I WAS BEING SNITCHED ON:
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hendra,” it read.
“It has come to our attention that your daughter, Jessica Hendra, has been absent from our institution for the last consecutive three weeks. . . .”
Busted . . . if my parents saw it. But the good news was, I found the letter first. That made it all the easier to toss it in the trashcan that stood by the front of our building. Then I paused, pulled it out, and looked at it again. It was serious. I could tell. And I wish I could say that I was having second thoughts. Instead, I ripped it to shreds, stuffed it at the bottom of the garbage and headed upstairs feeling guilty—just not guilty enough to tell my mother the truth. But the Board of Education doesn’t give up. After another week without me, the assistant principal of the school called the loft. I wasn’t there to intercept this time, and when I came home that day, I found my mother in the kitchen with an unusually stern look on her face.
“Jessica, I got a call from Bronx Science this morning. The principal said you have not been in school one day this entire term!”
What could I say?
“I’m sorry, Ma,” I stammered.
My mother, the Queen of Stoicism, had finally reached her limit. She had tolerated the transformation of her youngest daughter from a pretty, quiet girl into a terrible teen. The knife-cut hair, the attitude, the safety pins, the loud music, the room that looked like a junk heap, the refereeing of the fights between my father and me. The phone call from the school proved more than she could handle.
“My idea of hell is being with you as a teenager for all eternity!”
I stood silent, shocked to hear this kind of emotion from my mother. She hadn’t exactly yelled. And it wasn’t even close to . . . say, my father screaming at the TV. But it had served its purpose. I stood in front of her feeling stupid and ashamed, and realizing, perhaps for the first time, that my mother wasn’t impervious to her surroundings. Her outburst rightfully was directed at me, but I could sense the pain, the real pain, of my father’s affairs, his drinking and drug habit, of Kathy’s increasingly obvious issues with food, of me destroying my future. It almost made a serious and lasting impression—but not quite.
My father, of course, was furious, ranting and raving about my “fucking idiotic behavior” and threatening me with military school. I said I was sorry, more out of fear than remorse, and he countered by telling me I was “grounded,” which I thought was an unbelievably 1950s Americana term for my dad to use. The idea of military school didn’t appear his style either. Hadn’t he warned me against the evils of militarism and patriotism all my life? What about safeties and not raising my hand for the Pledge of Allegiance? What about the Brownies being Hitler Youth? Hadn’t he always encouraged me to resist authority? But faced with the messed-up product of his utterly confusing parenting, I suspect he thought the military sounded like a good idea. Not being grounded himself, Dad left in a passion and didn’t return until the early hours of the morning. By then, he was irredeemably stoned and refused my mother’s pleas to go with her to the Bronx, even though the letter from the school requested both of them present. So Mom and I trekked uptown without him to plead my case in front of “The Gang of Four,” as my mom dubbed the principal and his associates. My father, as far as they knew, was “out of town.” The Gang of Four took one look at my hair and accessories and suspended me. My career at the Bronx High School of Science ended before it began.
The next stop on my educational path was our local high school, Seward Park. My mother and I walked over one afternoon to sign me up. I thought I was now a street-smart fourteen-year-old punk rocker, but I shook in my combat boots when I saw the kids at Seward. They were tougher than my classmates at P.S. 3 and were much, much bigger. I knew I would never make it through a single day there. My mom knew it too, but private school exceeded our bud get. My father didn’t care if I got the shit kicked out of me. He thought it would do me some good and was nothing less than I deserved for “fucking up” such a wonderful opportunity as Bronx Science. Maybe he was right. As it was, I ended up getting accepted to a public school on Seventy-first Street that had a “gifted” program. I wasn’t feeling the least bit gifted, but Krisztina, who had been kicked out of Music and Art for truancy, was going there, so it seemed as good a place as any. And I went, at least a few times a week, and congratulated myself in my diary: “. . . I suffered through a whole day of school today,” I wrote. “Actually it wasn’t that bad; you just have to get used to it. I’m going to try to go a whole month without missing a day. Not much of an accomplishment for the average person, but for me. . . .”
