A Lotus Grows in the Mud (11 page)

“Oh, some yogurt and my cleaning.”

“Well, can we help you carry it?”

“Oh, no thank you. I just live across the street. Right over there. I live on the third floor right up there on 888 Eighth Avenue,” I say proudly. “It’s a brand-new building. That’s my bedroom window.”

“Cool.”

“So, where are you boys from?” I blush, chattering on.

“Poughkeepsie.”

“How long are you staying in town?”

“Not long. We’re on a road trip. You know, like Jack Kerouac in
On the Road.
We’re starting here and ending up on the West Coast, to find those California girls.”

“Very cool.”

“Anyway, nice to meet you,” they say, smiling and moving on.

I say good-bye and cross the street. Halfway across, I turn. “By the way,” I yell, “my name is Goldie. Oh, and don’t forget to go up the Empire State Building while you’re here. It’s much better at night.”

“Great. Thanks, Goldie. Bye.”

T
alking to my mother on the telephone later that night, I am in my kitchen making a piece of toast. “I dunno, Mom,” I say, pulling a plate from the cupboard as I rest the telephone in the crook of my neck, “maybe I should just come home. I mean, New York is great and everything, and I love my new apartment, but I think maybe it’s time to come home.”

Watching the toaster to make sure it doesn’t burn the bread, all of a sudden the lights go out and the line goes dead. The toaster glows red but then fades. “Mom? Mom? Mom? Are you there? What happened?”

It is pitch-black. Putting down the telephone, I peer out the window and gasp when I see not a single light in any of the windows across the street. Only the car headlights illuminate the street. Feeling my way to the cupboard under the sink, I retrieve a flashlight and wander through my apartment and into the hallway. All my neighbors are standing around.

“What happened? Why did all the lights go out?”

“We dunno. Do you have lights?”

“No. Is there a fire? Did something happen?”

“Looks like the whole block’s out. I can’t see a light on anywhere.”

“Oh my God, the elevator! Is someone stuck in there? I can hear shouting.”

I run downstairs to the lobby and find Ernie the doorman lighting a candle.

“Ernie, what happened?”

“Looks like a blackout. The whole of New York is out. It’s inky out there.”

“I think someone’s stuck in the elevator,” I tell him.

“I know. I just called the fire department.”

I walk out into the street and look around in wonder. I have never been in a blackout before. Looking up, I realize that the Empire State Building is in darkness, something I have never seen before.

Wandering back into the lobby, I see Ernie has been joined by others from our building. They are listening to a transistor radio. “What’s going on?” I ask.

“It’s a massive blackout, honey,” a woman tells me. “It’s affected the whole northeast coast, right up into Canada. They reckon there are thirty million people in the dark.”

“Oh no! Do you mean there are people trapped in buildings?”

“Yes, honey, right up in the Empire State Building.”

“Oh my God!” I cry, my hand to my mouth. “I told two strangers to go up there tonight.”

“And on the subway,” Ernie pipes in, his ear to the radio.

“None of the stoplights are working, so the traffic’s at a standstill,” a man I don’t know tells me.

I go out into the street again, craning my neck to look up at all the buildings shrouded in darkness. Everyone seems so calm. The people who live in my building are all talking to each other for the first time. Jilly’s is crammed with strangers sitting around candles, talking and sharing and connecting. Nobody can get home, so they have just stopped where they are. It feels like we are on the safest island in the world, and all of man’s foibles, all our anxieties, aggressions and fears, have melted away for one night

“Isn’t this awesome?” I tell Eddie, the dry cleaner.

“Sure is, Goldie. I’ve lived here all my life and I ain’t seen nothing like this.”

“Isn’t that old Mrs. Krokovitch?” I say with surprise, pointing to a gray-haired woman standing talking to someone else across the street.

“Oh my God, you’re right!” he says. “She hasn’t unlocked that front door of her apartment in ten years. Wow, this night is really something!”

I run back up to my apartment to find my roommates drifting in from their auditions or from Phil Black’s dance class. They are half giddy and half hysterical.

“Did you see the moon?” asks Anita.

“I know,” says Susan. “I’ve never seen it so big.”

“And how about the stars?” says Roberta. “It feels like I’ve never seen them before.”

We run around and light the candles as more and more friends arrive on our doorstep. “Okay, I guess the party’s at our house!” I laugh as I bring some glasses in from the kitchen.

