Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2005 by Susan Jane Gilman

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Material in Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress originally appeared in an article by Susan Jane Gilman entitled “Power Pouf” in the June 2001 issue of Real Simple magazine.

  The chapter “Mick Jagger Wants Me” by Susan Jane Gilman originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Fall 1994 issue (Vol. 20/2&3) of Ploughshares under the title “Meeting Mick Jagger.” That version of the essay was awarded an Avery Hopwood Literary Award by the University of Michigan prior to its publication.

  5 Spot

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10169

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  5 Spot is an imprint of Warner Books. The 5 Spot name and logo are trademarks of Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: January 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-446-51058-5

  Book design and text composition by Stratford Publishing Services

  Cover design by Brigid Pearson

  Contents

  Acclaim

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Soapbox

  PART I: Grape Juice and Humiliation

  Chapter 1: Nudie Hippie Kiddie Star

  Chapter 2: A Girl’s Guide to Bragging and Lying

  Chapter 3: White Like Me

  Chapter 4: Christmas Trees, Jews, and Virgins

  Chapter 5: Love and the Maharishi

  PART II: Not Just Horny, But Obnoxious, Too

  Chapter 6: Mick Jagger Wants Me

  Chapter 7: Puberty, Sex, and Other Extreme Sports

  Chapter 8: My Brilliant Career

  Chapter 9: How Clever Are We?

  PART III: Reality Says “Hello”

  Chapter 10: Picnic at Treblinka

  Chapter 11: I Was a Professional Lesbian

  Chapter 12: My Father the Park Ranger, My Mother the Nun

  Chapter 13: Your Tax Dollars, Hard at Work

  Chapter 14: Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

  Chapter 15: Speak at the Tuna

  About the Author

  Acclaim for Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

  “A deliriously, levitatingly funny memoir … The thread of tough humor working its way through this memoir serves to backlight moments of exquisite realization … and startling, genuine epiphanies.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Gilman’s wise-cracking, raw narrative … is reminiscent of David Sedaris’s writing and will draw a similar audience. Hilarious, assured, and moving, these are wildly entertaining stories that readers will share instantly with friends.”

  —Booklist

  “Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress is hip and hilarious.”

  —Susan Shapiro, author of Five Men Who Broke My Heart

  “This is not so much a sequel to as an enlargement of Kiss My Tiara; Susan Gilman’s voice is somehow both representative of a generation and unmistakably her own. A book to savor silently that makes you laugh out loud.”

  —Nicholas Delbanco, author of The Vagabonds and Old Scores

  “Amusing, entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny.”

  —Cheryl Peck, author of Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs

  “If David Sedaris married most of the cast of The Breakfast Club, the resulting child just might be Susan Jane Gilman. She channels the voices of her inner geek, freak, hipster, and princess with razor sharp wit and no small measure of grace. If you have a friend who came of age any time between Carrie and Clueless and you don’t buy them this book, then face it—you aren’t a very good friend.”

  —Joshilyn Jackson, author of Gods in Alabama

  Also by Susan Jane Gilman

  Kiss My Tiara

  For my family

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK WOULD have been impossible to write without my mother, Ellen. Not only did she obviously give birth to me, but she has taught me the supreme value of imagination and creativity. Likewise, this book would have been equally impossible to write without my father, David. Not only did he, too, have a role in my birth, but he has continually inspired me to live courageously and not take myself too seriously.

  My husband, the Amazing Bob Stefanski, deserves his own acknowledgments page for his steadfast support, love, patience, and availability as a sounding board, as well as for giving me the adventure of a lifetime.

  Countless thanks are due my editor, Amy Einhorn, for her continually amazing work, commitment, optimism, and high tea at Fortnum & Mason, as well as to my agent, Irene Skolnick, for her eternal hand-holding and clear understanding of what is truly important.

