Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  “Let’s go with him. Let’s do it, Susie,” Michelle whispered. “Let’s jump in his limo …”

  I’d completely jelled. He was walking down the street, and all I could look at was his ass. I was watching his proud legs and his ass, packed into tight black velvet, pull and move, pull and move, with a bit of a jiggle, as he moved toward his car. That is Keith Richards’ ass, I thought ecstatically. I am watching Keith Richards’ass.

  Michelle grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the curb. “Let’s do it, Susie,” she said. “We’re really going to do it.”

  The chauffeur opened the door and Keith’s son scuttled in, followed by Keith, who paused for a moment before dipping down into the back seat. He seemed to take one last look at the studio, the street, and the people, and as he did, the sunlight glared off his glasses in flashes of gold. Michelle and I froze. The door slammed, the motor growled, and the limousine veered away from the curb, leaving us standing at the edge of the gutter, shivering, tears running down our faces.

  “Keith,” we shrieked as the car drove away, “Keith, we love you!”

  When it was absolutely out of sight, we started laughing, crying, jumping up and down, and shouting all at once: “We saw Keith! We saw Keith Richards!”

  Then Michelle said to me, “I’ll bet you anything Mick is still in the studio. We’re going to meet him. We’ll wait out all night if we have to. But he’s ours, Susie. He’s finally-fucking-ours.”

  I should have been thrilled. I should have felt that sweet, heart-pulsing surge of expectation nearing fulfillment. But instead, strangely, I didn’t. Instead, I started to feel something that felt an awful lot like dread.

  And then it became instantly clear to me: in my fantasy life with Mick, I was always beautiful, sexual, confident. I was at dinner parties, I was in Geometry class. I wasn’t waiting outside all night on some urine-drenched sidewalk, some scraggly kid, some beggar ambushing him with a carnation and an autograph book.

  The idea of actually meeting Mick Jagger this way sickened me. How could I possibly cast myself that way in his eyes? For that matter, how could I cast myself that way in mine? To be so pathetic and prostrate before him—Christ, what would I be left with?

  I looked at Michelle.

  “I can’t,” I said quietly.

  “What? Susie, what are you talking about?” she cried. “This is our dream come true! Mick Jagger is in there! I know it! I’m telling you! We are meeting Mick Jagger!”

  I shook my head. I felt like a jerk, but somehow, I couldn’t stop.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Michelle said.

  I looked down and played with the rhinestone buttons on my coat. For some reason, my eyes started watering. Maybe there was something wrong with me. I mean, really, I thought. Look at me. Finally, I swallowed. “Oh, Michelle,” I said, “in my dreams, I always meet him at a dinner party. And somebody introduces us—I don’t just come up to him. And he wants me. Mick Jagger wants me—”

  Michelle said nothing. She just reached into the pocket of her jeans jacket and fished out a cigarette. Then, very slowly, she took out her lighter, flicked it open, and expertly lit her cigarette. When she finally looked at me, I saw on her face something I hadn’t expected: pity. Pity mixed with just an inkling of fear.

  “Um, Susie?” she said carefully, in a tone usually reserved for the senile—or, perhaps, the criminally insane—“Honey? That’s a fantasy you’re telling me. This?” she waved her hand across Eighth Street. “This, right here? This is real. Mick Jagger is in this recording studio, right here, right now, and you and I have an opportunity of a lifetime to meet him.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered hoarsely. Then I started to cry.

  In standard Teenage Girl Culture, this should’ve been considered a massive betrayal, a pivotal moment that ended our friendship. The fact that it wasn’t was a testimony to how close we were. Michelle simply reached over and pushed my hair away from my eyes. “Go home, girl,” she said gently. “Go home and take care of yourself.”

  The next morning, she called me in hysterics: at five o’clock that morning, Mick Jagger had in fact emerged from Electric Lady Studios.

  “Oh, Susie,” she sobbed, as I shrieked with delight. She was calling me from a pay phone on the corner of Sixth Avenue, just about fifty yards from where she’d met him. “He was so beautiful. I waited outside with three other groupies until the sun was starting to rise. When he walked out of the studio, we almost missed him because he’s grown a beard and none of us recognized him. But then we realized who he was, and we started following him down the street. Susie, I must have been only three feet away from him. Then, all of a sudden, he turned right around and starting yelling at me, ‘Fucking ridiculous.’

