How to Cook Your Daughter (14 page)

I had been at a club on Avenue A with a friend who was also named Jessica. When she and I were slouching around late-night Manhattan, she had an effortless, unpretentious cool that I could never achieve. For one, she really
was
English and had the accent to prove it. I had to live with the fact that, despite my parentage, I was just a New Yorker. She also was elegant, lovely, and hip all in one go. Her hair was short, reddish, and hennaed. Her skin was the perfect sort of pale. It accentuated her vivid red lips and slightly slanted green eyes (her grandmother had been Chinese). Besides, she was tall, exotic and—what really got me—naturally slim. I spent many afternoons with Jessica in one of the Ukrainian coffee shops that filled the East Village, watching her eat grilled cheese sandwiches or pierogies with never a care in the world. Meantime, I sat drinking bad coffee and wishing I could take just a single, guiltless bite. I also shared “my secret about Daddy” with Jessica, just as I had with Iana and my other close friends. But none of us ever thought of going to an adult. Perhaps they didn't know what I should do any better than I did.

Jessica scorned purses and carried her essentials in a small brown paper bag. She wore a 1960s Mod black-and-white checked skirt and a Rude-Boy porkpie hat. I tried to walk like her, talk like her, and even smell like her, making a pilgrimage to the Kiehl's Pharmacy on
Thirteenth Street and Third Avenue to buy the rose talc that she used. Nothing worked. I just became a rose-smelling version of me, clutching a crumpled brown bag.

We left the club at two-thirty that morning, and because it was raining hard, we decided to treat ourselves to a cab ride home. The first stop was Jessica's mother's loft on Crosby Street. After five or ten minutes, a Checker finally came down the slick avenue. Even as I was saying, “Great, a cab!” a guy a block or so up ran out of a bar and flagged the cabbie. The Checker slowed, but the driver must have seen us because the cab abruptly sped on just as the guy reached for the door handle. It stopped in front of us. Jessica and I were much too wet and tired to care about taxi etiquette, and we opened the door and flopped onto the dry black seats. I heard a loud
click
, and I sat up with a start. The driver had locked the back doors. Then I looked up front and saw her. The cabbie was huge. She took up the entire front seat, and the steering wheel wedged between her massive bosom and her stomach. Long, and not recently washed, brown hair snaked from under a soiled Yankees cap. And when she turned around, I could see that her front tooth was chipped and a mole hid itself in the many folds of her fleshy face.

“Where do you two cutie, little things think you're going?”

Jessica and I exchanged a glance. “Oh no, a loony!” I whispered.

“We're going to Crosby and Broome, please,” Jessica said in her best Be-Nice-to-Crazy-People voice. The cabbie let out a long snort.

“I don't think we're going to Crosby and Broome, honey. I don't like Crosby and Broome. I'm gonna decide where this cab's goin'. And I think we're gonna run every light from here to 168th Street. I think I'm gonna have some fun with you girls, introduce you to my whip collection. When I'm done with you sweet things, I'm gonna run you right up to the Bronx and sell you on the white slave market!”

She cackled and floored the gas pedal, speeding up Avenue A at maybe forty or fifty. To me it seemed like at least a hundred. I looked at Jessica and began fumbling madly with the door. The lock wouldn't budge.

“Forget that, baby cakes. I've got this cab all locked up, sugar tits!”

Jessica and I began screaming, and though Big Momma had locked the doors, I could still open the window on my side. “Roll your window down!” I yelled to Jessica, who looked like she might vomit. We hung our heads out, screaming into a rainy and profoundly empty Manhattan. Big Momma just kept driving, running every red light as promised.
This is it! This is actually it!
I thought as the streets flew by. Then a guardian angel—a big black guy with a leather jacket—crossed Avenue A and Fourteenth Street. Big Momma thought better of adding manslaughter to her growing rap sheet, and she slowed down. That was all we needed. I thrust myself out the open window, pulling Jessica along with me. We landed hard on the street, and I cut my hand on a broken bottle. Jessica turned her ankle coming down. At least we were free. The Checker screeched to a halt, but Big Momma's bulk was in our favor. She struggled to extract her gigantic body from the front seat, and Jessica and I took off running, our guardian angel standing on the other side of Fourteenth Street, looking on in amazement as we fled. I turned back and saw Big Momma lifting her leg out of the car, waving her flabby arms at us and shouting, “Come on back, sweethearts. It was only a joke! It was only a joke, honey pies!”