  I would also like to thank Dollie and Paul Llanso, and Irit and Yitzik Lev for their friendship and sharing their “space” with me; Susie Walker for bringing me home to her garden; Maureen McSherry for agreeing to read whatever I sent her; Jackie and Ken Davidson for keeping me sane; and Cathline James and Roy Langstaff for their endless support.

  My thanks as well to Kitt Rasmussen. To Anyzette and Jacques Lebet: Merci beaucoup pour tout. I’d also like to acknowledge Eric Messinger simply because he deserves it.

  Yet above all, I must express my undying gratitude to my phenomenal brother, John, who has been along for the entire ride, both literally and literarily. I could not have done this without his support, dedication, sound judgment, and killer sense of humor. Kid, you’ve been incredible. I am blessed to have you as my brother; I cannot thank you enough. This one, above all, is for you.

  Author’s Soapbox

  THIS IS A BOOK about growing up ambitious and engaging in some spectacularly imbecilic behavior. Although I was taught never to let the truth get in the way of a good story, the tales here are true—or, at least, I’ve recounted them as honestly as I can remember them. In some cases, names and details of people and places have been altered to protect the guilty and innocent alike.

  I’ve written this book, in part, because it seems that all of us could use a good laugh these days. Yet I’ve also written it because so many of the stories women are currently telling are all about getting a man. Or about getting over a man. Or about getting laid. Or about not getting laid. Or about not getting laid and not getting a man, but deciding we’re okay with it.

  Having spent criminal amounts of time sleeping with inappropriate men myself, then bragging about it, I love hearing about other people’s romantic and sexual ineptitude as much as the next person. Yet ultimately, there’s so much more to women’s lives that’s worthy of attention and ridicule. Hence, this collection. While a few stories do involve a boy, a bra, and a booty call, mostly their focus is elsewhere—on other passions and delusions that we all experience in one form or another.

  It‘s my hope that these “coming of age” stories will make readers laugh, and prove once and for all that a girl doesn’t need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot. Certainly I, at least, never have.

  —Susan Jane Gilman

  PART I

  Grape Juice and Humiliation

  Chapter 1

  Nudie Hippie Kiddie Star

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen. I wanted to be e
verything at once: a prima ballerina, an actress, a model, a famous artist, a nurse, an Ice Capades dancer, and Batgirl. I spent inordinate amounts of time waltzing around our living room with a doily on my head, imagining in great detail my promenade down the runway as the new Miss America, during which time I would also happen to receive a Nobel Prize for coloring.

  The one thing I did not want to be was a hippie.

  “For Chrissake, you’re not a hippie,” said my mother, fanning incense around our living room with the sleeves of her dashiki. “You’re four years old. You run around in a tutu. You eat TV dinners and complain when the food doesn’t look exactly like it does on the packages. Hippies don’t do that,” she said. “Hippies don’t make a big production out of eating their Tater Tots.

  “Come to think of it, hippies don’t torture their little brother by trying to sell him the silverware, either,” she added. “If I were you, I’d worry less about being a hippie and more about being an extortionist.”

  But even by age four, I was aware of my family’s intrinsic grooviness, and it worried me no end. Like most little kids—or anyone, for that matter—I suffered from contradictory desires. While I wanted to be the biggest, brightest star in the universe, I also wanted to be exactly like everybody else.

  And so, I was enormously relieved when my parents announced we were going away to Silver Lake for the summer. From what I understood of the world, “going away” was what normal Americans did. It was 1969, and my family was living in a subsidized housing project in Upper Manhattan, in a neighborhood whose only claim to fame at the time was that its crime and gang warfare had been sufficient enough to inspire the hit Broadway musical West Side Story.

  At Silver Lake, not only would we be taking a real summer vacation, but, according to my mother, there was even the slight possibility I’d get to be in a movie. Apparently, she knew a filmmaker there named Alice Furnald, who had been casting around for kids.