One afternoon, Krisztina and I were sitting out on my fire escape, smoking. It was okay for Dad to smoke cigars and pot in the loft, but he had a fit if he smelled cigarette smoke. It didn’t matter. We sort of liked the fire escape. It was narrow and rickety, and the black paint was peeling, but for us it served as a private back porch. We took pillows out there and sat for hours, talking and smoking countless Marlboro Lights. Next door was a parking lot, and Krisztina and I could see right down onto the roof, spying on drug deals and guys taking a piss on the cars.
It was cold, and we were huddled in our coats, having the typical conversation of that year: “Madness is playing at Irving Plaza to night. Do you think we can copy the stamp? I don’t have any dough,” Krisztina said.
“I can’t go anyway. Daddy had a fucking attack when I asked if I could go out to night. God I wish we lived alone, just the two of us. Then we could do what ever the fuck we wanted.”
“Jessie, I was looking out my window the other day. (Krisztina and Olga had moved to an apartment on East End Avenue.) It’s only three stories high. I know I could climb down out the window. Or maybe I could get a really long rope and get down that way.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean I can leave whenever I want, and my mother never has to know.”
I just looked at her.
“Okay, listen. I did it last night, and it worked. I climbed down and went to Tier 3. She never found out.”
“You snuck out of your house and went to Tier 3 without me? You bitch!” I punched her shoulder lightly.
“I’m sorry. But there has to be a way for you to get out too. I mean where does this fire escape go? Nowhere at the bottom, but it goes up to the roof, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, can’t you get up the stairwell to the roof?”
“But the door to the stairwell is locked from the inside.”
“Yeah, but I can get out of my house, come down here, open the front door with a key, walk up the stairwell, and unlock the door.”
“Then we can both go down the stairs and out the front door. Do you think it might work?”
We decided to try. I gave Krisztina my key. And while she went back through the loft and up the building stairs to the roof, I climbed three flights up the fire escape. It didn’t feel at all sturdy, and looking down through the iron slats made me dizzy. I looked across at where the Lower East Side met the gray sky of early winter. I hoped it wouldn’t be too dark if I tried this at night, but if I could find a way to sneak out, it was worth it. I walked across the tarpaper roof, and passed the water tower, opened the stairwell door, and found a smiling Krisztina waiting for me. “It works!”
Krisztina and I agreed to try it for real that night. The problem was timing. We had no idea what hour Olga might go to sleep, so Krisztina could sneak out her window undetected. And I had to wait for her to open the roof door before I could get out. It was too risky to rely on it staying unlocked all evening considering that the artist and part-time drug dealer who lived on the eighth floor checked it each night. I would just have to get ready to go out and sit by the fire escape until I heard Krisztina coming. The plan called for her to knock on the fire escape door when she’d made it in. It would be safer if my parents were asleep, but it was impossible to know when, or if, my father was coming home. We reasoned that because the loft was so long and my parents’ bedroom was on the opposite end from the fire escape door, no one would hear us sneak off even if they were awake. If Kathy found out, we felt certain she could be trusted to keep quiet. Maybe we might even get her to sneak out with us one night.
That night I “went to bed” early—meaning I went to my room, got dressed in a ripped plaid dress and fishnets, and waited in bed for my mother to go into the front room to read. Having told me to be home that night, Daddy was still out. We ran an enormous risk of meeting him coming home, either in the stairwell or on the street, but I decided not to think about it. At around 11:30 P.M., I heard my mom leave the living room. I made a “body” out of pillows and blankets, so the bed looked occupied. Then I quietly stole to the fire escape door. I sat by it, wrapped in my long, black coat to protect against the draft that came through the cracks. After what seemed like years, I heard a tentative tapping. I unlocked it and peeked out. Krisztina’s eyes, defined in black, met mine in the flood light from the parking lot. We had a whispered conference.
