14

AS I RODE the Lexington Avenue local down to Astor Place, I thought about what Claire had said about Julie fucking with me. Claire was so suspicious that she now had me really wondering about Julie. I went back and forth for a while, with all the voices in my head arguing different sides of the question.

But, no, I decided, not after all we went through together, fatherlessness, daffy mothers, cooties, and redeeming those cooties to become semipopular.

Even though I look back on my shallow, semipopular high-school years with significant regret and embarrassment, I am still kind of proud that we were able to transform ourselves in one summer, and still grateful to Julie, because she was the engine behind it. Before she moved to Ferrous, she had been popular, or so she claimed, and it became her life’s work to get back her previous lofty social status. I had never been popular—I had always been considered weird—and, not knowing any different, I didn’t know just how bad a thing that was until Julie arrived. It was her deep shame at her cooties that made me aware of my own shame.

Several things helped us redeem our cooties. Our junior high school fed into a huge high school serving five towns, four of which had no knowledge of our previous cootie status. That gave us a nearly fresh sheet of paper with which to start high school, reputation-wise. It also helped that our enemies, Mary and Sis, were going away to some horsey private boarding school in Virginia.

So, the summer before high school, we dieted, using a candy called Ayds that we ordered from the back of a trashy magazine. We exercised like crazy and practiced gymnastics and dance so we could go out for junior cheerleaders. We started wearing makeup, Julie got contact lenses, and I started relaxing my hair to give me a more sultry Rita Hayworth look, the Farrah style being beyond what I could accomplish. We read Susan Dey’s book about how to be popular. In preparation for dating, we even practiced closed-mouth necking with Julie’s cousin Jack when he came to visit. There was no French kissing—which is fortunate, because it would have been creepy to French-kiss Julie’s cousin, who was a full year younger and a twerp. (The practice kissing came to a halt when the little prick tried to cop a feel.)

So many different images of Julie went through my head. Some of them made me crack up, like Julie dressed in her pirate costume. She loved to play pirates, and so did I. People still have this goofy idea about girlhood, even other women, which I find inexplicable, that girls of my generation spent all their time in frilly dresses drinking tea from tiny cups across the table from their dolls, or wheeling dolls in doll carriages and combing the hair on their Barbie dolls with tiny Barbie-doll combs. Dolls were such a small part of most girls’ experience. Most of the time, we were riding our bikes, playing cops and robbers, pirates, softball, climbing trees, doing homework, or torturing each other, just like boys.

Then, for Julie and me, there was the whole bandit-queen thing. I had to laugh when I thought about Julie dressed up like Putli Bai, in polyester tunic and harem pants, full makeup, jewelry, with a toy gun in her hand and a fierce expression on her face. Somewhere, I had a picture of that. On the back of it, she had scrawled, “Be all that you can be.”

That was her favorite role to play, bandit queen. Leading an army of men and sometimes women. Beholden to nobody but the gods and goddesses. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor. What really got Julie was that Putli Bai was shot dead in January 1958, a few days before Julie was born. Julie thought that was somehow significant.

As I came out of the subway station at Astor Place, a film crew was there shooting a movie, a period piece set in the 1960s, judging by the costumes and the cars. It looked almost like the real Astor, just off enough to make me uneasy. There were actors, spectators, and lots of film people with walkie-talkies and clipboards. I walked through the faux Astor, passing through fantasy on my way back to reality. That seemed an apt metaphor for the blurring of reality and fantasy tonight. When I entered the faux Astor, I was still trying to give Julie the benefit of the doubt, convincing myself that her intentions were good, if misguided.

By the time I got to the other side of the faux Astor, my view had changed. In between, I heard one of the guys with walkie-talkies say, “Ginger, can you bring some scrim?”

One time, late at night, when most good kids and good parents were in bed, we were playing a game known variously as Ring and Run and Knock a Door Ginger at Mrs. Johannsen’s house. We were thirteen.

Though I was usually up for Julie’s pranks, this one gave me pause, because Mrs. Johannsen’s husband was away on business in Duluth, and Mrs. J. was home alone. I didn’t want to scare her. But Julie said, “Don’t worry.”

We rang the doorbell several times, and then hid behind the caragana hedge. The curtain opened in the little diamond window on the front door. Then nothing.

Julie ran back up to the house and rang the doorbell again a bunch of times. At the time, I remember thinking, She’s crazy. She’s gonna get caught. I almost hightailed it out of there then. I would have, if I hadn’t been frozen in place.

This time, instead of coming back, Julie hid by the side of the house, peeking at the back door. I stuck my head up, trying to signal Julie, and when I did, Mrs. J.’s face was in the diamond window, staring at me. I’d been caught. I started walking towards the back alley, as casually as possible, whistling out the side of my mouth for Julie, trying to signal her to meet me in the alley. I looked back. The curtain was closed.