  “Susie, I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was going to die. I thought he was angry at me for following him. But then, he smiled right at me and said, ‘This is so fucking ridiculous. I can’t get a fucking cab in fucking New York City at fucking five o’clock in the morning!’ It was so unbelievable. Just like that, Mick Jagger starts talking to us! I just froze. I couldn’t even speak. Mick Jagger, standing right next to me, talking to me about taxi cabs and New York City! Oh, Susie. Oh, girl. I wish you had been there.”

  At that moment, I’d wished so, too.

  At the end of January, I got a telephone call from Vanessa, my cohort from the summer. She was home from boarding school, staying at her mother’s house five blocks away. She wanted to know if I would come over. Her mother, she informed me, was having a “totally fucking pretentious dinner party” for some people from France.

  “I figure if she can have, like, a zillion people over, I can have one friend,” said Vanessa. Besides, as soon as her mother started drinking, she explained, it was open season on the liquor cabinet for us, too.

  Vanessa’s mother lived in a sprawling, high-ceilinged apartment on Central Park West crammed with artwork by Vanessa’s father and godmother. No sooner did I arrive than Vanessa got a phone call from her boarding school boyfriend, and I was left alone in the middle of a crowded living room, wondering what to do with myself. Everyone else was French and at least twice my age; all I could see were the backs of people huddled in groups for conversation. Since just about the only French I spoke consisted of such captivating and useful observations as Le tracteur est grand (the tractor is big) and Voici la bicyclette (here is the bicycle), I sat by myself and tried to look riveting as I studied the bottom of my drink.

  Then the doorbell rang, and Vanessa appeared from her bedroom to answer it. I started to follow her, but stopped at the entrance to the living room. Although the party was still in full throttle, everything’ suddenly got very quiet around me.

  There, five feet in front of me in the vestibule, stood Mick Jagger.

  He said hello to Vanessa’s mother and unknotted his scarf.

  The surge of adrenaline I felt was so powerful that, for a moment, it knocked the wind out of me. It was like having a private earthquake. My knees started to buckle and the floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet. My breathing became staccato, nearly asthmatic. Feeling dizzy, I gripped the upholstery and tried not to faint. Cool it, girl, I told myself, my heart thumping wildly. Do not be an idiot. You’ve just been given the gift of divine fate. Blow it, and you’ll hate yourself for the rest of eternity.

  Be cool, now. Be cool.

  Taking the cue from my daydreams, I decided that I would look far more blasÉ if I was not standing there directly in front of Mick, gaping idiotically as he unsnapped his parka. Yet I suddenly found I was incapable of moving—my legs were shaking—they seemed prepared to collapse beneath me. So I just stood there and tried to avert my eyes by feigning great interest in the light fixture. Eventually, Mick looked up and saw me. Most likely, he saw a small fifteen-year-old girl with eyes as big as chestnuts and a mouth as round as a small cantaloupe, making a deliberate effort not to look at him.

  “’Ello,” he said plainly.

  It took me a mome
nt to realize he was actually addressing me.

  “Oh, hello,” I said, trying to sound as casual as possible. I shrugged and made a gesture that I hoped would communicate something like: Yes, I always stand like this, completely immobilized, clutching the sofa. And, my, is that not the most fascinating light fixture you’ve ever seen?

  Just then, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and asked me if I wouldn’t like to talk to her for a minute. I noticed that she, too, was trying to sound as casual as possible. Both of us were talking in singsong, our voices chirpy with restraint. We sounded like two female impersonators.

  As slowly as possible, we brushed past Mick Jagger and walked ever so nonchalantly down the long hallway. We stepped into her bedroom very calmly, then shut the door and proceeded to shriek and jump on the bed.

  “Ohmygod! Can you fucking believe it? Mick Jagger! Right here, in this house!”