“Was your mom asleep?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I almost fell out of the stupid window. I hope no one saw me!”
“My dad’s still out.”
“Shit, what if we meet him on the street?”
“I don’t know. Let’s just get down the stairwell. If we hear him coming up, we’ll hide. Once we’re out on the street, we can make a run for it.”
The wind felt sharp as we began our ascent to the roof. I went second and felt, even more than I had on our test run, that I might plummet off the side of the fire escape or that it might fall away from the building entirely. Oh, well, it’s too late now. In a few minutes, I would either plunge to my death sprawled atop a Chevy in the parking lot, or I’d be on my way to see one of my favorite bands. The fire escape held. We made it over the roof.
As we crept down the stairs, we listened but didn’t hear my father’s footfalls. Krisztina did a “Tony check” of the street from the front door and found it all clear. Into the freezing night we scurried, pulling our coats over our heads in an imagined disguise. We ran all the way to Irving Plaza. There, we searched the crowd outside for someone we knew who had a hand stamp from the club. Then Krisztina took out the black pen she always carried and deftly copied the stamp onto her hand and mine, and we made it in for the last few songs. At about four in the morning, I slinked back into the loft from the fire escape and got into bed. My parents never knew.
The Great Loft Escape became our almost-nightly routine. Considering we slept about two or three hours most nights, it’s not surprising that we fell behind in classes. But I had found a way to escape without battling my father, and I was going to take full advantage. Once I had a near miss when I was walking up Fourth Street at five-thirty in the morning and Dad was letting himself into the building. I hid behind a car in the parking lot until he had plenty of time to get upstairs. Another morning as I headed to school, I heard Krisztina calling softly to me from the basement. She had arrived home to find that her mother had gotten up in the night and bolted the front door. She couldn’t sneak back in her house, so she came downtown on the subway at dawn and spent a few hours among the mouse traps and discarded furniture.
Sneaking out could be avoided if I could wrangle permission to stay at Iana’s. Her parents never watched the clock, and 3:30 A.M. was our usual ETA at their Seventeenth Street loft. Iana and I were now very close. In my diary, dated February 9, 1980, I wrote, “What to night really turned out to be was ‘talk’ night. First off Iana and I had the greatest conversation. . . . she told me her ‘deepest darkest secret’ [whom she had a crush on at the time, which was not the kind of thing Iana usually revealed]. Well I told her my secret, about Daddy.”
My two closest friends, Krisztina and Iana, knew. Still, I never mentioned a word to any adult. I saw no point to it. What had happened happened, I reasoned, and talking about it wasn’t going to change anything. But it had, to some degree. Telling my friends had made me feel better. It seemed to relieve some of the pressure that had built. And they still liked and accepted me regardless.
Miraculously, given that we were fourteen or fifteen, none of us got raped, mugged, or murdered. I had a radar for avoiding scary people—or, at least, scary men—and if I ever grew wary of someone coming toward me on a dark night, I dodged down another street or hid until he passed. The three of us all knew never to accept an invitation to get into a car, and cars weren’t really part of our world anyway. Not when we lived in Manhattan. The subway made me more than a little nervous. It seemed so easy to get trapped by some nut case. One night I came home with a friend who had dreamt up a unique defense against predatory men. She acted as though she were schizophrenic. She even kept an Alka-Seltzer or two in her pocket. In real emergencies, she’d break open a packet and put one under her tongue to create the illusion of rabid drool. We noticed a guy following us into one of the subway cars, and almost immediately, she started talking to herself, kicking and screaming at imaginary assailants. The guy got off at the next stop. I was glad she hadn’t pulled out the antacids. I felt too timid to try any of this myself and once had to escape a stalker by jumping off the subway and sprinting through the Times Square subway station until I lost him. It never occurred to me to find a cop. They might wonder what I was doing out at three in the morning. Krisztina had skipped one of our clandestine dates because she jumped a turnstile and was arrested by the transit police. Olga had a near collapse when she had to go down to the station and bail her out. The police were not our friends. I preferred to walk rather than get on the subway. But the most frightening trip I ever had was in a taxi.
