or ever temper his mood in the slightest simply because he was in the presence of someone else, which he rarely was anyhow. The advantage to this was that we never wasted time circling each other uneasily, even when we hadn't been together in so long. He just opened the floodgates, and I rode the wave.

“I hope my back holds up at the show,” my dad said.

“Yeah?”

“I haven't wanted to upset you, Sarah.”

Without moving my head, I tried to see how much Donyelle was picking up from the backseat, and how she was reacting, in order to try to puzzle out what she thought of my dad, and by extension, what she thought of me. We had been friends a long time, since grade school, when I had taken ballet lessons from her mom, and she now shared my passion for finding a way out into the big, wide world beyond Maine.
She was thankfully oblivious to my concerns, a normal teenage girl who was simply happy to be on her way to a concert, her long, brown hair whipping in the wind.

“That's why I haven't been in touch much lately,” my dad said. “But it's been real bad. Sometimes I can't sleep. When it's real, real bad, I can't sit down. I can't drive a cab or deliver packages. I can't work anymore. Sometimes all that helps is to walk. I walk for miles and miles around the city until I'm too tired to walk any more.”

I watched him nervously, waiting for his hand to grip the flesh of his waist. I felt guilty that I needed a ride to a concert, which was probably going to cause him pain.

We made our way into one of the venue's acres of asphalt lots and parked. My dad planned to wait out by his car during the concert.

“Have fun,” he said, not thinking to warn us to be on our guard, or to behave, as other parents might have done.

Everywhere around us were Goths so skinny or rotund they were like characters from a fairy tale, all draped in velvet capes and antique lace that looked as if it might evaporate in the cool night air. Oceans of skin so pale it was nearly translucent were scarred with lipsticked mouths as red as soft, seeping wounds.

I soaked it up, not just the sights and sounds, but also something on the molecular level: a collective exhale, a feeling of having stumbled into a safe haven where we could all be as bold or as dark or as scarred as we were, and it would gain us recognition, not ridicule. I didn't yet have the clothes to dress like them and was simply wearing a baggy black skirt and an army-green sweater, but I'd found my people: the Goths.

We made our way to the sloping lawn at the very back of the venue and waited. It felt as if all of the dials of my experience had been turned up to eleven, and my skin had been peeled off, and I was standing there totally exposed and more sensitive to input than ever before. It was sort of how I felt all the time, just amplified. But whereas in the real world of my droning school daze and quiet family time it was uncomfortable
to be an emotional adrenaline junkie, such larger-than-life feeling was celebrated in this space.

The stadium was outside, and it was a drizzly night in late September, everything slightly damp with the threat of rain. Great gusting fog banks rolled in and out of the air around us, making the faded grass look like a moor out of one of the Brontë books. An epic wash of music rolled over us from all directions at once. Robert Smith slouched over his microphone wearily, his pure white high tops glinting amid a sea of black clothes, black hair, black emotions. The drums, bass, and guitars formed a wall of churning sonic sludge, synths like shards of sunlight, as the band opened their concert with “Plainsong,” the first song on their new album.

Somewhere in the middle of the second or third song, my father appeared out of the mist, smiling shyly when he saw me amid the other teenagers. He'd found a cheap scalped ticket and decided to see what the Cure was all about. Too unused to him being my dad to react with normal teenage irritation, and having long mimicked his tastes and wanted to share his life, I was thrilled at the possibility of introducing him to a band and an experience he might now value. I basked in the feeling of being interesting to him. And then, as I adjusted to his presence, for once in my life I shook it off. This night was not about him. It was mine, all mine.

Eventually, Donyelle and I left my dad behind and pushed down to the edge of the lawn seats. I looked back over my shoulder, feeling guilty, until the fog swallowed him completely. Then I lost myself in the music, swaying my body freely in the anonymity of the damp darkness, singing along to every single word of every single song, enraptured. The band played forever, three encores in all, before disappearing into the wings in a haze of feedback. I quickly looked over at Donyelle, a little embarrassed at having let myself go so completely, now that I found myself back in my awkward teenage body. We trudged up the hill to where my dad waited.

“Did you like it?” Dad asked.

I nodded my head in the curt, conversation-deadening way of teenagers, reluctant to share the moment even with him. The crowd of elated fans pushed us along to the merch tables. I absolutely had to get a T-shirt, and I pulled us into line.

“Which one are you going to get?” I asked my friend.

“I don't have enough money left,” she said.

My dad looked up from where he stood a little ways off, hands in pockets.

“How much are they?” he asked.

“Twenty dollars,” she said.

My dad reached for his wallet. As he handed her a twenty-dollar bill, I was filled with gratitude that he was being so cool to my friend. I didn't even get jealous when he didn't pay for my shirt. I'd had a perfect night, and I thanked him as I hugged him good-bye.

That concert changed everything for me. All of my anxiety about being the kind of girl my dad would want to know, and now a desirable girl boys would want to be close to, had built up inside me for so long. Betty had been a model. Mom was beautiful by any standards, and especially well suited to the earth-mother ideal of the seventies. But I hated my freckles, hated how my skin broke out, hated being almost six feet tall, hated my curves, which I hid with baggy clothes. Here was my chance to say, “Fuck it, I don't want to be pretty anyhow.”