  Frantically, we brushed our hair, put on gobs of lip gloss, doused ourselves in her mother’s Halston cologne, and tried to look as grown-up as possible. Then we zoomed out of her room and, acting as if we had all the cool in the world, arrived breathlessly at her mother’s elbow just as she was making introductions. She introduced Mick to Vanessa, then turned to me. Her words sounded in my ears were like the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: “Mick, this is Susie. Susie, this is Mick.”

  He reached out and took my hand.

  From then on, the evening was all candles and glitter, clouds of white wine, and a room the color of amethyst. I was so delirious with adrenaline, for a while I thought I was having one of those outer-body experiences that precede a heart attack.

  Mick, it turned out, spent most of the evening talking to me and Vanessa. I wasn’t sure whether he was simply bored by the Parisians, or if he felt most comfortable playing to a teenage audience. Perhaps, tickled by our adoration, he enjoyed giving us the thrill of our lives. In any event, soon after we were introduced, he beckoned me to come sit beside him on the couch. Snaking an arm around me, he took my hand with a great, gallant gesture.

  “So,” he said, “what do you do all day?”

  “Well,” I said carefully. I tried to respond just as I’d imagined I would, very coolly and sophisticated, as if having rock stars ask me about my private life was a daily occurrence. “Naturally, I do attend high school. But really, that’s just so I can complete my education and become a novelist.”

  For some reason, this seemed to amuse him. “A novelist,” he grinned. “Really? You don’t say?”

  Suddenly, I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed; I found myself completely straying from my script, telling him about high school and poetry and working for the Maysleses and how I’d had to fish Star Wars figurines out of the toilet all summer and how I could never figure out how to operate the electric can opener. Then, inexplicably, I began prattling on about theater, religion, and movies I’d seen. Mick kept holding my hand and grinning and nodding and interjecting, “Really? You don’t say,” over and over, and I supposed that he was rapt, but try as I might, I couldn’t really focus on a single thing he was actually saying to me—or that I was saying to him. All I could concentrate on was that I was in a conversation with Mick Jagger, and that he was holding my hand, and that I was an idiot for not having a camera.

  What I eventually did become aware of, however, was that Mick couldn’t sit still. He was constantly moving: drumming his fingers, winking, making funny faces, rolling his eyes. He had a small diamond set in one of his front teeth; when he spoke, first his eyes (blue) would sparkle, then his diamond, then his whole smile. He seemed to glitter blue-silver-white, blue-silver-white, like Christmas lights. Also, he was dressed very casually—a green sweater and rust-colored slacks—nothing spectacular, certainly nothing at all that looked like it had been purchased at Bogie’s. But what surprised me most of all was his head. It was enormous. Proportionally, it was one of the most enormous heads I’d ever seen. It seemed much too big for his body; it gave him the silhouette of a lollipop, a helium balloon. Why, he was almost a homunculus—an attractive homunculus with a seductive British accent—but a homunculus nonetheless.

  As the evening wore on, my pulse slowed and oxygen slowly began returning to my brain. After dinner, Vanessa and I sat with Mick and Vanessa’s godfather, Nigel (who, it turns out, was the one who knew Mick and had invited him to the dinner), drinking champagne out of Dixie Riddle Cups. By that point, Mick seemed sort of like a family friend. I began to notice that, in addition to a big head, he also had big pores. Pores like perforations. Looking at his face, I could see them sprinkled across his nose and cheeks without even squinting. And after dinner, Mick liked to hang out in the kitchen and pick at the leftovers—eating ham with his fingers and dipping it directly in the mustard jar—just like I did. He got some ham stuck in his teeth and fumbled around, looking for a napkin. And as the party splintered off into small clusters of conversation, he wandered around a bit lost in the apartment, too, just like any other normal person. At one point, he even had to ask where the bathroom was. It never once occurred to me to flirt with him. After all, he was thirty-six years old. That was way too adult.

  Yet he remained, in my eyes, heroic. At one point after dinner, Mick, Vanessa, Nigel, and I were all in the kitchen, telling jokes. Nigel began one, “There’s this Jew, you see …”

  Having talked to me about religion, Mick knew that I was, at least in ancestry, Jewish. As Nigel launched into the joke, Mick looked at me, rolled his eyes, and said, “Hey Nige, I don’t want to hear that one right now. Save it for later, huh?” Then he looked back at me and winked.