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. What ever 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 what ever you want to do. It’s all up to you.”
The truth was it had never been all up to me. What ever 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.
I watched Krisztina’s sexual adventures explode. Once she had started, it seemed she couldn’t stop. It wasn’t as though she enjoyed it much, either. Sex for Krisztina was like vomiting for me.
Olga caught her sneaking out one night, just as she was disappearing off the balcony with a rope around her waist. Understandably alarmed, Olga locked Krisztina in her room. To retaliate, Krisztina wrote a poster-sized sign and put it up to the window: “MY MOTHER HAS LOCKED ME IN MY ROOM PLEASE HELP!” It caused chaos among the neighbors, who knocked on the apartment door with questioning concern. Upon her release, Krisztina still managed to roam the city, sleeping with this guy or that, even showing up one day with whip marks on her back. She told me they had come from a lunatic on a street corner. I listened to her exploits with outward disapproval and secret envy (though the whipping was hard to embrace). And I worried about her. I went to clubs with her and made my way home alone after she went off with someone new. Once she even brought a guy to the roof of Twenty-five East Fourth Street, something I did myself a year later.
I became more and more determined to catch up with my best friend and “went for it” a few months later. He was a roommate of Krisztina’s new and somewhat steady boyfriend, Steve. Steve seemed to be a stable, responsible guy and really loved Krisztina. He worked on Wall Street, standing on the stock exchange floor all day in a suit. After the market closed, he came back to his tiny downtown apartment, put on Doc Martens and torn jeans, and went clubbing. I’m positive Steve never knew her real age. I wasn’t remotely in love with his roommate, Vinnie, but he seemed as good a person as any—and a relatively safe choice—for my first time. His only glamour in my eyes was his Britishness. Vinnie was a nice guy—and not bad looking, in a pallid English way.
I knew I needed to prepare for it. I remembered the conversation I had overheard between my parents regarding the anonymous woman in need of an abortion, and I had accompanied one irresponsible girlfriend no less than three times to an abortion clinic and heard the details of her “procedures.” I knew Krisztina was “taking care” of herself, and I went to the Planned Parenthood Clinic on Third Avenue to get a diaphragm. I also had a conference with Krisztina the night before I expected it to happen.
“Tell me what to do. I feel so nervous. What if I mess up?”
“You won’t mess up. You’ll know what to do when it happens.”
“I just feel so fat and disgusting.”
“You’re not fat,” she reassured me. “You’re perfect. Don’t worry.”
I tried to listen to her, but it was hard. I felt nervous when Vinnie and I got home early that night. The four of us been at a club, and Krisztina and Steve had insisted on staying, clearly part of the plan to leave Vinnie and me alone.
Sex was okay. Not good. Not awful. I was too uptight about my body and too ashamed about what had happened with my father to really enjoy it. But at least I had gotten it over with. I went out with Vinnie for a few more weeks and then decided to move on. After all, I was almost sixteen and no longer a virgin.
Besides plain luck, I figure there were two reasons I survived my adolescence. One, I hated drugs. Two, I was too ashamed to have much sex—at least compared to some of my friends. I have my childhood to thank for both. I had seen too many stoned and fucked-up adults to ever view drugs as anything but stupid. And the kids I hung out with were too poor to buy anything but some grass and maybe a little speed. I smoked pot once or twice but hated it. I got nothing but more paranoid than I already felt, and I walked home with my heart pounding. I spent the next two hours holed up in bed waiting for the experience to end. I still remembered seeing my mom slip under the New Jersey dinner table after too much hash, panicked as she cried, “I’m disappearing!” I figured I had inherited her tolerance for drugs rather than my father’s. His beloved cocaine, the stuff I had mistaken for confectioner’s sugar, had made me think I was going to explode. I wondered how my father could ingest so much of it without feeling as if he were going to rip his own head off. But this was the 1980s, when coke was the King of New York. My father suffered a heart attack when he was thirty-nine, a tremendous scare for him considering that his father, Robert, had died from heart failure when he was in his fifties. One of the doctors in the ER suggested that my dad might cut down on the coke if he didn’t wish to die the next time. He followed the doctor’s advice—for a week or two. If I had wanted to do coke, I could easily have pilfered it from his stash. I just wasn’t interested.
