Scream (10 page)

The couple wasn't going to come back for another year, but my mom hired a new boardinghouse landlord and we moved.

This time it was to a tiny ranch house, still in Lexington, but very much on the wrong side of the highway. Lexington was important to my mother: it was known for its good school system; also, anywhere else was far too expensive for us. She sold the prefab in Amherst and the money got us this place, with a tiny fenced-in front yard and a massive herd of rats occupying the backyard, built on the edge of the highway next to a chemical-scented swamp.

Still, for once, I got to go to the same school for two years. In tenth grade I found a loophole: if I took one specific course, something like American History, I would be allowed to graduate at the end of eleventh grade.

And what did we do in that crummy house for my last year at home, when I was in eleventh grade? Sometimes my mom would drive me and my brother a couple of hours away to a meeting point in a parking lot where my dad would pick us up and take us back to his beautiful home, where there was heat and hot water and we would work for the weekend for food. Or he would get my brother up on the roof there, which was flat, to plant and harvest marijuana. Marijuana was very illegal then and was a big crime to smoke. To grow it was even worse.

Then, after the weekend, we were back with my mom. She was teaching whenever and wherever she could: adult-education classes in poetry at community colleges, or in high schools that had enough money for one “extra” arts class.

When she was out of work, which was often, I would go with her to wait on the unemployment line. It was the time when all the steelworkers were out of work, so that made for an interesting time. The steelworkers were huge, muscular men weighing hundreds of pounds, kindly and tough and from another planet—the planet that we were trying to escape. That planet represented the working class. Now, I am old. I am educated. I have met rich people, including socialites and aristocrats with titles. I am happy with the working class. I do not need to escape their company. Then, however, at fifteen years old, I was in search of upward mobility, though I did not understand it at that time.

At home, what did my mom and I do? At night, at the table, eating tuna fish sandwiches, we read. We read anything and everything. We had stacks of books from the library; we had used books from sales; we had those books you could buy at the drugstore for twenty-five cents apiece missing their covers that came with the threat:
DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK IF THE COVER IS MISSING
.

Now I don't remember what we read back then. But these are some of my favorite books:
Alice in Wonderland, Papillon, Robinson Crusoe, New Grub Street
by George Gissing,
Down and Out in London and Paris,
and
Down Among the Women
by Fay Weldon. Larry McMurtry. Jean Rhys.
Tracks
by Robyn Davidson. Memoirs by guys who joined the Foreign Legion.

Anybody who's a loser, an idiot, a victim, or engaged in a basic struggle for survival: I'm there. When I read a book I just want a bunch of interesting stuff to happen, adventure-wise, like
In Cold Blood,
without too much musing and thinking and philosophizing.

I don't want a moment of epiphany. I want to go someplace worse, different, more interesting than where I am. So when I stop reading, I can feel good, even if I'm in a cramped economy seat on an overnight flight, or in a filthy kitchen where I should be doing dishes.

london in 1976

I
“studied” in London for my junior year of college, from 1975 to 1976. I found a program at Goldsmiths' College, which at that time was not a fancy art school but a teacher-training program. It was the first year the college was trying to attract American kids to study there, so they made a catalog that looked like an American university catalog, offering classes like “The History of England through Furniture, M–W 10–12.” But when you got to the class it turned out that it was a group of guys who were learning to make furniture and that day they had gone off at 9
A
.
M
. to visit the chair factory and wouldn't be back until five. Stuff like that.

I had fun, though. One day I was hanging around the Tate Gallery and some guy and his friend started following me. The guy looked kind of like Andy Warhol and it turned out he was from Neptune, New Jersey, and he invited me to his flat for dinner with his wife. She was a stripper in a pub at lunchtime and she encouraged me to work as a stripper there, too. She said the clientele, primarily lorry drivers, was always glad to have new bosoms to look at.

