Before lunch was over, they’d set me up to join them for Cokes at a local hangout on Friday, go shopping with them on Saturday, and visit someone’s house on Sunday. The kicker came when one of the girls called me at home that night to announce that I would be going steady with one of the freckle-faced rich guys I’d met at lunch. I was stunned. I’d heard of arranged marriages, but this was ridiculous.
The next day at lunch, I deliberately chose to sit at a table of outcasts—those who’d either abandoned all hope of ever being popular or had never cared much to begin with. One girl leaned over to me and asked, “Do you realize how pissed off they’re going to be if you sit with us?” Of course I did. I actually enjoyed watching the Heathers glower at me from their privileged position. They didn’t like the idea of being rejected.
Serves you damned right
, I thought.
I did okay on my own terms. That year I got into gymnastics. I would have liked to try out for the women’s gymnastics team, except there wasn’t one. Instead, I became a cheerleader. Co-captain of the squad, in fact. Before I could really get into the season, however, we moved again. This time to Maryland.
I was prepared to hate the place, but I ended up loving it. The apartment complex we moved to was populated largely by families as transient as my own. They came from all over the world. In the afternoons and on weekends I’d play soccer in the central courtyard with kids from India, Chile, Argentina, and England. They were kindred spirits. Most of them had lived lives as unsettled as my own, and they had no trouble welcoming a newcomer whose tenure was uncertain. I faced the usual trauma of having to make new friends, but the transition was easier than ever before. Within two months I’d become part of a congenial crowd, with a few close friends among them.
That interlude of contentment, however, ended abruptly with yet another move, this time to New York. The announcement devastated me. I’d been so happy in Maryland. For the first time in my life I hadn’t felt like a freak. Maybe it was the feeling of having no control over my life, or maybe it was just the prospect of having to start all over again, but when I got news of our impending departure, I marched upstairs to my room, closed the door, and ripped up every book I could lay my hands on. Then I threw every fragile object I owned against the wall. When my belongings lay in ruins around me, I dropped onto my bed in a fit of sobbing.
We moved to a development on Staten Island, where we bought a large house. That, at least, made me happy. I had the whole downstairs floor to myself. It had its own entrance, which gave me more freedom than ever. The bad news was that the kids in my new high school regarded me with outright hostility. The California mystique didn’t mean spit here. The only group that would accept me were the hippies. They were not junkies or hypes or anything, just basically good kids who, like me, didn’t fit in anywhere else. I helped them organize the distribution of the
High School Free Press
and agitated for the abolition of the school dress code. And I smoked a little dope, something I admit without a twinge of regret or guilt. When I see a politician squirming when asked to admit he sneaked a toke as a kid, I just want to shake him and say, “Grow up, Junior.” The way I look at it, toking was just one more rite of passage.
One
night my friends and I met at a local park that was one of our favorite hangouts. We were just sitting around acting cool. One guy brought his guitar and we were singing Dylan songs badly. Suddenly a crew-cut man wearing a Ban-Lon shirt, cutoffs, and a peace symbol approached us and flicked on a flashlight.
“This is a bust, everybody,” he barked. “Stand up.”
I thought it was a joke. I mean, he had to be kidding, especially in that getup.
“I mean it,” he repeated. “I’m a cop.”
“Oh, yeah? Well then, where’s your badge?” I taunted him. I was perfectly sober but high on attitude.
He produced a badge. We promptly stood.
The cop marched us out to where several other officers had stationed themselves in the middle of the park. Another girl and I were handed over to an older cop who questioned us apart from the others. I was scared. I was enough of a middle-class Jewish girl to know that an arrest would be terrible for me in every way. But I also knew that I’d done nothing wrong.
“Why are we getting busted?” I asked him. “We were just singing.”
“Don’t give me that,” he sneered at me. “We found a bunch of hype kits and Baggies of heroin right over there.” He pointed to some bushes.
Heroin! The thought of pushing a needle into my arm made me physically ill.
“You must be kidding,” I said in complete amazement. “We don’t do heroin!”