I was stationed in the alley, Julie behind the house. She saw me and put her finger to her mouth. The back porch door opened and a man came out. It was Mr. Groddeck, who owned the Ford dealership on the interstate.

When Julie saw him, she said, “Hello, Mr. Groddeck,” and then she took off like a bat out of hell to the alley, grabbing my hand and saying, “Come on.”

Groddeck chased us for two blocks, but somehow we got away. I was scared shitless Groddeck would call the school, or my mother, or, worse, my Aunt Maureen. But he didn’t. In fact, every time he saw Julie or me after that, he smiled and gave us money.

“He’s really a nice guy,” was Julie’s explanation.

So nice that one night in high school, when Julie was feeling her oats, as they say, and she stole a car from the Groddeck Motors lot, Mr. Groddeck didn’t press charges. It’s terrible, but I had to laugh at Julie’s nerve. Her uncle, with whom she lived, was an auto mechanic, and Julie picked up a lot from him, including how to hot-wire a car. One night, she showed up outside my house, honking her horn. She’d “borrowed” a car and wanted to take me for a drive, cruise the boys in Newton. We hit every hangout in Five Towns before the cops grabbed us on the interstate, frisked us and everything. Julie told the cops she’d just borrowed the car, that Mr. Groddeck knew about it, and when the cops told Groddeck who was involved, he apologized, said of course he’d told Julie she could borrow a car, and we were released. Only afterwards did Julie gleefully confess that she had stolen the car, and she knew Groddeck was “too much of a sap” to charge her. I was kind of ticked about her putting me through that, but there was something exhilarating and outlaw about it too.

Now I was completely pissed off. Now I understood. Julie knew that Groddeck would be at Mrs. Johannsen’s house that night. She and I were blackmailing him and didn’t even know it. Or I didn’t, at least. Julie obviously did. She’d enjoyed making Groddeck twist in the wind like that. Maybe it had something to do with her dad. Maybe she was just cruel. But she milked Groddeck for a long time, and he gave her a job doing his books after she graduated from high school.

Who was she now?

Suddenly, I had to question everything. What else had I misunderstood, misinterpreted? That note she brought to sewing class in eighth grade, ostensibly from the principal—it seemed so hilarious at the time. But what if Old Hobnail had insisted on reading it? I could have been in a lot of trouble because of that. Still, it was funny. Telling George and Billy I spoke French, setting me up like that, that wasn’t too nice. Yet that too was pretty funny.

But that note she typed and signed “Doug Gribetz,” that was downright cruel. Getting my hopes up for a brief moment, then telling me she wrote it. Man, that was mean. There was nothing funny about that.

This was a pretty mean joke too. I’m pretty good at seeing the hidden menace in things. But I’m not always so good at seeing the hidden menace in people.

How could I hold it against her, though? She’d had such a shitty childhood. Julie’s mother would bring strange men home, men she met at her brother’s gas station on the interstate. The men would give Julie money to go away, and she’d show up at my place at all hours with money in her pocket. Get-lost money, she called it. She’d climb up the fire ladder to my window and knock. More than once, we’d gone out after my curfew to ring doorbells or smoke cigarettes with dark-eyed juvenile-delinquent boys behind the elementary school.

And here I was again, thirty-eight years old and out after curfew because of Julie. Despite the late hour, or maybe because of it, St. Mark’s Place—which is, numerically, East 8th Street—was fully alive. The colored carnival lights strung up and down the street for Halloween created a corridor of artificial brightness through the darkness. This street never sleeps, at least not at night. The lights were still stark in the T-shirt and earring shops, in Cappuccino & Tattoo and the leather bondage-clothes place, dim inside the bars and coffeehouses. The sidewalks were full of people, a lot of them in costume waiting to get into late-night joints. Punked-out kids were clustered outside Coney Island High, a retro punk-rock club. Homeless guys sold books and magazines and other stuff from card tables. Tamayo once said this neighborhood’s nocturnal commerce made her think of the last carnival on a dying star, a feeling intensified tonight by all the people in bizarre costumes.

“Beware the asparagus,” some nutball screamed as he ran past me.

Loony toons? Or ahead of the curve?

About thirty years ago, I remember seeing some nutball standing on a corner in Duluth raving about how spray cans were going to burn a hole in the sky, and people thought he was toons. We put everything in spray cans, shaving cream, hairspray, even cheese. Then we found out how fluorocarbons in spray products helped destroy the ozone. So that guy wasn’t crazy, at least not about the spray cans. He was just ahead of the curve. After you’ve lived long enough, you gotta wonder which things that serve and delight us today will turn around on us later. When I was a kid, figure skaters were national sweethearts, postal workers were noble, sleet-fighting heroes, spray cans were the greatest invention since sliced bread, and Julie Goomey was my bosom buddy.