There were always rich kids doing lines in the bathrooms of the more trendy clubs, and once I almost lost my life to a coked-out chick with purple hair and a nose ring because I bumped into her in the ladies’ room and spilled her store. As I fled, a transvestite in high heels and a red wig, high as a kite, stopped me. “Now which bathroom do you think I should use?” Then he—or she—collapsed onto the filthy floor in hysterics. Most of the kids I knew stuck to cigarettes and drinking. I drank too, sometimes too much, but I drank more out of a feeling that I should than because I liked the sensation. As with drugs, I had too many bad associations with drunks to ever want to be one myself. What did I want to be? I had no idea. All I knew was that I was getting tired of clubs and cutting school but didn’t really know how to get back on track. In the fall of 1980, I wrote this in my diary, already world-weary at fifteen:
The first days of clubbing were good, everything was so new, it was all so exciting. Now going out, dressing punk, seeing bands, even cutting school, is more an obligation in a weird way. Sometimes I want it all to go away. I mean sometimes I want to never go to a club again, do well in school like I used to, dress totally normal, even dress kind of pretty.
I had come to identify myself with a certain life, and I was reluctant to change. Besides, my father would take credit for me straightening out. It would be like going back to him. It was as though I’d been saying to him, “You messed me up, and now I am going to mess up my own life to prove it!” If I got my act together, wouldn’t that be like admitting that everything was okay when I knew it really wasn’t? I had changed schools again, this time to a small liberal private school in Brooklyn Heights, and I began going to class more often. Krisztina’s brother had gone there, and when she and I actually managed to graduate the ninth grade at our public school, we were offered places at St. Ann’s. The fact that we managed to graduate shocked everyone, especially the principal, who told my mother in a conference that he was sure Krisztina and I were, and I quote, “dope addicts and no doubt shacking up with college boys,” neither of which was technically true. The staff at St. Ann’s was less fazed by our appearances. There were even a few other kids who looked like us, among them the Beastie Boys, who were already performing. I knew how much the tuition was; my father berated me constantly about the bills. I also knew my mother (and Olga) had gone to considerable effort buttering up the principal to get us in. I spent a lot of time hanging around bars in Brooklyn playing pool instead of going to class. But because I was not completely, as Dad called me, “an overprivileged Manhattan teenage bitch,” I made deals with myself. I never cut English or History and managed to get As on book reports and history tests. I could only cut French twice a month, science once, and math three times. I kept track of my eating habits just as rigorously, counting calories and how many times I vomited. And I discovered, simply by actually going to class more often, that St. Ann’s had some cool kids.
Just as I had begun to emerge from my most reckless period, Dad seemed to be entering one of his, marked by the end of his tenure at the Lampoon. He and Sean Kelly left in 1978, disgusted with the effect of Animal House on the magazine. My father deplored both the movie and the gross-out jokes that had started to characterize the Lampoon. My dad was essentially ousted, and he took the rejection—of himself and his particular brand of humor—hard. The Lampoon had been more than a job; it had been, creatively and socially, his entire existence. My father is an intense man. To be satisfied, he must be passionately involved in something. When he was young, he had the Catholic Church and his quest to become a monk. That gave way to the world of satire, and I think he viewed the early Lampoon and its (almost exclusively male) members as a band of brothers fighting against social and political conservatism. What ever terrible damage he did—to my sister, my mother, or me—was, as he has claimed, excusable in the face of his “precious mission to save the world through laughter.” His weapon was the pen, and in his mind, it was always mightier than the sword. Now, he saw P. J. O’Rourke and the remade Lampoon as instruments of Satan, bent on destroying what he had helped create.