“Well, you’re the only people we know who live in a three-story walk-up!” Eddie cries, holding up a bottle of scotch as he waltzes in.

We finish lighting the candles, relishing their flickering light. Someone strums on a guitar and another rolls a joint. My front door is wide open, and, suddenly, standing there are the two guys I met in the dry cleaner’s earlier this morning.

“Hi, Goldie! Sorry to crash this party,” they say in unison.

“Hi! Oh, thank God you’re okay! Come on in, this is great. I thought you might be stuck at the Empire State.”

“We didn’t get there yet,” one says. “And 888 Eighth Avenue was the only address we knew in the whole city!”

“Welcome!” I say, and happily fix them a drink.

Other friends and strangers arrive with bottles of liquor or tins of food. People empty their refrigerators, and they bring transistor radios so we can listen to some music. We create our very own nightclub—partying together by the golden glow of candlelight.

I stay up all night, chatting and laughing with my two new friends. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, we share joy and friendship, touching and laughing and telling our secrets. We have no judgment, no history. We are just three people, united in the moment and enjoying the freedom of
it. They don’t push themselves on me, or try to take advantage. We have a closeness and an honesty that completely restores my faith in men.

At dawn, I eventually crash. I wake to find these two guys I have only just met sleeping on my pillow. My apartment is littered with people still making love or staring out the window, marveling at the tentative first light of morning. Reaching out, I switch off the table lamp, which tells me the power is back on. The blackout is over; the moment has passed. But this beautiful, magical experience, this perfect night, will forever mark my heart.

W
hen we strip away the things that seem important and go back to the basics, we discover that all we really have is each other. I was a naïve out-of-towner who had been in New York less than a year. In that crazy period, everything had happened so quickly. I’d had some powerful, huge experiences, wins and losses, many of which had presented me with great personal dilemma. I had to get myself out of some tricky situations that I would never have even shared with my mom and dad.

I had left my rose-tinted family values behind and somehow come to be regarded as a strange sexual object by people who didn’t even know me. I had been leered at and groped almost daily. More than any childhood experience I’d had, even the young man kneeling on my bedroom floor in Takoma Park, the Al Capps and the subway jerks and the seedy bargoers of this city had almost succeeded in breaking my spirit, in making me lose my faith in men.

Then, just when I’d decided I’d had enough, I was going to quit New York and find a healthier path somewhere else, the blackout restored that trust. A sheet of black velvet fell over the moonlit city that night, and, as if by magic, all that was dirty and cheap vanished. This one night became, for me, the epitome of the flower-power, peace-and-love days of the sixties. No one slept. Everybody loved each other; strangers made friends with strangers, and we had the wildest, funniest, most romantic night.

There was no fear in the air, no robbery, no murder. New Yorker helped New Yorker. Volunteers assisted the police and fire service in res
cuing those who were trapped, or sent coffee and blankets to the hundreds without food or heat. Even the people stuck in the elevators of the Empire State Building didn’t panic. They held hands in the darkness and sang.

That beautiful night of lovemaking and gentleness gave me a respite from the relentless onslaught of the worst, most predatory traits of man. It acted as an antidote and allowed me to lift my head again and decide to keep trying—both with my career and with men.

I have since come to learn a lot about men, about why they behave the way they do. Men had to protect their women and children when we were all out roaming the earth. They were the hunters. They became sexual animals that wanted multiple partners. I am so happy I was born a girl, because I have never had to struggle with that innate need to spread my seed or impregnate a mate.

Instead, I have learned over the years to feel a deep understanding for how difficult it is for men just to be male, to have this hormone raging through their blood like a drug. It makes it difficult to control their behavior. Just going out on the street can be hard for men because the sight of a girl in a short skirt, even if she has a bag over her head, ignites them physically. It goes directly to their sexual energy.

Men fight such impulses every day, especially in their prime years, always having to corral themselves because they have a family, a wife or responsibilities, because they have to be good boys, be part of society and hold down a job. We women can’t identify with the frustration that they feel at having to bottle that up. If we could have testosterone shot into us daily and experience what happens to our tempers, our sexual energy and our destructive forces, we would be horrified.