We never thought to take her license plate number. We just got out of there fast. I didn't get into a Checker cab again for at least a year. But I never really moderated my behavior. I couldn't. After all, I was a bona fide “groupie” for certain bands—mostly of the British persuasion. And being out late at night was the only way to see them.

I was thrilled when a guitar player or singer I worshiped gave me a look—any look, really—or invited me into the dressing room after the show. Still, I always froze when he asked the inevitable question: “How about coming back to the hotel, luv?” I went through the backstage drink. Then the first kiss routine. But I never went “all the way” with anyone in any of the bands. I must have pissed off a lot of horny English rockers.

For months, I had a huge crush on a great-looking black guy name HR, the lead singer of an underground band the Bad Brains. The group had come from Washington, D.C., and HR had incredible stage energy and wowed everyone by doing back flips in the middle of songs. I got girlish goose bumps when he called me “from the road” but was too nervous to do more than heavy kissing in the back room at CBGB. He never knew how young I was.

He had been getting more and more heavily into the Rastafarian movement, growing dreadlocks, talking about
jah
, and making music that fused reggae with punk. I had always loved reggae and had started listening to it with my father, who was a Bob Marley fan. But that didn't mean I was ready for what HR wanted. Just before his set started, in a voice that indicated he was either incredibly serious or incredibly stoned, he invited me to move “back” to Ethiopia with him and become one of his wives. That's when I revealed to him, after months of making out, that I was only fourteen, perhaps a tad young to accept such an offer.

On the way home, I asked Krisztina, “Do you think I should have said yes?”

“What? No! Are you crazy?” Krisztina was always more realistic and less star struck. “You're going to live in a shack in Ethiopia with HR and his seven other wives, having babies and grinding wheat? Jesus.”

In the end, HR did not go to Africa but stayed in Washington. The next time the band came to New York, I played it cool and so did he, maybe because he was put off by my status as a minor. Whatever the reason, HR never pressed his offer.

Even so, we were propositioned often, less because we were devastatingly attractive and more just because we were there. One night at the Palladium when the Clash was playing, Krisztina, Iana, and I hung around the back door figuring out a way to get in—the $15 entry fee was out of the question. One of the bouncers noticed. “Hey babe,” he said to me. “You really want to get in? I can walk you right through if you give me some head backstage. I can get you right in easy if you came back here and jack me off a bit.” In my diary I wrote quite primly, “Well, of course I said NO. I was very disgusted.”

Still, I considered my virginity a burden. At fourteen, I thought it would be better to “just get it over with.” Krisztina worked faster. One night, we snuck out to see the Specials, one of our favorite English ska bands, at an uptown club. We had no tickets or money, so we did our usual trick of copying the stamp. I managed to wedge myself right up against the stage and fixed my eyes on the bassist, who was unbelievably cute. The Specials were a two-tone band, decked out in silver suits and pork-pie hats with short haircuts, not the usual punky crew. I nearly had a groupie heart attack when, at the end of the set, the cute guitarist walked over to the edge of the stage and handed me a beer.
I'll keep this Heineken bottle forever
! I thought as the crowd dispersed and I ran to find Krisztina, clutching the cherished beer in my hand.

“Look, the guitar guy (I had only a very vague idea of the difference between a bass guitar and a lead guitar) gave me this.” I thrust the Heineken at her. “He just walked right over and handed it to me! C'mon. Come with me! I really want to find him.”

Hand in hand, we trolled around the club looking for the entrance to our backstage Mecca. We knew it was a very uncool to ask where the door was. If you had to ask, you didn't deserve to get in. When Krisztina and I found it, we just tried to act hip. We stood there smoking, pretending we had no idea where we were or that we were waiting for anyone. And of course, we swapped sips of the sacred beer. Finally, two roadies emerged carrying equipment. We saw roadies as the younger dukes to the band's royal family. Not princes—the musicians—and certainly not kings—the lead singers—but royalty all the same.

