Heart of Glass (11 page)

We all came to New York to try on new selves, new ideas, maybe even make new homes. But if things didn't work out, most kids could go back to where they came from and who they used to be with doors held wide-open for them by their families. Their days in the city would become memories, stories of mystery and excitement told from a safe haven. No door was being held open for me, except the one at Jenny and Pete's at Ninety-seventh Street. And I was glad to have it.

I'd miss Annie and wonder how things had worked out for her—if she ever told her friends or family about the Steak Bunnies or Iggy Pop or me.

It was easy to lose people in the city—it seemed that if you let go of someone's hands for a moment, they were gone, slipped away. And all you could do was close your eyes and try to remember what they looked like, the sound of their voice, or what their last name had been.

chapter five

ALL THE YOUNG DUDES

That May, I flew to Minneapolis to visit with my dad and Sarah before heading to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I'd inherited my trust money on my twenty-first birthday, so I felt emboldened when I called the trust officer Mr. Charno on the phone and asked him for $1,500 to buy a car. Daddy took me shopping at various used-car lots, although his only criteria for a good deal seemed to be a working radio and a cigarette lighter. The minuscule chocolate-brown Honda Civic I chose resembled a clown car, but it was in my price range. It would just about fit me inside, along with my giant, battered, white Samsonite suitcase that I had bought to supplement the Ciao! bag and named Moby, purchased at the Salvation Army in New York right before I left. I had crammed it with my possessions and just hoped it would survive the baggage handlers at LaGuardia.

“Take care, sweetheart—those roads can be treacherous.
I'll make it up there once you're into the run.” Daddy hugged me good-bye.

I wedged myself into my car. “Bye-bye.” It was still weird to say good-bye to him, to voluntarily leave my father. A part of me thought I might lose him again, that he might not be there when I came back.

“And remember”—he leaned down and spoke through the open window—“the mountains of Colorado are a place where men are men and sheep are nervous.”

I had no idea what he meant, but I laughed anyway; he had great delivery. I headed south through Iowa, with its rolling hills and cornfields and entered startlingly flat Nebraska—where the speed limit shot up to seventy-five miles an hour. Outside of Omaha, I shoved my David Byrne and Brian Eno cassette,
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
, into the tape player. The screaming evangelists, droning melodies, and thumping drum loops seemed an apropos sound track for this monotonous moonscape terrain—the home of the Strategic Air Command, Boys Town, and a seemingly endless stream of billboards that said
JESUS LOVES YOU, HALLELUJAH!
and
DON'T KILL YOUR BABY.
Feeling sleepy later that night, even after a drive-through McDonald's cheeseburger and coffee, I pulled into a Best Western off the highway in Kearney to get a room for the night. Dad had given me an Amoco credit card before I left, in case I got stranded somewhere. I could buy gas, snacks, and even put a hotel room on it.

I walked through the dark motel parking lot, which had
huge fields on either side and smelled faintly of cow poo. In the too-bright lobby, deserted at midnight, I asked the skinny, pasty guy working the overnight shift—his name tag said
RAY
—for a room. I signed the book and plonked down my credit card.

He smiled and slid a key on the counter to me. “Sweet dreams, ma'am.”

Once in my room, too tired to undress, I pulled back the thick, floral polyester bedspread and collapsed, facedown. In the pitch black, I suddenly heard an odd, throbbing noise from somewhere inside the room. I got up and turned on the lights, checked the bathroom—nothing. But when I returned to the bed, I saw that it was covered in crickets, sawing away. I shrieked, grabbed my bag, and ran downstairs to tell the clerk.

“My room is filled with bugs!”

“Yes, ma'am.” Ray nodded apologetically. “Crickets, ma'am.”

“Well, can I have a room that isn't filled with crickets?” Freaked-out, I was about to tell him that I was even willing to pay extra.

“All the rooms have them this time of year. They come in through the windows from the fields across the way. We just can't stop 'em.” He shrugged.

“Okay, thanks. I guess.” It wasn't Ray's fault; he was doing his best.

I trudged back upstairs, swept as many of the crickets off the bed as I could, stuffed my ears with Kleenex, and pulled the bedspread over my head.