I said my breasts were quite small but she said it didn't matter. I asked what the pay would be and she said four pounds—I think—for a two-hour shift, and that did not seem like very much money to me, and in addition I still did not want to dance half-naked in front of truck drivers, despite my dad's wish years earlier.

This couple said that for fun we would play strip Monopoly before dessert was served, but I would not have to take my clothes off. So when I lost the round Lyn presented me with a long evening gown to wear, but it did not fit very well at the top.

Then Ted lost his turn and Lyn made him unzip his flies (I don't know why it's plural in the UK) and serve dessert with his penis hanging out.

Then they said it was time to go to the party. This party was quite far by the tube and it was in the loft of a man named Andrew Logan. He lived in an old factory that was full of all the items from the department store Biba, the incarnation after the one I had first gone to in 1969. It had reopened as a splendid department store with a roof garden. But I missed it.

Andrew Logan had things like giant gold palm trees made out of stuffed fabric and plastic hamburgers. Lots of great items from that store were now in this guy's loft.

Nobody was living in a loft then. His was in some odd old factory, way the heck in the middle of nowhere. Later it burned down. I didn't even know who he was or what he did. He reminded me of the Mad Hatter, with a reedy nose, long face, quite manic—he was friendly as I admired all the magical items.

At about one o'clock the Sex Pistols played. I think it was the second time they had ever performed. They were bad.
^*
They knew about three chords, I guess—I didn't know anything about music, but basically if you handed me a guitar and told me to strum it, that's what it would have sounded like. Nor did there seem to be any tune, melody, song, or lyrics. Was it a joke? The crowd of partygoers gathered in front of the mini-stage to watch.

One girl named Jordan wore a rubber dress that had fake fur under the armpits, and there was a man in a beautifully made suit in powder blue with large white polka dots. Later, maybe eight years later, in the clubs in New York City you would see great outfits like these, but not at the time. These were forerunners. I said to the man in the bespoke polka dot suit, “This band is terrible!”

“I know,” he shouted. “But they're so bad they are certain to be famous!”

It hurt my ears, and I left the room scowling, and I sat in an overstuffed chair scowling. I was not having any fun. Then, because I was scowling, a lot of photographers came out and started taking my picture. I represented “punk,” which was just starting.

Then the group came out on their break after three “songs.” It was just me and them in this little area off the kitchen. They were very young. They had a lot of pimples. It was their “photo shoot.” I was still sitting. They stood sheepish and pimpled. “All right then,” one photographer said. “Can you just go around behind her, kind of in a horseshoe behind the chair?”

They seemed somewhat surprised, but they obliged.

At that time, being American in Britain was of interest. “I always wanted to know,” one of the band asked, “would you be so kind as to tell me: What is a ‘pastrami sandwich'? What's a Colt .45?”

There had been some American program on television there recently that used those mysterious phrases.

Certainly I wasn't interested in anything to do with the Sex Pistols. They seemed poor, uneducated, grubby. Scrawny. A life of baked beans on toast and chips. A mixture of embarrassed and scared. I had on a silvery satin silk shirt, and I had tied up the bottoms of my jeans with thick pinkish cloth strips from ankle to knee, and I had a pair of pointed, spike-heeled black ankle boots with little fins that flapped down as if the boots had collars. This was not what other American girls were doing on their year abroad.

I always wanted to be a groupie, but there was no way I was going out with any of them, even though they seemed affable enough, even puppy-doggish. But I was hoping to move up on the social scale, or at least out of poverty, and there was no way these guys were ever going to play again, in my opinion, after tonight.

The whole thing was so ridiculous, I started to giggle. After a short while the photographers didn't want to take my picture anymore, because to be punk, you had to scowl. To be punk you were supposed to look disenfranchised, or it wouldn't have any value as a trend.

Somewhere out there are a whole bunch of photos of me with the Sex Pistols. I missed so many opportunities along the way because of my fears and shyness! If only I hadn't thought the Sex Pistols were so untalented and unattractive, I could have ended up as Nancy Spungen.