Most important, I no longer blame the male sex. I may not like it when they misbehave or are disrespectful to women; it doesn’t feel good, and, in fact, it hurts. But then I try to summon my higher self, the one that gets to observe, and look at the bigger picture. Only then can I see what happened and understand that when they say, “But I love you, honey, it didn’t mean anything,” the sad part is that for them, it
didn’t.

The man who jerked off in front of me at the Peppermint Box probably went home to his wife and kids. Similarly, the photographer who groped me in the darkroom, or the two thugs on the subway. If I had
acted differently, if I had responded to their advances, it wouldn’t have made any difference to them. They would merely have satisfied an urge, like scratching an itch, and—as sure as eggs are eggs—the itch would have come back sooner rather than later, with someone else.

What was so wonderful about the night of the blackout and its perfect timing in my life was that it taught me the beauty of a world where people’s defenses come down, where primeval urges are set aside and love and understanding prevail. We were all just human beings in the candlelight that night, trying to help each other out. I’d never felt more alive, more a part of everything. Everyone was just living in the moment. It was the most extraordinary revelation and a real awakening for me. Most of all, it allowed me to have hope again.

And with hope, I could pursue my dream.

“O
kay, girls! Let’s roll!” yells my friend Sandy as we suck the last of our Orange Julius drinks through straws at Pete’s Hotdog stand in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. “Las Vegas, here we come!”

Shrieking with excitement, we five dancers jump into our separate vehicles for the five-hour drive to Vegas. I’m the only one with a traveling companion: Lambchop, a toy poodle I impulsively blew two hundred bucks on in a pet store just before I left New York. It is August 1965.

“The Desert Inn, right?” I ask as we start up our engines and lean out the windows, calling to each other from across the lot. My ’59 Chevy convertible with the cool fins and the permanent squeak coughs to life and almost drowns me out.

“That’s right, Goldie,” Sandy yells from her ’58 Cadillac, which, like mine, has seen better days. “Just stay on the 15 Freeway across the desert until you see the pretty lights.” She floors her accelerator and races off with a squeal of tires. Horns honking, the others follow close behind, and I hurry to bring up the rear.

I haven’t a clue where we are going. I have only been in California a few months, and I still feel like a foreigner amid the flower-power, anti–Vietnam War, hippie culture. I am sharing an apartment with a family near the famous NBC Studios in Burbank and am about to embark on a new adventure.

The sun is shining, the radio is playing “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher, and I am back to being a gypsy in the chorus line again. Sitting
in my long, low, sexy Chevy, with Lambchop in the passenger seat, we are off to Vegas. Honking at the girls in front and laughing, I know I made the right move in heading west. Everything feels fresh and bright and new here. It is a place of opportunity, not a city of broken dreams.

Singing along to the music on our radios, our little caravan snakes along Sunset Boulevard, past the Beverly Hills Hotel, Dino’s Lodge from
77 Sunset Strip
and Ciro’s Restaurant. Waving and whistling at the tanned young men who stop and stare, we felt life couldn’t be sweeter.

Rounding a corner at the famous Chateau Marmont Hotel, our cars nearly bump into one another when we come face-to-face with a sharp reminder of reality. Marching down the middle of the street toward us is an antiwar protest denouncing President Johnson for sending a further fifty thousand troops to Vietnam.

DON
’
T SEND OUR BOYS TO THEIR DEATHS
, reads one banner. Long-haired hippies trail past us, handing out single roses with the message “Make love not war.” I take a rose and watch them shyly as they march slowly past in their combat jackets and multicolored headbands, not really understanding the politics of their protest or the intensity of their emotions. I was never one for rallies; I missed all that because I was too busy working. Every time I heard that somebody I knew from high school or Takoma Park had died in Vietnam, I would cry. I knew I wanted Americans out of there, but I didn’t really know why.

The marchers march past, and I wedge my red rose between the cigarette lighter and the ashtray, as a silent reminder to myself. “Every day I’m going to make myself think about our boys fighting out in Vietnam,” I tell myself aloud. “Losing their lives in what seems to be a senseless war.”

We head for the California freeway that wends its way through the eastern Mojave Desert, and I watch the scenery shifting all around me. The tall buildings give way to smaller ones; the shops and houses become fewer; and there is gradually more countryside. Soon, I find myself surrounded by rolling hills, parched brown by the summer sun, a few palm trees dotting the horizon. The wind is in my hair, the radio is now playing “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds, and I feel so free.