The next day, still sleep deprived, I drove out of town, dipped into Wyoming, and reached the mountains. The scenery was gorgeous—buttes capped with snow, craggy rock formations, forests of towering pine trees—but as I was a city kid, it all kind of scared me. I didn't know how to respond; it was so picture-perfect, so vast, it looked like a mural or the opening scene of
The Sound of Music
. I could practically see Fräulein Maria skipping around in her ugly novice uniform, singing to the trees.

When I stopped at a gas station to fill up in Cheyenne, dressed in my black jumpsuit and red Keds, a menacing-­looking man in a cowboy hat and boots looked me over, scowled at my pixie haircut, and spit on the ground at my feet. I ran inside to pay and bought a cup of coffee and a candy bar, receiving more hairy eyeballs from flannel-clad, bearded truckers and the big-haired gal at the register. Walking out of the store, I felt their stares follow me; I jumped in my car and fled. I drove into Colorado, through little mountain towns on narrow, twisting roads punctuated with hairpin turns. I passed through Kremmling and Granby, which looked to me like Mayberry from
The Andy Griffith Show
. All the people, especially the guys, seemed bigger, taller, louder. Maybe it was all the fresh air; maybe it was the bolo ties and oversized belt buckles. I guessed that's why they were ­referred to as mountain men. I drove by ghost towns that had sprung up during the silver boom and were now deserted, crumbling, and roadhouse bars in the middle of nowhere. I even saw some buffalo grazing on a hillside. I'd only ever
seen them dead and stuffed at the Natural History Museum.

I drove through Rabbit Ears Pass, my ears popping from the nine thousand plus feet of altitude, and descended into Steamboat Springs. When I reached the town, I marveled at how dinky it was. There was basically one street, home to a Western-wear store, a gas station, a clapboard restaurant advertising a chicken-fried-steak dinner on a handmade sign in the window, and a convenience store. That was it. I was in the sticks. Expecting to see tumbleweeds blowing across the road at any moment, I walked down the main drag, feeling completely out of place—like a female David Bowie in my own version of the girl who fell to Earth. Since arriving, I had raised quite a few eyebrows and had felt anxious when the cashier at the minimart had asked me if I had gel in my hair with a tone implying gel was a felony in Colorado. My runaway friend, Annie, had turned me on to Tenax, a French hair product that came in a green-and-black tube. It was essential for eighties hair, Annie had told me, and I used it religiously. I didn't explain that to the cashier, merely nodding.

When I got to the address where the theater was, using a map I'd picked up at the chamber of commerce, I pulled over to the side of the road and looked around. All I saw was a big white tent in a field with a dilapidated trailer and a few trucks parked nearby. Where was the theater? I walked over to the tent, figuring someone inside might be able to direct me. Drawing back the heavy duck flap, I saw two men inside, hammering.

“Excuse me,” I yelled over the din. “Do you know where
the Steamboat Repertory Theater is? It's supposed to be around here somewhere.”

They looked up from their work. One looked like a Deadhead, in a rumpled tie-dyed T-shirt and a droopy mustache. The other one looked like the Marlboro Man come to life.

“You're standin' in it, little feller,” said the Marlboro Man. I guessed it was the hair. And the jumpsuit.

“Really? You mean, it's in a tent?” Then I noticed some of the workmen were setting up folding chairs in rows and saw the large lighting instruments on the ground waiting to be hung. It had a dirt floor, the grass tamped down by many pairs of work boots.

The Steamboat Springs Repertory Theater had been founded by Richard Geer—not to be mistaken for the movie star—during a bleak winter with little snow in the resort town. He was affable, liked to wear Hawaiian shirts, and saw himself as a visionary bringing culture to the five thousand people who lived in town year-round. We'd be putting up three plays. Although the theater ended up going broke a few years later, we were all invigorated that summer by Richard's enthusiasm and his unshakable belief that we were making the world safe for the arts.

My housing was in a college dorm that was empty for the summer: cinder block with a thin single-mattress bed, overhead lighting, blah-colored curtains, and a communal bathroom down the hall. I had a roomie—a young African American woman named Bernadette who had a job in the
costumes department. She must have weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, was really into purple, and had a huge stash of M&M's under her bed. She was always scribbling in a diary in French—perhaps because she was afraid I might read it, which she was right to be because I did once when she'd left it lying around. There was only one reference to me—she called me
le papillon
—the butterfly. I don't think she was comparing me to the Steve McQueen character in the prisoner movie of the same name. More likely, it was a condescending description of my size. I was kind of small, five feet three and three-quarters, and barely hit a hundred pounds. When I was eight, the kids at school had teased me, calling me a dwarf. When I ran home to tell my mother, she took a drag on her cigarette and said, “Darling, you're not a dwarf—you're petite.” Then she went back to her
Cosmo
quiz. Twelve years later, I was neither a dwarf nor petite; I was a butterfly.