My father always thought in terms of good and evil, black and white. Even during his self-imposed exile from the Catholic Church, he viewed the world that way: holy fathers (from the order of Saint Satire) versus devils (P. J. and fart jokes). Most of the brothers had already abandoned the Lampoon. When Henry Beard sold his founder’s share, my dad was devastated by the ingratitude of Henry’s exit line: “I have not felt this happy since the day I got out of the army.” Doug Kenny walked off a cliff in Hawaii a few years after leaving. It was either a suicide or drug-induced fall. Michael O’Donoghue continued to score big with Saturday Night Live. And then there was my father, left alone with his satirical mission and his contempt for television, the medium that made the fortunes of many of his contemporaries. Stuck between drugs, affairs, and a few successful freelance projects, Dad thought about going back to the church. In 1981, he wrote a careful but desperate letter to his former spiritual mentor, Father Joe Warrilow, asking Joe to “get his faith back for him.” I don’t know if he ever sent it, but it wasn’t enough to get him to Mass on Sundays.
Depression made my dad angry and temperamental, and it was then that I feared him most. But what did I fear exactly? Certainly not that he might hit me. My father hit me only once. I was eight, and it was a slap on the face. It shocked me more than it hurt. And he felt very remorseful, so much so that he brought me home a present the next day.
It seemed as if he felt more remorse over that slap than over the sexual incidents. But I’d still wonder, when he grew angry, whether he might try something sexual again. How could I not? When my father was livid, it seemed as if he took up the entire loft. And not just with his screaming. He became a veritable arsenal of weaponry. There seemed to be a rage that emanated from his body, like a glow of radiation that, if you got too close, might kill you. He was like a grenade ready to explode, his face red, his huge, blue eyes boring holes in his target. His words became bullets that flew from a sniper’s rifle, chosen carefully and aimed to kill.
The simple truth was that Dad was always smarter than me—smarter than anyone I knew. That meant he could fight, using words anyway, with great precision and effect. Maybe he would employ some well-chosen phrase about the way I looked. Or he might mock my accent (American, not English, as his remained). Maybe he would ridicule my friends or confirm the fears I already had about myself—that I wasn’t much good at anything but being a lazy bitch and would amount to nothing. And he was relentless, a pit bull that would lock its teeth on your throat until you simply stopped struggling. The only way to end a fight with my dad was to concede, absolutely and unconditionally.
That meant that Dad was never wrong, not even remotely. If you chose not to concede, he had two ways of ending a fight: He’d either storm from the house, or, if the fight were by phone, hang up. Countless times he’d say, “Just go away and think about it, Jessie. Go look at your navel and think about exactly what you have done to me!” And then a slam—either of the stairwell door or the phone. Usually, our fights dissolved into me going silent, and my dad going ballistic. An icy teenage stare was often my only (futile) defense against his verbal artillery.
Why did I care? Hadn’t the damage he’d done been enough to make me never love or trust him again? I never saw it that way. Yes, I was trying to create an identity separate from his, trying to escape his suffocating influence and dominating opinions. But I still wanted him to love me. I needed him to love me. I was even hesitant to be angry with him, as I wrote in my diary:
I am sorry, I mean I really don’t want to feel this way, but Daddy is really starting to get short with me—temper-wise. Maybe I deserve it, but there are times when I really think I don’t. He’s such an egomaniac. Total hot shit. I love Daddy and all, but sometimes he is very hard for me to stand. He’s so self-centered. If anyone but him is in a crummy mood, it is always unjustified. Well, might as well turn the other cheek. I can never win a fight with him.
Not long after I wrote this, the fights would stop, and Daddy would be gone.