Looking around, I realize that this is the extraordinary landscape I flew over when I first came in from the east. This is what inspired me to
write about God. These are the undulating mounds of earth and rocks that form voluptuous contours from the air. I’ve never seen spaces like this before, such vast uninhabited areas colored gold. I have lived a tiny little life on the East Coast where the mountains are so old that they’ve turned into bald hills. I thought the trees that grew over my house were big. I’ve never seen barrenness like this, peppered only by cacti or Joshua trees, and I am mystified.

With hardly any other cars on the road, and the late afternoon sun beginning its slow descent over the spectacular mountains that form the horizon, I have rarely seen anything more beautiful.

Passing road signs to places like Sidewinder Mountain, Coyote Lake, Devil’s Playground and Ghost Town of Calico, I whoop and holler to Lambchop, who is perched up against the rear window, the wind ruffling his curly brown fur.

Thump, thump, thump.

My car starts to pull violently to the left just past a place called Barstow. A strange vibration beneath my feet shakes the car, and it is accompanied by an even stranger sound.

Thump, thump, thump.

Switching off the radio, I can hear the odd noise at the back as my vehicle weaves right and left. The car becomes increasingly wobbly, and I struggle with the huge steering wheel. Leaning on my horn and flashing my lights, I try to alert the girls in front of me, but they are all too busy singing along to their radios, hair flying.

“Hey! Guys! Help! Help!” I yell, trying to keep up despite the terrible noise my vehicle is now making as bits of rubber fly off the rear tire. “Hey! Please! Wait!” I wave at them frantically out my window, hoping one of them will spot me in her rearview mirror. To my horror, I watch as all four cars disappear over the horizon.

I pull the car over to the soft shoulder in a billowing cloud of dust. There isn’t a vehicle or a building as far as the eye can see. As I turn off the engine and step out, I have never heard such silence. I am completely alone in this desolate spot, just Lambchop and me.

Getting out to check the damage, I discover my rear tire in shreds. Damn it! A blowout. Why me?

With just a critical tilt of his head, I can almost hear Lambchop saying, This is a fine fix you got us into, Mom.

Glaring back at him, I say, “Well, I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do. How are we going to get out of this?”

Lambchop rests his head on his paws and closes his eyes.

I sit dejectedly on the fins at the back of my car, ready to wave down anyone who passes. I am sporting pink hip-hugger capris, a midriff top and orange flip-flops. It is ages before I see anyone, but then a pickup appears on the horizon like a mirage, shimmering in the heat. Jumping up on the trunk of my car in case he doesn’t see me, I put both arms in the air and wave dementedly.

“Hey! Hey there!” I yell, “I need help. I have a flat tire!”

The driver of the pickup truck gives me a shrug of his shoulders and speeds on by.

“You horse’s ass!” I yell after him, the worst cussword I can think of. I watch as it takes his truck a full ten minutes to become a dot and follow my friends over the horizon.

The sun is sinking fast and the sky is changing to purple. In the lessening light, the landscape takes on a different perspective. It feels gloomier somehow, sinister even. Each new minute brings down another layer of mauve gauze. The wind picks up, and every minute the air seems to be losing its comforting yellow heat. Looking forlornly at my soundly sleeping dog, I start to feel scared.

To my intense relief, another car appears on the horizon twenty minutes later, coming from the direction of Las Vegas. “Perhaps the guy had a change of heart,” I tell Lambchop hopefully. “God, I hope he didn’t hear me swearing at him.” I pause and scratch my head. “Or perhaps he did, and he’s come back to rape and murder me, before scattering the pieces of my dismembered body all over the desert!” Scooping Lambchop protectively into my arms, I stand apprehensively at the side of the road.

I only exhale when I realize this is a different car, driven—thank the Lord—by a presentable young man in smart clothes. He slows down and pulls onto the side of the road just beyond my beleaguered vehicle.

“Are you in some kind of trouble, miss?” he asks me, his accent unfamiliar.

“Yes, I am,” I reply. “I have a flat, and I’m afraid I don’t know how to change it.”

Peeling off his jacket, he pulls out some tools from his trunk and brings them back to my car. He rolls up his shirtsleeves and reveals a pair of well-shaped arms. I sigh with relief. After taking off my old tire, he looks up at me and asks, “Do you have a spare?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” I say. “Where would it be?”

