Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (17 page)

“I am so fucked up,” said Michelle.

“We are sooo bad.”

“That French shit is nasty.”

“Think he’ll come after us?”

“If he does, we’ll just tell ’em that Keith’ll kick his ass.”

“Ohmygod! Of course!”

We’d told so many people that we were the Rolling Stones’ girlfriends, we’d actually started to believe it ourselves. We’d also made it policy to speak, whenever possible, with British accents (never mind that sometimes we sounded like Eliza Doolittle, other times like Princess Margaret—we were pretty convinced we were authentic). One night, we told boys from Yorktown Prep that we were groupies who’d hitchhiked from San Francisco. Another night, a group of tourists from Georgia stopped to ask us for directions. High on pot, beer, and cooking sherry, we happily loaded them down with all sorts of useful information about the city.

“Wow, for British people, y’all sure know a lot about New York,” one of them drawled.

“Well,” I whispered, leaning in close for effect, “when you’re the illegitimate daughters of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, you tend to get around.”

Is it even necessary to say, at this point, that our home lives were a misery? Michelle’s parents fought so terribly that through the walls of my apartment, I could hear them screaming and slamming doors. While my family was eating dinner, I’d hear several thuds; a few minutes later, our doorbell would ring. Michelle would be standing there, crying in the hallway.

“Oh, Susie, oh, God …”

Similarly, I’d come home from school every day to find my mother moody and seething. She was often enraged at my father (they, too, were headed for a divorce), but I usually presented the easiest target. The smallest transgression—a fork left in the sink, a wet towel on the bathroom floor—was enough to trigger a volcanic fight. My efforts to appease her often backfired as well:

“I won a prize today at school for a poem I wrote.”

She read it, looked at me icily, and threw it on the floor.

“So?” she said. “What do you want from me?”

“Well, my English teacher liked it.”

“So go live with your English teacher.”

Then she told me to make my own dinner and slammed her bedroom door.

When my father finally arrived home he asked, “What happened? What did you do?”

“Nothing. Honest. I just showed her a poem I wrote. Do you want to see it?”

He shook his head. “I think you owe your mother an apology,” he said wearily, setting down his briefcase. “You shouldn’t upset her.”

He walked into their bedroom and closed the door sharply behind him. I stood there for a minute. Through the door I could hear my mother yelling, then my father stammering, “Jesus Christ, Ellen—” Then I walked slowly over to Michelle’s. She answered the door and I could hear her mother shouting in the background, “Ted! Listen to me for a minute, goddamn it!”

Michelle looked at me. We didn’t say anything. She just got her cigarettes and we went and sat out in the concrete stairwell. I unfolded my poem and handed it to her, and she read it as she smoked. When she was done, she hugged me.

“That’s wonderful! That’s really, really wonderful.”

I eyed her. “You really think so?”

“Of course! Susie, you’re a poet!”

“Oh. Michelle.”

We hugged, and then we both started to cry.

After a little while, when we felt better, Michelle would say, “So. I had another fantasy about Mick.”

“You did? Tell me.” Although we’d repeatedly told each other our fantasies, we never tired of hearing them and embellishing the details. Michelle’s main fantasy was that she would meet Mick Jagger at a nightclub and he’d take her around to the apartments of all the other band members so she could meet them. Then she’d hit it off with Keith Richards and travel with him in the band for a while.

My favorite fantasy was that one evening I would meet Mick Jagger at a dinner party. We would talk about music and literature; he would find me intelligent and attractive. Then we would get romantically involved and he would pick me up from school in his limousine. But the limousine wouldn’t simply pull up to the curb. Oh no. Mick would actually get out and walk directly into my high school. Of course, everyone would immediately stop whatever they were doing and stare. A wave of whispers would sweep through the school—a few kids would try to approach him for autographs—as Mick walked purposefully, straight to Room 217, where I had Third Period Geometry. He’d knock on the door, and my teacher, Mrs. Yearwood, would look on stunned, as Mick strode into the room.

“‘Ello Suz-zay,” he’d say jauntily. Everyone in the class would look at me and gasp. The boys who’d once ignored me would be practically apoplectic with newfound reverence and awe.

“Ohmygod,” Henry Piatt would exclaim. “That’s Mick Jagger!”