  To call Silver Lake a resort would be an exaggeration. It was a summer colony founded by Socialists, people either too exhausted from manual labor or too unfamiliar with it to care much about landscaping. Small bungalows had simply been built on plots of land, then left to recede back into the woods around them. Dirt roads led to the eponymous lake, which shimmered, mirrorlike, at the start of each summer before deteriorating into a green porridge of algae by late August. The community’s one concession to civilization was “the Barn,” an old red farm building used as a recreation center. Otherwise, Mother Nature had been pretty much left to “do her thing” as the colonists liked to say.

  For a kid, Silver Lake presented infinite ways to inflict yourself on this natural world, and my new friends quickly schooled me in a range of distinctly un-girlie pleasures. Our parents might have been sitting cross-legged on the grass nodding along to the Youngbloods—“C’mon people now! Smile on your brother”—but we had ants to incinerate and decapitate, worms to smush, frogs to stalk, fireflies to take hostage, caterpillars to outwit, slugs to poke at with a stick, berries to pulverize with a rock, and dead moles to dig up in the garden and fling around the kitchen moments before lunch. We discovered that if we scraped reddish soil from the side of a mound by the lake, then mixed it with water, we got a terrifically sloppy, maroon-colored mess. It stained our clothes and the teenagers called it “bloody muddy,” so of course we were determined to play with it as much as possible. It was like the caviar of mud.

  Better yet was the four o’clock arrival of the ice cream man. I suspect the London Blitz generated less hysteria and mayhem. As soon as we heard the bells on the Good Humor truck jiggling up the road, every single kid under the age of twelve went insane. “Ice cream!” we shrieked. Dashing out of the water, we raced over to our parents, snatched money out of their hands before they could finish saying and get a Creamsicle for your father, please, then zoomed up the hill barefoot and screaming. It wasn’t so much the ice cream man arriving as the ice cream messiah.

  In Silver Lake, I romped through my days in a state of semi-delirium, fully at home in the world, happy in my skin. Twirling and somersaulting in the sunlit lake, I was an Olympic gold medalist, I was the queen of water ballet, I was a weightless, shining goddess with nose plugs and a lime green Danskin bathing suit that kept falling off my shoulders and riding up my butt. I spent my days yelling, “Mom, Mom, Mom! Look at this! Look at this!” then doggie-paddling around the kiddie pen like a maniac.

  Yet like most idyllic things, Silver Lake seemed to exist in this state only to serve as a backdrop for some pending and inevitable craziness.

  And that’s where Alice Furnald and her movie camera came in.

  Alice Furnald was known in the colony as an artiste with a capital “A.” While other mothers walked around in flip-flops and rubbery bathing suits, Alice wore ruffled pencil skirts and platform shoes and white peasant blouses knotted snuggly between her breasts. Whenever she chewed gum—which was pretty much all of the time—everything on her jiggled. I called her “The Chiquita Banana Lady,” and I meant this as a compliment: who didn’t want to look adorable with a pile of fruit on her head?

  One night, Alice called a meeting at the Barn. “As you might know,” she announced, “I’m planning to shoot a film here in Silver Lake.” Its title was going to be Camp, she said. If she meant this ironically, she seemed unaware of it.

  “Camp will star a number of people here in the colony, including …” Alice stopped chewing her gum and looked pointedly at me and my friend Edward Yitzkowitz. At that moment, I was busy inventing a way to hang upside down from the bench while chewing on a plastic necklace. Edward was shredding the rim of a Styrofoam cup with his teeth. “Including,” Alice cleared her throat, “some of our very own children.

  “Edward,” Alice called across the barn. Like many of the colonists, Alice had a thick Brooklyn accent. She pronounced Edward not “Edward” but “Edwid.” In fact, most of the colonists—including Edward’s own Brooklyn-born mother, Carly, and thus Edward himself—pronounced Edward “Edwid.” For years, I believed that was his real name. Edwid. Edwid Yitzkowitz. (Only when we were grown up, and I bumped into him in the East Village, did he inform me that his real name was “Edward.” Or had been Edward. Sick of the wimpiness it implied, sick of its syllabic bastardization, he’d gone ahead and changed his name legally to “Steve.”)