He laughs at me and opens my trunk. “In here,” he says, effortlessly lifting out an old spare, getting dirt all over his shirt.

“I’m so sorry about your clothes.”

“It’s not
that
that I’m bothered about,” he says, smiling up at me wistfully. “I’m going on a date with my girlfriend tonight, and now I’m gonna be late.”

“Oh no!” I cry, thinking of the poor girl waiting for her handsome young beau in his finest clothes and with his bunch of flowers on the front seat. “I’m so sorry.”

My sweet Good Samaritan not only changes my tire, he then offers to follow me back the way he came to a small town called Harvard a few miles farther on, where someone should be able to replace my flat.

“Oh, it’s okay, really, you don’t have to do that,” I say apologetically.

“Yes, ma’am, I do,” he replies. “This spare isn’t in great shape either, and you could be stuck with another flat just a few miles up the road. Harvard’s just up the way a piece.”

I feel terrible, and my face must show it because he adds, “Don’t worry, I can call my girlfriend from the gas station and explain.”

Listening to him making the call, I can tell that his girlfriend isn’t happy.

“Oh, hi, honey. Well, I had to stop and help a girl just out of Barstow, she had a flat…No, no, not that kind of a girl…Well, she was stuck on the freeway…I know, I know…Listen…No, she’s not that pretty.”

Watching him, my arms crossed, I think, Hmm, but I am interesting-looking.

“You should be all right now,” he tells me when he hangs up the phone, his face flushed red.

“I can’t thank you enough,” I reply, reaching up and pecking him lightly on the cheek. “I hope I didn’t get you into too much trouble.”

“Aw, no.” He grins and his cheeks go the color of watermelon.

“Bye, then.” I wave with a smile, and off he goes.

After paying the gas station attendant an exorbitant sum for his labors, I ask, “Which way to Vegas?”

“Straight up the 15 through the bottom end of Death Valley for about a hundred and fifty miles,” he says, without humor. “You’ll see a sign and you turn off there.”

“Wait, wait. Stop. Death Valley? Is that, like, a scary place?”

“Can be,” he says, without elaborating.

By the time I get back in my car with Lambchop, it is almost seven o’clock and getting dark. Death Valley? A hundred and fifty miles? Perfect. I trundle along at sixty miles an hour, the road stretching ahead of me relentlessly. The soft hills around me become jagged outcroppings of rock, and the landscape becomes very bleak. The temperature plummets, and I reach round to my suitcase and pull out a sweater I knitted. Soon, there is hardly any light at all, just the pale moon over the mountains, which, silhouetted in black, are eerie and menacing.

I have no concept of how long I have been driving or how far I have to go. It feels like I will be on this solitary road crossing the desert forever, hemmed in by a tunnel of dark shapes looming on either side of me. Only a handful of vehicles pass me or come at me from the other way. Each time one does, I sit rigidly in my seat, checking the rearview mirror to make sure I’m not being followed by an ax murderer.

I am soon desperate to pee, but I don’t want to stop by the side of the road in case of snakes or crazy men. Up ahead, I see a truck stop, and I pull in gratefully. Running from my car with Lambchop in my arms, I use the grimy facilities as quickly as I can and run back, locking and then relocking the car door and checking behind me all the while.

Lambchop settles onto my lap to sleep, giving me a welcome sense of calm. I wish I could just stay where I am for a while, in this pool of light from a single bulb swaying in the night breeze. “Maybe if we slid down in our seat, nobody would notice us, and we could wait until morning,”
I whisper into Lambchop’s ear. He looks up into my eyes and I look down into his, but I know we have to keep going. Starting the engine, I yank the shift into drive and pull away as Lambchop jumps into the back.

Just a few yards up the road, I falter. Standing by the side of the road is a dark shadow. It is the figure of a man with a duffel bag and some sort of hat on his head. He is lit by the moon. When my headlights fully illuminate him, he turns toward me, raises his arm and sticks out his thumb.

What should I do? Should I pick him up? It would be nice not to be alone. Maybe I shouldn’t. Would I be safer with someone else in the car? Or am I asking for trouble? The closer I get, the more I agonize. Getting closer still, I see he is a soldier, and I stand on the brakes.

“Hi there,” he says with a smile as he pokes his head through the open passenger window. “Could you give me a lift?” The lights on my dashboard illuminate his face. He is about my age, with an open face and a beautiful smile.