Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (2 page)

One night, Alice called a meeting at the Barn. “As you might know,” she announced, “I’m planning to shoot a film here in Silver Lake.” Its title was going to be
Camp,
she said. If she meant this ironically, she seemed unaware of it.

“
Camp
will star a number of people here in the colony, including …” Alice stopped chewing her gum and looked pointedly at me and my friend Edward Yitzkowitz. At that moment, I was busy inventing a way to hang upside down from the bench while chewing on a plastic necklace. Edward was shredding the rim of a Styrofoam cup with his teeth. “Including,” Alice cleared her throat, “some of our
very own
children.

“Edward,” Alice called across the barn. Like many of the colonists, Alice had a thick Brooklyn accent. She pronounced Edward not “Edward” but “Edwid.” In fact, most of the colonists—including Edward’s own Brooklyn-born mother, Carly, and thus Edward himself—pronounced Edward “Edwid.” For years, I believed that was his real name.
Edwid. Edwid Yitzkowitz.
(Only when we were grown up, and I bumped into him in the East Village, did he inform me that his real name was “Edward.” Or
had
been Edward. Sick of the wimpiness it implied, sick of its syllabic bastardization, he’d gone ahead and changed his name legally to “Steve.”)

“Edwid. Little Susie Gilman,” Alice called across the barn. “How would you two like to be in a
real, live
movie?”

Her voice had all the forced and suspicious cheerfulness of a proctologist—it was the voice grown-ups used whenever they wanted to coax children into doing something that they themselves would never do in a million years unless ordered to by a judge—but I was more than willing to overlook this. At that moment, I felt only the white-hot spotlight of glory and attention shining down on me: it felt like butterscotch, like whipped cream and sprinkles.

I nodded frantically. Of course I wanted to be in a movie!

The truth was, until Silver Lake, the year had not gone terribly well for me. Sure, the Vietnam War was going on, and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had recently been shot. But as far as I was concerned, there was only one national trauma worth paying any attention to: the birth of my baby brother. Not only did John’s arrival demolish my status as an only child, but he was handily the cutest baby in all of recorded history. Decked out in his red pom-pom hat and his pale blue
blankee,
he was the traffic-stopper of the West 93rd Street Playground set. Other mothers abandoned their carriages by the monkey bars. “Ohmygod, he is
gorgeous!
” they’d squeal, pushing past me to poke their heads under the hood of his stroller. “Does he model?”

I, on the other hand, was cute only in the way any four-year-old is cute: big eyes, boo-boos on the knee, the requisite lisp. But my face was round as an apple, my tummy even more so. I was not too young, I quickly discovered, to have adults declare open season on my weight. If anything, my brother’s adorableness seemed to compel them to point out my unattractiveness in comparison. It was as if there was only a finite amount of cuteness in the world, and my brother had used up our quota.

“Oh, your little girl, she so chubby!” bellowed the obese Ukrainian woman who ran the Kay-Bee Discount department store, where my mother bought my Health-tex clothing wholesale.

“I think she drink too much Hi-C,” the teacher’s aide at my nursery school suggested. “Her face, it get fat.”

My teacher, Celeste, was herself a genuine sadist. This was made clear to me the very first day of nursery school, when she led our class in a game of “Simon Says” designed to inflict flesh wounds: “
Simon says: Poke yourself in the eye! Simon says: Hit yourself on the head with a Lincoln Log! Stick a crayon up your nose! Whoops. I didn’t say Simon Says, now did I, Juan?
”

“Well, Susie certainly does like Cookie Time,” Celeste informed my mother with a naked, malicious glee. “And let’s face it, she’s not doing herself any favors. Have you considered taking her to a doctor?”

Halfway through the school year, I lay down in front of the door to my classroom and shrieked until my mother promised to take me home. So there I was: the Upper West Side’s first bona fide nursery school dropout.

But now, Edwid and I were going to be movie stars!

“We’re going to be in a movie!” we sang on the ice cream line the next afternoon. As any kid knows, it’s not just that good things should happen to you, but that they should be rubbed into the faces of everyone else. “We’re going to be in a movie!” we chorused again, wiggling our butts in the universal hoochie-coochie dance-taunt, successfully and immediately alienating every other kid in the colony.