The roadies started chatting us up. Did we like the show? Where were we from? Did we want a drink? Did we have a smoke? Krisztina and I sat down on the equipment. After a few more questions, one of the guys asked me straight out: “Do you want to come back to the hotel?”

“Umm….” I said.

He looked right at me. “You're a virgin, aren't you, darling?” he said in his East London accent.

I was struck by the way he said it. I should've been offended, I suppose, but the way he asked was so matter-of-fact. Like, “You're a New Yorker, aren't you darling?” or “You enjoy dancing, don't you?” Out of his mouth it became a question like any another, as if an answer either way was nothing to be ashamed of, as if the whole pick-up game ought to be played honestly and benefit both sides. It was the kind of shameless attitude toward sex that I knew I could never have. Of course I was way too young to be playing the game at all, but I imagined I was very sophisticated, and I'm sure the roadie, whose name was Rex, thought I was at least eighteen.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Yes, I am a virgin.”

“Well, if you want, I can help you out with that. If you don't, that's all right too.” He sounded almost indifferent, but in a flattering way. “You're a beautiful girl, and you just decide whatever you want to do. It's all up to you.”

The truth was it had never been all up to me. Whatever choices I might've had about sex and innocence disappeared before I turned seven, and the choice would never be mine again. If it had been up to me, maybe I wouldn't have been sitting there at four in the morning having this conversation at all. I might have had the self-respect to be staying in at night and studying for my math test the next morning, rather than stalking band members and holding their beers. But I couldn't tell Rex this. Instead, I begged off his invitation, and he took it no further. “That's all right,” he told me and offered to get me a drink from the bar anyway.

While he fetched me a gin and tonic, Prince Heineken appeared. He took Rex's place and ran through the same questions, finally asking if I wanted to go back to the hotel. I liked him much less than Rex. But then, he
was
a prince. I bought some time. “Let me talk to my friend to see what she wants to do,” I told him, but Krisztina had disappeared. She must have gone off with the other roadie without me noticing. Rex came back with my drink; the prince went to get his guitar; and Rex offered to help me find Krisztina.

I still was searching for her when the band loaded their stuff into a van and left without me. Finally I found Krisztina in the bathroom, looking disheveled and clearly preoccupied.

“Where the fuck have you been!” I accosted her. “I've been looking all over this fucking club for you! Those guys wanted me to come back to the hotel with them, and I didn't 'cause I was searching for you! Now they left!”

“Jessie, you're a big girl. If you wanted to go back to the hotel with them, you should have gone. Don't blame me because you're too scared to go by yourself.”

I was pissed because I knew she was right.

We started walking home, me angry, Krisztina silent.

“Why did you just disappear like that? I know you were fooling around with that roadie. Why didn't you just tell me where you were going?” I said to the back of her head.

Krisztina turned.

“I went into a back room with him, and I got it over with. I fucked him if that's what you want to know.”

I was shocked, not by her behavior but because now we were no longer equals. Ever since we had shared our secrets and learned that we both had been molested, I felt I knew and understood everything about her and that she felt the same about me. Now she had taken a step that I was afraid to take. She had left me behind. I felt hurt but sounded angry.

“God! I can't believe you did that. I can't believe you did it your first time in the back room of some shitty club. Not even at a hotel. Not even at someone's apartment! I just can't believe it.”

We didn't talk again that night. And I was livid as I snuck back into the loft. I didn't have the confidence to do what Krisztina had done. I hated my body. She didn't hate hers. She exuded an open sexuality that got her into trouble. But I envied her freedom. And even as I saw that the molestation she had shared with me resulted in her promiscuity, I didn't see how what had happened to me left me the way that I was. All I knew is that I wished I could be like her. I spent the whole next day mooning over my Specials LP and thinking I should have
taken the ride with Prince Heineken, even though I would have preferred Rex the Roadie.