Punk Like Me (14 page)

For all that Nanny drove me crazy sometimes, she just looked adorable standing there all indignant, cup of water in one hand, thermometer and Tylenol in the other, making herself red in the face trying to cough. I hid the smile she brought to my lips—Nanny didn’t ever want to get caught being cute. She hated being “the baby” because she was almost as tall as I was and a shade taller than Nicky.
She’d hate
me, too.
I winced at the thought, knowing how deeply uncomfortable Nanny was with people and things that were outside her idea of

“normal.” They made her angry, and it was easier for her to hate them all. The smile died.

I was so very much wrapped up in my thoughts, I lay unresisting as Mom slipped the thermometer into my mouth and argued with Nanny over her “cough.”

• 94 •

PUNK LIKE ME

“It’s not fair—Nina gets to stay home whenever she wants. Daddy always says you should never miss work or school on a Friday or a Monday.”

“Unless you’re sick, honey,” Mom explained patiently, and held her hand out to me for the thermometer. I handed it over to her, and she studied it. “Hmm…one hundred.” She took the pills and the cup from Nanny, who stuck her tongue out at me (I just gave her as much of the evil eye as I could from my half-buried position) and handed them to me.

“Drink all of the water, Nina, the whole thing, so you’ll feel better.”

I sat up to comply and took the pills and water down in a few gulps.

It hurt going down, like it was traveling past a golf ball or something. I settled back into my cocoon.

“She’s not sick, Mom. She’s just sitting there looking all white and pinky. I can make my eyes and cheeks pinky, too, you know. You just have to pinch them, like this,” and Nanny demonstrated her new blush technique.

“Nanny, your sister isn’t feeling well. And when you bring home the grades Nina does, you can stay home and pinch your cheeks all day long, if you’d like.” Mom tucked me in and stroked my hair. “You okay?” she asked me. “Do you want me to stay home with you?”

“Aw, Mom,” Nanny protested, grabbed her clothes, and stomped out of the room.

I turned to look at my mom in amazement. She couldn’t stay home from work, we all knew that. I wasn’t
that
sick. “No, Mom, I’ll probably be Þ ne in a few hours. Please, don’t forget to call the school before you leave and then after, when you get to work, okay? You know how they get,” I asked her in my scratchy voice.

Here’s the deal: at my high school, there was no real cutting. Your parents had to call either the principal or the school secretary before homeroom started, and then again, before the end of Þ rst period. If you didn’t show up for school and had no veriÞ able parental phone call, you were up shit creek without a paddle, my friend. You had a detention, even if your parents just forgot to call. Let me repeat that: you had detention, not demerits, and detention consisted of either polishing the endless banisters and trophy cabinets, cleaning the school library, the principal’s ofÞ ce, or, and this was my personal favorite, complex math equations with Attila the Nun herself—all of this, after school, for at

• 95 •

least an hour. Sounds like a joy, doesn’t it?

How did I know this, you ask? Easy. I’d been on detention—a lot—and at least once a year because my parents forgot to call the school.

“I’ll go call right now, sweetheart, don’t worry,” my mom assured me. She got up off the bed and stood to leave, but I caught her hand.

“Mom?” I looked up at her.

“Yes, baby? What’s the matter?” She looked at me with concern.

I just looked up at her and stared for a long second, the warmth in her face, the love and worry and tenderness in her eyes. I wanted to etch that image into my memory forever, to never forget it, so that in the days that I was afraid would come, I would remember that once I had been treasured and precious. I had been loved.

“Nothing. I love you,” I told her, and I squeezed her hand.

“I love you, too, little bird,” and she bent to kiss my forehead. I smiled and then shut my eyes to snuggle back in as Mom shut the door and left the room.

Nanny made some sort of protest to her in the hallway. Faintly, I heard my mom say, “Nina’s sick. Leave her alone and don’t tease her, Nanny.”

I tried to shut out the normal noises of people getting ready in the morning, but in the end, I couldn’t and I just lay there, mentally blank, miserable, and still cold, although it wasn’t the same bone-deep chill I’d felt before. Maybe taking those Tylenol was a good thing after all.

I heard the sound of feet running across the house downstairs and the front door opening, which signaled Nanny’s leaving for school.