In retrospect, Edwid was probably as hungry for some top billing as I was. At four years old, he was already well on his way to becoming a dead-ringer for Ethel Merman. Showy, gossipy, melodramatic, he had a great froth of curly hair which he’d brush back with a flourish, and a voice that trilled up the octaves. “Ohmygawd, you guys, listen to this!” he’d exclaim. Never mind that for some of his contemporaries, getting through
Hop on Pop
was still a major accomplishment: Edwid had not just his mother’s Brooklyn accent, but her full-blown, intellectual’s vocabulary. “What child talks like that?” my mother remarked. “That kid is a
yenta.
”

And I adored him for this. All the girls did. Unlike other little boys, whose primary hobbies seemed to be throwing rocks and plowing into you while pretending to be Speed Racer, Edwid was opposed to any kind of activity that required you to exert yourself. A burgeoning chocoholic like myself, he was only too happy to sit in a lawn chair eating Yodels and making up elaborate stories about what would happen to everybody in the colony, if, say, aliens landed in the Barn and enslaved people based on their outfits.

Needless to say, the other little boys weren’t quite sure what to make of him. They were only four years old, and yet they
knew
—just as Edwid himself
surely
must have known—
that one of these things is not like the others.

Slurping away on Fudgsicles, Edwid and I talked excitedly about how our lives would be transformed by being stars in the movie.

The only child actress I knew of at the time was the ancient Shirley Temple. Somehow, I had the idea that appearing in
Camp
meant being the centerpiece of several vigorous song-and-dance numbers: I envisioned myself solemnly descending a staircase in a small white mink cape while a cast of adoring grown-ups fawned around me, singing songs about how wonderful I was until they left me alone in the spotlight for one of my many ballet solos. I would then proceed to perform one perfect arabesque after another, ending each one by flashing a peace sign at the camera just like the Beatles did.

Edwid saw himself more as a magician. “I’m going to be in a long purple cape and a silver top hat,” he announced. “When I tap the rim of my hat with a magic wand, pet rabbits are going to come running out. Then,” he added, “I’ll lock my sister Cleo in a cello case and make her disappear.” It went without saying, of course, that somehow Cleo would fail to rematerialize at the end of the trick. Through no fault of Edwid’s, she would remain lost forever in a netherworld of incompetent magicians’ assistants.

At the end of the movie, Edwid and I agreed, we’d both be in a parade, then move to a split-level house in New Jersey with shag carpets and an aquarium and a kitchen stocked only with M&M’s and Bosco.

The morning that
Camp
was to begin filming, I woke up so excited, I didn’t want to eat breakfast. But there wasn’t any breakfast to be had—my mother was already down at the lake, watching Alice shoot the first scene.

“Come take a look, sweetie,” said my dad. “It’s really something.”

Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that there might actually be other people in the movie besides Edwid and me. Following my father down to the lake, I didn’t know what to expect: perhaps Alice would be seated in a director’s chair while a few colonists milled around in sparkly costumes, awaiting my arrival. Maybe there’d be people practicing tap-dancing, or a collie with a red ribbon around its neck, being groomed to appear as my sidekick.

What I did not expect to see was twenty-seven hippies cramming themselves into a pink and purple VW Bug.

They were, from my point of view, practically naked. The men had only cutoff denim shorts, and the women who weren’t actually topless were wearing tiny, macramÉ bikinis crafted by Daisy Loupes, a colonist whom even the others considered, in their words, “far out.” Daisy made her living selling handcrafted bathing suits at music festivals. That people actually paid money for her creations is a testimony to the strength of the hallucinogens of the time. At Silver Lake, the older boys called Daisy’s bathing suits “Bags o’ Boobs” and “Saggy Titty Sacks.” They weren’t being uncharitable.

In place of everyone’s clothes was psychedelic body art. Explosive flowers and huge Day-Glo orange peace signs were painted on their chests. Hearts framed their belly buttons, smiley faces grinned from their shoulders and knees. Butterflies alighted from their clavicles. One woman had yellow and orange rays of sunshine radiating from her crotch; my friend Annie’s brother, Jerome, whom I already considered a freak because he was a white guy who insisted on wearing his hair in an Afro, was entirely covered in paint. Stripes of color swirled around him like a green and magenta barber pole. The Fleming twins, a pair of teenaged girls who’d baby-sat me once, had the words “Groovy” painted on one leg and “Sock It To Me!” on the other, and “Make Love, Not War” emblazoned across their tummies.