Bernadette snored horribly, her enormous body a sound chamber that rattled and creaked with her every breath all night long. I had to go the drugstore and buy earplugs. This helped me sleep better at night but backfired when I couldn't hear my alarm clock in the morning—Bernadette having gotten up and gone, not bothering to wake me. I couldn't help but think she did it on purpose; she had taken an instant dislike to me. She claimed to have never heard the song
“Bernadette” by the Four Tops, which simply couldn't be true. She looked at me blankly when I started singing it to her one day at rehearsal, using my comb as a pretend mi
crophone. In the end, our tenuous relationship didn't matter because she moved in with the hippie lighting guy who lived in the fetid, crusty trailer next to the theater. I don't think he knew what was happening—one day she cleaned it from top to bottom, miraculously removing the stench that emanated from it, and set up house with him. She would pad around in an apron, screaming at him, and he'd try to smoke a joint behind the trailer without her seeing him or smelling it. They were like a Rocky Mountain take on Ma and Pa Kettle. Bernadette didn't think much of me, clearly, but I was slightly in awe of—and impressed by—her ability to take what she wanted; even if what she wanted was to shack up with a stoner dude. She got her man. I was still in the planning stages of figuring out what and who I wanted.

My next-door neighbor in the dorm was the other apprentice—a twenty-three-year-old business major from Virginia named Stanley, who would be working in the box office. He was a Mormon. I had never met a Mormon before. He was gangly and blond, with a receding hairline. He looked exactly like Clint Eastwood. Some days I could make him squint like Clint and say “Well, do ya, punk?”—which sent me into hysterics. He was a sweet guy with a girlfriend back home, whom he called Old Valerie; he said they'd probably get married. Even though they'd been going out for a year, I doubted they'd even seen each other's kneecaps. Shortly after Bernadette moved out, I got altitude sickness, and Stanley stayed by my side the entire time. I had a fever of 102 and genuinely thought I was going to die. Delirious,
I promised to leave him all the mixtapes my friend Amy had made me as well as my Grace Jones cassettes. We talked about his ­religion—or, rather, he talked while I shook with chills and perspired. I learned that Mormons couldn't drink alcohol or caffeine, couldn't smoke, couldn't have sex out of wedlock, and weren't allowed to masturbate. Even swearing was verboten. “Graham crackers!” Stanley would holler endearingly after he'd slammed his finger with a hammer. As he explained the teachings of the Mormon Church, it became clear to me that it had a lot of rules. Having grown up with few, I wondered if it made life harder or easier. Either way, from what he told me, I was pretty sure that in Stanley's world I would totally be going to hell big-time.

The first show of the season was
The Rainmaker
, a somewhat corny and dated play about a spinster named Lizzie living on a ranch in Oklahoma during the Depression. There's a terrible drought, and a charismatic con man named Starbuck comes to town and claims to be able to make it rain for a price. Lizzie and Starbuck have a one-night stand (demurely depicted in a play from the 1950s), and he tries to convince her to run off with him. But having learned something from him about herself—that she is beautiful in her own way—she stays on the ranch, and he's run out of town.

My job on
The Rainmaker
was to sober up one of the actors before the play's first—and his only—scene. No actor, really, he was a disc jockey at the radio station in town. He drove a pickup and usually arrived at the theater drunk, so I was in charge of getting him cups of coffee, and if he was
really shit faced, I ran him around in circles in the field next to the tent. I'm sure we looked odd together, like a turbocharged comedy act—him stumbling a bit and little me working hard to keep up with his long legs. Then, when I got him settled in his chair in the dressing room, I went to help Stanley at the box office, passed out programs before the show, and served coffee during the intermission on a folding table at the back of the tent.

For about two weeks of the run, it rained torrentially during the performances. Since the play's set on a farm during a severe dry spell, this led to some hilarious moments onstage for the actors and the audience. An actor would stick his hands in pockets, look up, and drawl, “I sure do wish it would rain!”—while water poured down the backdrop and leaked into buckets on folding chairs placed around the ­theater, and the company tried to keep a straight face.