“Bye, Mom! I love you! Bye, Nina! Read your comic books and feel better!” Nanny called as she left, and she slammed the door behind her, shaking the house.

By this time things had Þ nally quieted down, and I actually closed my eyes to get some real sleep, but just as I drifted off, my mom opened the door and came back in. “Are you going to be okay by yourself, Nina? Are you feeling any better?” she asked me with the same soft concern she’d shown as she came over to sit on the edge of my bed again. She felt my face the same way she did before. “You seem a little cooler, thank God. Do you feel any better?” she repeated.

“I’m not so cold now,” I sat up and answered truthfully, “still kind of yucko feeling, though,” and I rubbed my head where it hurt the most.

• 96 •

PUNK LIKE ME

“My precious, feel better,” and she kissed near the spot I rubbed.

“Not there,” I smiled, “here,” and I put my Þ ngers on the spot. It was an old joke between us—I’d show Mom where it hurt and she’d kiss a different spot, and I’d show her where it really was, and she’d go to kiss it and miss again, and this would go on for a bit until Mom got the boo-boo.

When I was really small, she’d cover me in kisses and tickle me until I was shrieking with laughter and had forgotten where it had hurt in the Þ rst place, while in the interim she’d gotten me disinfected and bandaged without my ever even noticing, and there was nothing left but the smile I felt from the inside out and the Band-Aid on an elbow or a knee.

I was too big for tickles now, though, and I didn’t know of any antiseptic or Band-Aids that could Þ x me.

Mom kissed the spot I’d indicated and stood. “There’s cold cuts in the fridge, there’s eggs, orange juice, bread, and milk. I left you some money on the counter in case you need anything later—food or if you want to rent a movie. You can ask Nicky or Nanny to go to town and pick it up, and tell them to give me change. If you feel better, later, when Daddy gets home, we’ll order in pizza or Chinese or something, okay?” she informed and asked me in the same breath.

“Food in the fridge, money’s on the counter,” I repeated dutifully.

“Chinese food later?” I asked hopefully, because that was deÞ nitely on my list of favorite things.

Mom laughed as she put her hand on the door. “We’ll see how you feel. Okay, sweetheart, I’ll call you later, all right?” she asked me from the doorway.

“Okay, Mom. I love you. Have a good day,” I wished her from my blanket nest.

A clock beeped somewhere in the house, signaling the hour. “Oh!

My bus!” My mom whirled around, then back again to look at me.

“Okay, I love you, Nina. Be good and feel better.” She closed my door and hurried down the stairs. “I can’t miss the bus again!” I heard her call out as the front door opened and closed again.

It was fully light out now, and as I looked past my feet over the end of the bed to the window, I could see a few perfectly white clouds scud across the otherwise clear blue sky.

I was completely awake now and no longer that cold. I rolled onto my back and stared blankly up at the ceiling. “Be good and feel better,”

• 97 •

Mom had said. That was so much easier said than done, I thought rather grimly, easier said than done. I grimaced to myself.

My mind drifted, and I started to review the experiences of the previous day. I’d never been in the East Village before yesterday, and I was surprised at how different it was from the West Village. It was grittier, dirtier, more colorful and freakier, somehow. The vibe was wilder, more creative, freer somehow, and I liked it. A lot. I deÞ nitely had to make a return trip there sometime. Maybe Nicky and I would go this coming Saturday afternoon, after our various practices (swim team for me, wrestling for Nicky), if we didn’t have other things to do in the time allotted us. He needed to loosen up a bit. He’d like it, too.

Let’s see, what else…

I’d never seen so many punks in one place at the same time, not even at the parties I went to, and that’s saying something, because we were deÞ nitely an eclectic bunch. That was incredible—I didn’t know so many people were out there trying to live out the everyone’s-an-individual-and-that’s-cool ideal.

I’m sure that some of them were just poseurs (and that’s pronounced
poe-zer
, just in case you were wondering), and being a poseur is just so not a cool thing. That’s someone who talks the talk but doesn’t really walk the walk. You know, someone who just misses the point and tries too hard to be cool, instead of not caring and thereby actually being cool. True cool doesn’t care if it’s “in” or not. Poseurs care—so they’re not in. Ever. You can always tell who they are, too; there’s just something about them.