  A few minutes later, as he was leaving the kitchen with Vanessa’s mother, he asked her pointedly, “The girl in the kitchen, the one who’s not your daughter?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “That’s Susie.”

  “Oh,” he cooed loudly, drawing out his syllables. “She’s charming.”

  Did he deliberately say this within earshot of me? Today, I’d put money on it. But at the time, overhearing his praise simply made me reel. My fantasy had come true—almost right down to the finest detail. No one will ever believe me, I thought. All my years of hyperbole and theatrics, and finally something big had actually, truly happened to me.

  Yet toward the end of the evening, I wandered into one of the rooms looking for Vanessa, and found her, Mick, Nigel, and a handful of other guests watching Saturday Night Live on television. Mick invited me to join them; I noticed that both he and Nigel were sniffing a lot, wiping their noses from time to time, and laughing slyly at some shared inside joke.

  After a moment, Mick looked over at me.

  “You know you’ve got the biggest titties out of all the girls here,” he said plainly.

  “Excuse me?” I said. Some of the other guests giggled.

  “Do you know you’ve got the biggest titties out of all the girls here?” he repeated again, much louder this time. Then he grinned a little, and motioned to my chest.

  Today if I were to write this as a short story, this comment would provide the obvious moment of epiphany: A young girl, whose sexuality is just being awakened, fantasizes about a rock ‘n’ roll star. She dreams that one day they will meet, and that he will find her desirable. Then, miraculously, she has dinner with him. But instead of being the charming man she dreamed he would be, he humiliates her, making lewd comments about her body in front of the other guests. When he says these things, she suddenly realizes that the man she has idolized for so long is in fact vulgar and arrogant. The event marks the beginning of her disillusionment, the end of her innocence, the start of her true coming of age.

  Yet while this chain of events is the most narratively and morally logical, it is not at all what actually happened. When Mick Jagger said to me, “you’ve got the biggest titties,” I simply stood there, astonished. For one moment, my insecurity and self-loathing, my bickering parents, my loneliness and fear, all melted away. I looked at Mick, and I beamed. I said simply, “Thank you.”

&nbs
p; Chapter 7

  Puberty, Sex, and Other Extreme Sports

  MY FRIEND KENNY lost his virginity to his mother’s mah-jongg instructor on a felt-covered mahogany table in the middle of his living room.

  “My mother and her friends were in the kitchen having coffee. I’d just come home from bar mitzvah class. The instructor took one look at me, ripped off my yarmulke, and jumped me on top of the mah-jongg tiles,” Kenny said, taking a swig from a bottle of Dr Pepper, then setting it down on the hood of a Buick. At Stuyvesant High School, it was Standard Operating Procedure to sit around on the cars parked outside the school and brag about our exploits before class. We snacked, made out, flirted, and gossiped endlessly on car hoods and fenders; if you parked anywhere on East 15th Street, your vehicle inevitably wound up serving as a rec room for some three thousand teenagers.

  “What could I do?” Kenny shrugged. “She’d been with a bunch of Hadassah ladies all morning. She needed me. Bad.”

  “I know how it is,” a guy we called “T.J.” sighed, setting his backpack down on a fender. “The woman who seduced me in the glass elevator of the Marriott was exactly the same way.”

  “You lost your virginity in a hotel elevator?” said my friend Dani.

  T.J. pulled out a Frisbee and practiced spinning it around on his index finger. “Doesn’t everybody?” he shrugged.

  “Not me,” said Jessica, a round, pimply redhead, removing a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her overalls. “The first time I did it was on top of an amplifier with this record producer named Sergio. Afterward, he composed a song for me with Jimmy Iovine but it was, like, a really boring song.”

  “Well, gee, don’t I feel old-fashioned,” Dani said with some annoyance. “I thought losing it to my boyfriend at summer camp was special. What about you, Suze?” She and the other kids looked at me.

  I took a deep breath and twirled a strand of my hair around my finger.

  “Well, I would like to tell you all the details,” I said coyly. “But really. The senator swore me to secrecy.”