Each hippie had a number painted on their stomach, too, and as Alice stood behind her tripod, she called out the numbers as if she were operating a deli counter. I noticed that she was counting backward, “Fifteen … Fourteen.…” Whoever’s number was called had to stuff him- or herself into the VW.

My father led me over to Alice. “You see,” he pointed at her camera, “Alice is going to have of all these people jump out of that tiny car just like clowns in a circus.” He seemed to think I would be entertained by this, though the truth was that clowns—along with puppets, forest fire commercials, and badly drawn coloring books—scared the shit out of me. Hippies, so far, weren’t faring much better.

“This scene is called ‘Ode to Joy,’” added Alice, not looking up from her viewfinder.

I had no idea what an “ode” was, but trying to stuff twenty-seven grown-ups into a VW bug didn’t look like joy to me at all. It looked like wishful thinking.

I watched my friend Abigail’s father, a compact man with giant purple daisies painted on his nipples, crawl under the dashboard in a fetal position, while the Fleming twins wedged in behind the stick shift. “Number Six!” Alice shouted. That was Larry Levy, my friend Lori’s dad. He was six foot two and had hot pink and yellow flowers painted up the trunks of his legs and a peace sign on each cheek. Watching him bend down and try to contort himself into the trunk of the VW was beyond painful; it was practically traumatic. Yet my father was grinning. “Give it up, Levy!” he shouted. “You can’t do it!” Larry turned around, smiled broadly, and gave my father the finger. Then he jumped down into the trunk and pulled the hatch closed behind him with a flourish, and everyone hooted and applauded. My dad put both fingers in his mouth and whistled. It seemed to me like every dog across New York state heard him and promptly commenced yowling.

“Okay!” shouted Alice, “start cuing the music.” A portable plastic record player had been set up under a tree with the help of half a dozen extension cords, and I watched Alice’s teenaged son, Clifford, slide a copy of Jefferson Airplane’s
Surrealistic Pillow
out of its sleeve and place it on the turntable.

A queasiness started to come over me, similar to the one I’d felt each morning before nursery school. I stood there with my father and tried to pretend that all of this was okay—that this was how any other kid from my nursery school would be spending their summer vacation.

No one paid the least bit of attention to me.

“Okay, people,” shouted Alice. “It’s 84 degrees out and I don’t want anybody suffocating to death. Once my camera starts rolling, haul your ass out of that car as fast as possible!” Then she shouted, “Clifford! Music!” and the reverberating, psychedelic, maraca-laced opening of the Jefferson Airplane song “She Has Funny Cars” boomed across the lake.

“Roll ’em!” Alice shouted. The original idea, apparently, had been to have the car “drive” up into the clearing and then have all the hippies emerge, but once everyone was crammed inside, steering the car became physically impossible. “Just get out when I call your number!” yelled Alice. “One!”

Slowly, the car door opened and Adele Birnbaum, who’d smushed herself in just a minute earlier, emerged. A lightning bolt painted on her stomach hadn’t fully dried; it bled into the purple “1” above her belly button, creating a Rorschachy mess, but Adele just grinned and wiggled and danced right into the camera while the crowd hooted and cheered. “Two!” Alice yelled, and Sidney Birnbaum emerged, dancing the funky chicken with an American flag wrapped around his waist.

It all went smoothly until Alice got to hippie Number Six. It seems Larry Levy had pulled his back out leaping into the trunk of the VW. Alice had to stop filming while my father and Sidney Birnbaum carefully extracted him from the back of the car and whisked him off to the emergency room in Brewster. Nobody thought to remove Larry’s body paint beforehand, and I wondered what the nurses would make of it. Oddly, it comforted me to think that Larry’s kids might be even more embarrassed by all this than I was.

By the time Alice got to filming her thirteenth flower child, most of the real children had lost interest. They’d wandered over to a grove of trees by the lake, where they invented a game in which one person farted into a bag, then everyone else took turns sniffing it. But I had no interest. I went off and sat on a rock by myself. The vague upset I’d felt at the beginning of the shoot had metastasized into a full-blown stomachache.