“Oh, yeah?” he said right into my face. “Well, let’s see your arms.”
I was wearing a sleeveless top, which, as I think back on it, should have told the cops right off the bat that I was no junkie. But I stretched out my arms obediently. The officer examined them and pointed to a small scratch on my right bicep. “You see,” he said triumphantly, “that could be a skin pop.”
Skin pop? What the hell was that?
The sickening realization swept over me that this guy could say anything he wanted. He could manufacture any evidence he wanted. No matter how innocent I was, he could send me to jail if he wanted to. To him I was just a scruffy piece of shit.
I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but that sense of total helplessness stayed with me long after I became an officer of the court. For a prosecutor, it’s easy to become annoyed at a criminal justice system that seems to be stacked so ridiculously in favor of defendants. But you have to have been on the downside looking up at the face of the law before you realize how thin those defenses really are. Once you’ve been there, you can’t honestly begrudge a defendant any help he can muster.
That night in the park, I had no cards to play. So I did the only thing I could. I begged. I pleaded. And as fear and frustration overcame me, I began to cry. The other girl watched this performance in silence, but when I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, I saw she looked as terrified as I felt. When I’d run out of words and courage, I stopped.
The officer stood looking at us for a moment, confused. Then he said, “All right, you two, get out of here, and fast. I don’t want to see you anywhere around here ever again. You hear me? Now beat it!”
I looked at him for a moment, unsure of what I’d just heard. I looked at my friend. She nodded, and together we turned and began to walk away, expecting to be stopped at any moment. After the first few steps, we broke into a sprint that had our hearts pumping. We didn’t stop running until we got to a bus stop about a mile from the park. And there we parted ways. Neither of us said a thing to the other. And after that evening, I never saw her again.
I never figured out what happened that night. How the heroin—if it really was heroin—got there. Whose it really was. The word around school was that the cops had planted the drugs as an excuse to bust us because neighbors had complained about noise in the park. The boys were booked and charged. No one got any jail time, but after that we all pretty much lost touch with each other.
My life was already drifting in another direction.
Shortly after we’d moved to New York, I’d started taking weekly acting classes at a small repertory theater in Greenwich Village, Circle in the Square. I absolutely lived for those classes, especially during the first six months of the school year while I was still battling the stigma of being the “new girl.” The acting teachers at Circle in the Square were terrific; they gave me the opportunity to cut my teeth on Shakespeare. When we worked on readings from
Othello
, I chose to play the maid rather than Desdemona. No mystery as to why—Desdemona was an ingenue, a sheltered little girl. Emilia, the maid, was an older woman, wise in the ways of the world and the streets.
My teachers seemed to think I was pretty good. At the end of the course, we put on a showcase and I was given the female lead, Emily, in a short segment from
Our Town
. I also had two roles in Dylan Thomas’s
Under Milk Wood
, which was more than anyone else got to play. While waiting to go on, I was paralyzed with stage fright. It was like being underwater, that queer sense of dissociation from the physical world. I would suffer that same crisis of nerves many times in years to come—in fact, any time I had to deliver an opening statement. But the resolution was always the same. Once I actually set foot onstage, the fear drained away. I became totally immersed in the moment. Onstage the imaginary characters overtook me and I felt the rush of bringing them alive for a few moments. Heady stuff for a fifteen-year-old.
From my first trip into the Village, I felt at home. It was exciting. Exotic. I just couldn’t get enough of it. During the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I found a way to spend more time there: I got a job. Well, sort of.
One afternoon after school, I wandered into a leather shop—I’d always loved the smell and feel of leather—and struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be the manager. He asked me if I’d like to make a little extra money. I was wary. “Like to make some money?” sounded like a preamble to “Take off your clothes.” The manager saw my reaction and laughed. He was looking for someone to distribute advertising flyers. He’d pay me five bucks an hour to walk up and down the street and hand them out to passersby.