Okay, so I missed SOD. Still, though, I got to see and be a part of that crowd, and that was a very good thing—because now I knew for sure I wasn’t the only one, that my friends and associations weren’t an isolated bunch of crazy people fed up with greed and false middle-class values and hypocrisy, glitter and perfume covering rot and corruption.

There were lots and lots of us, trying to tell the truth—that food lay wasting and rotting in storehouses in the richest countries of the world, yet men, women, and children starved in Africa, in Asia, in Central and South America. And hungry and homeless and sick people lived in the most privileged of cities while our governments spent monies for food and medical research on arms development.

And what the fuck was a “Cold War” anyway, dammit? The rhetoric was pretty damn heated, the people in charge were crazy, and the people paying in blood, sweat, and tears to fund the arms race,

• 98 •

PUNK LIKE ME

and that’s you and me, baby, would end up dust particles glowing in the dark, the only consolation being that our constituent molecules and particles might glow on in an our-side-won desolation.

The world was run by a bunch of callous, power-hungry, greedy, war-mongering bullies, making rules they didn’t follow, writing laws they broke, and happy enough to have us all Þ ghting each other so we wouldn’t notice the theft of our lives. You didn’t have to be over twenty-one years old to understand that, and who knew if you’d live long enough, anyway. Hello, mushroom cloud.

And we weren’t gonna be all “peace and love” about Þ xing it either, like the hippies had been. You couldn’t hug missiles or drop ß owers into silos. Yeah, the hippies got some stuff done, but after a while, all the tuning in, turning off, and dropping out left them stoned and disconnected. And they’d come down from their collective high to become the establishment, the law, the middle class and rich hypocrites who ignored hunger and poverty and bigotry and crime.

Now
this
was “Anarchy in the UK,” baby, and the U.S., and everywhere else, too, and that’s the fuckin’ truth. We were betrayed, we were angry, we weren’t fooled by the bullshit, and we didn’t want to die in this stupid international “King of the Mountain” pissing contest.

But still, I reß ected, I felt better knowing that the Punk Army really did exist, that there were lots and lots of people agitating to make things better, even the poseurs. And it didn’t matter that I didn’t get to see a band. What mattered, what really mattered, was that the message was out there and calling people, even if sometimes all the music said was the irreverent and/or the obvious. That was part of the point, too.

There was other stuff, too, on a more surface level.

Ronnie the Bouncer Boy thought I was pretty. And I wasn’t hallucinating; he’d been coming on to me. What the hell was up with that? I never thought I was pretty. I mean, I knew I wasn’t hideous. It’s just that it seemed wrong somehow to think that I was, or that I could be, like too much ego or something when there were so many other important things to worry about, like becoming nuclear dust (see above rant) or failing the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test—important to get a good grade on if you’d like to overpay or attempt for a scholarship to get a higher education at the college of your choice).

Besides, everywhere I went, most guys went for Kerry. In fact, all of them did. If she’d come up to the door with me, I’m sure that wouldn’t have happened. Ronnie would never have even seen me. I

• 99 •

wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Then there was that girlfriends and boyfriends thing he’d said, about having both at the same time, I mean. That was a new concept, but it did sound like sooner or later someone would get hurt—feelings or otherwise. What did you do, go out on three-way dates? So, if you asked someone out, did they ask someone along? Did you ask them both out? What if you got asked out, then did you bring someone along? Or did the two of them (whoever they might be) ask you out? And what if you didn’t like one of the people? Or they didn’t like you? What if they didn’t like each other? And then, who paid for the whole thing?

Especially if you had a Þ rst asker and then a second one?

Forget that. It sounded way too confusing. Besides, you’d go crazy trying to share popcorn or a soda, never mind Þ nding someone willing to deal with that whole sort of mess in the Þ rst place. Figuring out the logistics for that was really messing with my already fucked mind.

Then what happened? Oh yeah, we got chased by those guys. I could still very clearly hear the way the guy had yelled “dyke,” with the same tone of disgust my father had when he said it. I shuddered when I remembered the sound of those footsteps pounding behind us and the glass smashing. Scary. That had sucked big-time.