  “Edwid. Little Susie Gilman,” Alice called across the barn. “How would you two like to be in a real, live movie?”

  Her voice had all the forced and suspicious cheerfulness of a proctologist—it was the voice grown-ups used whenever they wanted to coax children into doing something that they themselves would never do in a million years unless ordered to by a judge—but I was more than willing to overlook this. At that moment, I felt only the white-hot spotlight of glory and attention shining down on me: it felt like butterscotch, like whipped cream and sprinkles.

  I nodded frantically. Of course I wanted to be in a movie!

  The truth was, until Silver Lake, the year had not gone terribly well for me. Sure, the Vietnam War was going on, and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had recently been shot. But as far as I was concerned, there was only one national trauma worth paying any attention to: the birth of my baby brother. Not only did John’s arrival demolish my status as an only child, but he was handily the cutest baby in all of recorded history. Decked out in his red pom-pom hat and his pale blue blankee, he was the traffic-stopper of the West 93rd Street Playground set. Other mothers abandoned their carriages by the monkey bars. “Ohmygod, he is gorgeous!” they’d squeal, pushing past me to poke their heads under the hood of his stroller. “Does he model?”

  I, on the other hand, was cute only in the way any four-year-old is cute: big eyes, boo-boos on the knee, the requisite lisp. But my face was round as an apple, my tummy even more so. I was not too young, I quickly discovered, to have adults declare open season on my weight. If anything, my brother’s adorableness seemed to compel them to point out my unattractiveness in com
parison. It was as if there was only a finite amount of cuteness in the world, and my brother had used up our quota.

  “Oh, your little girl, she so chubby!” bellowed the obese Ukrainian woman who ran the Kay-Bee Discount department store, where my mother bought my Health-tex clothing wholesale.

  “I think she drink too much Hi-C,” the teacher’s aide at my nursery school suggested. “Her face, it get fat.”

  My teacher, Celeste, was herself a genuine sadist. This was made clear to me the very first day of nursery school, when she led our class in a game of “Simon Says” designed to inflict flesh wounds: “Simon says: Poke yourself in the eye! Simon says: Hit yourself on the head with a Lincoln Log! Stick a crayon up your nose! Whoops. I didn’t say Simon Says, now did I, Juan?”

  “Well, Susie certainly does like Cookie Time,” Celeste informed my mother with a naked, malicious glee. “And let’s face it, she’s not doing herself any favors. Have you considered taking her to a doctor?”

  Halfway through the school year, I lay down in front of the door to my classroom and shrieked until my mother promised to take me home. So there I was: the Upper West Side’s first bona fide nursery school dropout.

  But now, Edwid and I were going to be movie stars!

  “We’re going to be in a movie!” we sang on the ice cream line the next afternoon. As any kid knows, it’s not just that good things should happen to you, but that they should be rubbed into the faces of everyone else. “We’re going to be in a movie!” we chorused again, wiggling our butts in the universal hoochie-coochie dance-taunt, successfully and immediately alienating every other kid in the colony.

  In retrospect, Edwid was probably as hungry for some top billing as I was. At four years old, he was already well on his way to becoming a dead-ringer for Ethel Merman. Showy, gossipy, melodramatic, he had a great froth of curly hair which he’d brush back with a flourish, and a voice that trilled up the octaves. “Ohmygawd, you guys, listen to this!” he’d exclaim. Never mind that for some of his contemporaries, getting through Hop on Pop was still a major accomplishment: Edwid had not just his mother’s Brooklyn accent, but her full-blown, intellectual’s vocabulary. “What child talks like that?” my mother remarked. “That kid is a yenta.”