It was too perfect. I’d be right in the middle of the action, and making money at that. I accepted on the spot. He handed me a stack of flyers and I hit the pavement with a big grin on my face. I did this for about two months until I got a job as a salesgirl at a low-end fashion boutique. I was really good at it. I could talk to people, size up types, and put together great outfits. Low-riding, hip-hugger bell-bottoms, tight T-shirts and halter tops.
For the next two years I worked at several shops on the Lower East Side. Artists and entrepreneurs had moved in and begun transforming what was basically a slum into another hip venue. It would come to be called the East Village, but in those days it was still a pretty raunchy part of town. The boutiques where I worked stayed open until one or two A.M. on Fridays and Saturdays, which meant that I was out on the streets in the small hours of the morning. On the way home I had to run a gauntlet of winos, junkies, and speed freaks, all looking for a handout. I knew better than to stop and reach into my purse on those dark streets. I decided I’d better get myself some protection. Not a gun—camouflage. I bought the scruffiest leather air force jacket I could find, as well as a pair of funky, threadbare jeans. Add to that a really beat-up suede saddlebag. I’d change into my grungy getup, pull a scarf over my hair and face, and adopt a speed-freak lope all the way to the subway. Worked like a charm. Even the winos gave me a wide berth.
By now, my old school chums were history. I wouldn’t date high school boys. I didn’t have to. Village dudes were invariably more attractive to me than high school geeks. I’d finally found someplace where I belonged. Then, once again, the ax fell. We had to move again—back to the West Coast, this time to Los Angeles. I was too young to stay in New York and finish high school alone. I had to go with my parents.
That next fall, when I started college at U.C. Riverside, I was suffering from depression. I hated the place. I hated life in a girls’ dorm. You can understand why. I’d just come from the Village, which was on the cutting edge of everything from street fashion to politics. Now all of a sudden, here I was, stuck in a dormitory where my floormates wore curlers and fuzzy slippers and agonized over whether boys should be allowed to use the girls’ bathrooms during Sunday visits.
I had fun shocking people. I still dressed in my Village clothes, which consisted mostly of velvet and leather. The only thing I would consider wearing to bed was an ivory satin gown, Jean Harlow–style, fitted to the hips and flaring out into a swirl around the ankles. I’d found it in a thrift shop. The Sandra Dee types viewed me with suspicion, and I avoided them like the plague. After two weeks I transferred to a coed dorm where I had a much better time.
The coursework was easy and I found a terrific jazz dance class. It was taught by Joe Tremaine, a slender redhead who had an impressive list of professional credits as both a dancer and a choreographer. It was just dumb luck to have run into someone that good. Joe gave me religion. One day the class was doing a combination he’d just demonstrated when he suddenly stopped the music and glared at us.
“You all think you can just get out there and wiggle your fannies and have a good time, don’t you? Well, you look sloppy and amateurish. Anyone can see it. I can tell who’s had ballet. I can tell who’s trained and worked, and who hasn’t. There’s no substitute for real work. If you’re not working, you’re not fooling anyone but yourselves.”
I knew he was right. Whether I ever danced professionally or not, I knew I wanted to do it right or not at all. The next day I got myself into a ballet class and continued to study ballet for the next twelve years. I danced until the rigors of trial work, and later, motherhood, made it impossible for me to keep up.
The following year I transferred to UCLA. I cut classes as often as I could get away with it. I don’t mean to leave the impression that I was a slacker. Far from it. I just preferred to study on my own. In fact, I took a heavy load each semester so I could graduate as soon as possible. I also worked several nights a week as a waitress at a local steak house. I hardly dated at all. To make up for the absence of a social life, I started folk dancing, which was a real craze back then. I made a few good friends, mostly women, and we started going out together on the nights when there was no good place to dance. Our favorite watering hole was on Fairfax Avenue.
This was the early seventies; the Six-Day War, which had ended in a huge victory for Israel, was still fresh in the minds of American Jews. Israeli males who streamed to the States in its aftermath carried with them not only the aura of foreignness but the macho allure of the conqueror. Most of these hotshots found their way to Jewish communities, where they felt most at home. In Los Angeles, that was the Fairfax district.