*
   John Lydon mentions this in his book
Anger Is an Energy
and says how the audience didn't like them. I am sorry. The audience did like them. It was me, surly and superior, who didn't. I like them now, though!

a side trip to france

B
efore I left for my junior year abroad, Mom and I both read
Without Stopping,
Paul Bowles's autobiography, in which he wrote about being a young man—about the age I was then—deciding he would become a writer.

So he wrote to a bunch of famous people, inviting himself to stay with them. He did not know the people, but most of them said yes, do come and stay with me. If I got a letter from a stranger, even though I'm not famous, I would
not
invite them to stay with me or even meet them for a cup of coffee. I am scared of people, even the ones I know.

At nineteen, however, this did not stop me from imitating Paul Bowles. I wrote to him in Morocco and suggested he invite me to stay with him. He wrote back, “No.”

But others did invite me for lunch, or for drinks. And now I have a great deal of gratitude toward them, for, if I were to receive such a request today, I would not be able to deal with it. I would copy Paul Bowles again and say, “No.”

But, on receiving my letter, Lawrence Durrell invited me to visit.

I had read
The Alexandria Quartet,
which I didn't understand, mostly. This was exciting beyond belief, and when I wrote to my mother (we did not have enough money for transatlantic phone calls), she wrote back and said, “Yes, of course you should do this!” She scraped together enough money for me to take a plane from London to Paris, another flight from Paris to Montpellier, and from there to take a bus to Sommières.

I wrote to Mr. Durrell again asking if I could visit soon, as it was my winter break. He didn't answer. Perhaps he had gotten nervous about this lunatic writing and inviting herself to his home in France?

So I gave him one last chance. I wrote to him again and said that I would be arriving on such-and-such a day and that if he did not want me to visit he should let me know, otherwise I would be there.

He did not write back.

I assumed this meant “Yes.” Otherwise he would have written back to me saying, “No.” Right?

Although I had taken French all the way through high school, when I got to Paris I realized that I could not speak French. Being able to conjugate a verb and knowing vocabulary lists was not enough to communicate. Then there was the whole gender thing that was a killer.

This was a race of people that assigned sex roles to books and plates and ice cubes, and if you didn't get their identity correct you would get an F on the final. Many French people speak English now, but back then, even if they did speak English, they were not going to let
me
know. It was a matter of pride.

In Paris I got another plane. In Montepellier, I left the airport and found a bus. I took that bus for a while and then I got another bus.

How the heck did I do this? I didn't speak French, nobody spoke English, and there wasn't Mapquest or GPS or anything. There were no ATM cards, there were no cell phones. That nineteen-year-old—broke, scared, brave, adventurous—whatever you want to say about her, that person wasn't me. I don't know who took over Tama for that period, but whoever she was, wow.

A bus dumped me out. I walked. I walked. It was getting dark. I don't actually remember how I managed to complete the rest of my travel.

It was evening by the time I arrived. All was gray. Dusty. Wintry. Not cold, but that sad time of the day, of the year. My ancient vinyl suitcase was small yet heavy, and it did not have wheels because in those days
they did not make suitcases with wheels.
On foot—from the bus station across the little bridge and down a winding road to Lawrence Durrell's home.

Yes, it was the correct address.

The house was boarded up. Drifts of dead leaves covered the drive, and the garden was a tangled ruin, untended for a long time. On the huge wooden door was a note scrawled on a stiff white card that said, in French,
FOR INQUIRIES GO TO THE AUBERGE AUX COCHONS ROUGES
.

Ha! I took the card from the door. I studied for a long time. I opened my French-English dictionary.

An
auberge
was a
traveler's inn
or a
public house
where one might stop for a rest after a long day's journey by
stagecoach
(a
calèche
or
diligence
).
Cochons Rouges
—
red pigs
.