“It’s really him.” Ira Abrams would say with astonishment. “For Susie?”

Some of the girls would squeal and faint, and Mick would have to step over their bodies to get to my desk. There, beside me, he’d drop to his knees and grab my hand and clasp it desperately to his heart while the whole class looked on. “I’m sorry, luv, but I just ‘ad to see you. I can’t stop thinking about you.”

And I would just sit there, looking unbelievably glamorous.

“Oh, Mick,” I’d sigh coolly, “I’m in the middle of Geometry. Can’t we talk about this later?”

In November, Michelle came running upstairs with a newspaper article.

“They’re here,” she shrieked.

According to the
Daily News,
the Stones were back in New York, putting the finishing touches on their album
Emotional Rescue
at the Electric Lady Studios. From the Yellow Pages, we learned that Electric Lady was on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. It was 10:00
P.M.
on a Thursday night, but clearly, this was not something that could wait until morning.

I told my mother I was going to Michelle’s house to bake cookies; she told her mother she was going to mine. Then we both took the C train downtown to West Fourth Street. The studio was one of the most nondescript doorways in all of Greenwich Village. Located next to a movie theater, it was a small, windowless storefront with a small door set in far from the street. Only a small brass plaque saying “electric lady” in lower-case letters distinguished it. You could walk by it a thousand times and never notice.

For the next two hours, Michelle and I stood in front of this doorway, stopping people on the street who looked like they might know something, asking them if they’d seen the Rolling Stones.

After that, we spent every weekend camped out in front of Electric Lady. We’d get downtown at about 10:00
A.M
., position ourselves against a car parked right near the entrance, and wait. Michelle would smoke cigarettes while I, ever the groupie geek, would bring along books and do my homework. We flirted with strangers a bit, if we thought they were “somebody,” and took beer from guys on the street. Sometimes Michelle would ring the bell at the entrance and say she was sent over from the
Village Voice
with a package for Keith Richards, but they never let her in.

We fell in with some other hippie-groupie types from Michelle’s school who were obsessed with Hendrix, the Doors, Janis Joplin, and Zeppelin as well as the Stones. On the weekends, they often threw “the parents are away” parties out in Flushing, Queens. Since the parties lasted all night, we rarely slept at them; at 3:00
A.M.
a bunch of us might try to set up beds on the floor using sofa cushions and towels, but when the sun rose, we’d all be up listening to “Free Bird” and cooking frozen pizza in the kitchen.

Most of the time, none of us knew where we were, or who we were with. People were taking speed, smoking grass, dropping acid, making out with whoever was around: it was a druggie, psychedelic mess. There would be beer and cigarette butts all over the basement floor, cans and paper, little pools of wax where candles had melted down on the coffee tables. Each party, I made out with a different guy. Making out, I’d quickly discovered, was the greatest activity ever invented in the history of the planet. As soon I started making out with boys on a regular basis, I couldn’t believe that vast segments of the human population ever did anything else. How, I wondered, could people possibly pick up their dry cleaning, perform open heart surgery, or teach high school mathematics when
they could be making out instead? What was wrong with this world? Where were peoples priorities?

Yet after eight straight hours of mashing, grinding, and drinking, my lips were always swollen, and by morning, I always felt battered from alcohol. All I ever wanted to do was take a hot shower and slide between the cool, fresh sheets of my own bed. Instead, Michelle and I would take the subway to Greenwich Village and spend a few hours replacing whatever it was we had lost at the party: lipstick, change purses, socks.

We were walking across Eighth Street one of these afternoons when a limousine pulled up in front of Electric Lady.

“Michelle!” I grabbed her hand and we raced across the street. Then we leaned against an Oldsmobile parked right in front of the studio and waited to see who was coming out. We were determined to appear very cool and nonchalant about it.

Two minutes later, the door to Electric Lady swung open and Keith Richards sauntered out with his little blond son in tow. He looked, if this was possible, scraggly and regal. His black hair was tousled and he was wearing a pair of gold-mirrored sunglasses. I sized him up as fast as possible: tight black velvet pants pulled over boots, black jacket, a red-green-yellow scarf slashed around his neck. When he walked into the sunlight, he recoiled a little. Then he spotted me and Michelle, and for a second, he acknowledged us with a nod before staggering toward his limousine.

“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.’