Madonna and Me (31 page)

She cruises around the Lower East Side to pick up seventeen-year-old Latino boys and I too take daring risks others don’t understand. Like the time I introduced myself to John Ashbery, told him I loved his work, and then quoted a poem by Mark Strand. Yet, despite our critics, Madonna and I have persisted in wearing our hearts on our sleeves over the years. I completed an epic, book-length sonnet called “I’m Still in Mourning,” while she illustrated her sexual angst when she posed sucking on bananas with lesbian skinheads.

Not surprisingly, outgoing personalities like ours have inspired numerous authors to hold us under a microscope. An old mentor of mine published a poem called “PsychoTrauma III” in the
Sheepsmeadow Quarterly Review West
that alludes to our two-week affair. Similarly, Madonna has spawned nine trashfests I’ve read, which shed further light on our linkage: We both felt desperate and alone when we moved to the Big City. She posed nude for art students while I was emotionally naked in true-life confessionals for women’s magazines. Though I never ate French fries out of the garbage at Burger King, I did eat their salad bar regularly, so I’m sure I tossed my remnants into the exact same can she was picking food out of.

I admit that our associations with the masculine gender have been a bit problematic over the years. Like Madonna, I used to be attracted to powerful men. Fred, an old lover of mine, once wrote a review for the
Beloit Poetry Journal
and Andrew was a teacher at NYU—with tenure. And we both dated older men named Warren. (Warren Schoenberg was a failed playwright from Queens, though he was just as vain.) Madonna and I were very upset when not one but three of our previous boyfriends ditched us and four days later showed up with quieter, more ladylike women. In her case, Sean, Warren, and Guy also had the nerve to marry and/or knock up their prim newbies. As a result, Madonna and I changed our hairstyles, went shopping, and took up aerobics. She goes to the health club six times a week and I’m there at least once a month, though there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between tight abs and faithful guys.

Maybe that’s because the losers won’t go away. After we split up, Warren had the nerve to demand I return a green chair he gave me. When they called it a day, Guy wanted all her money. Madonna and I called our lawyers and shrinks, but later decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. I gave him back the chair and she let him have the mansion. You’d think that would be the end. But no! Guy had the nerve to call her “It” in the press, the same week A-Rod took up with Cameron. Madonna’s response was to take up with an even hotter blond and
adopt another baby while I lost six pounds and left a curt message on Warren’s machine, saying I might be free for coffee—next month. For control freaks who don’t like surprises, I must say Madonna and I handled it all with poise.

Mary K. Fons

 

 

 

 

 

IT MIGHT HAPPEN in London. She owns six homes there. It could happen in Paris, which would be nice. It wouldn’t happen in Beverly Hills, because I would never willingly go to Beverly Hills, not even for her, but it might happen in Barcelona, because we are both women who enjoy Spaniards and modest servings of
patatas bravas
if we’ve exercised enough to deserve them.

If I am walking down a good street and see Madonna, it will most likely happen in New York City. My sister lives there, and even though Madonna has had trouble with its co-op boards and its baseball players, she can’t stay away from New York for long. It’s her oxygen tank. I’ll see her in New York if I see her.

And though I send three of my best friends the new Madonna wall calendar every Christmas without fail; and though a sixth-grade Leia turned to me in her basement and told me she had a psychic vision that “Vogue” was debuting
that very minute
on MTV and we needed to go upstairs and watch it; and though Leia was right and our lives
were changed forever; and though I see the entirety of my college experience when I hear “Music” (wildly inconvenient if I’m driving in traffic); and though I love her like I love the first boy who kissed me on the mouth, if I see Madonna walking along a New York City street, I will not say hello. I will not introduce myself. I will not approach her. My plan, for a long time, has been to keep walking.

Why, you ask? Not for the obvious things critics accuse her of. Madonna didn’t disgrace feminism. I hope to God it would take more than a cone bra and some black backup dancers to do that. And she isn’t a talentless hack; that the Madonna we know exists at all is proof that this can’t be true. There may be pieces in this book that critique or tear Madonna down—for many folks she is the ultimate straw woman and everyone’s entitled to their opinion, (even bell hooks).

When I say I don’t want to meet my idol, my touchstone, the image that comforts me in dark times, I say it because I need an idol, a touchstone, an image that comforts me in dark times more than I need, say, an autograph. I want Madonna more than I want to meet Madonna. To continue to slog through this risky world—lo! how harsh and dangerous it can be—I need the Madonna that exists in my head, the amalgam of infinite, two-dimensional images, the endless montage. These images lifted me from my small Iowa town as a young girl, and they continue still to rocket me out of complacency and sog and into things like work, squats, riding crops. Those kinds of things.

We know what happens when Madonna meets a plebe. We’ve all seen
Truth or Dare
several times this year. We know that about an hour into the movie we’ll be introduced to Maureen “Moira” McFarland. When this happens, any secret hopes we held of randomly meeting and becoming Madonna’s BFF are over. Moira, world-weary but still scrunchied, goddammit, has called to (or has been called by)
Madonna for a brief reunion during a stop on the Blonde Ambition tour. Their meeting tells us all we need to know about what it’s like to encounter Madonna if you’re not already part of the inner cadre. Remember: This all happens in 1990. Madonna’s been Madonna for several more decades since—it’s doubtful the terms of a meet n’ greet have improved.

The whole deal starts with tiny Madonna in costume backstage, getting her hair and makeup done. She’s talking to Christopher, the brother who would eventually get all jowly and betray her in a crappy tell-all memoir.

Madonna is laughing. “Moira McFarland taught me how to shave my legs, let me borrow her stuffed bra, showed me how to use tampons—not very well, I might add—and taught me how to make out,” she says. At some point, someone who I think is Alex Keshishian asks her how old she was when all this happened, but she doesn’t respond. The film cuts to Moira’s hotel room door. Her eyes widen, she conceals her lit cigarette. “Guys?” she calls to the kids squawking in the background. The cameras enter.

Two worlds, one collision.

They meet near the hotel elevators, or maybe it’s a private suite, or a forest, or some ancient sea-faring vessel. It’s hard to tell. Madonna comes in with the filmmakers, her handlers, and bodyguards. In the midst of all this, the two women embrace. Moira mumbles something about not being able to see because she doesn’t have her glasses and Madonna tells Moira she’s unfortunately unable to sit down even for a moment. At one point, Moira actually forgets how many children she has, then offers her old friend a “Madonna and Child” painting she’s made and framed herself. Madonna blesses Maureen’s pregnant belly, thanks her for the painting, and gets into the elevator, having never taken off her sunglasses.

This is what happens when you meet Madonna. You can’t see, you forget you birthed five children, you offer a piece of your soul, then the big handlers take it—and Madonna—away forever. The bad news
is that for you or me it would be way worse than that, because neither of us taught Madonna anything about tampons or sex in Bay City, Michigan, in the mid-1970s. If brassy, sassy “We-go-way-back” Maureen McFarland can’t get more than a dismissive seventy-five seconds with Madonna, think what you or I would get. Half a blink maybe, and some of us might instantly birth five babies right there from sheer adrenaline, which I bet
still
wouldn’t get her to sit down.

If you’ve ever tried to have a halfway pleasant holiday with the family or a killer birthday after age twelve, you know that despair and disappointment are the bastard offspring of fantasy and expectation. You want Norman Rockwell, you get Kmart. You want a confetti parade with candy tossed from a float, you get five bucks from grandma and an e-card from your dad. In your heart, you know everyone means well, but they’re all super busy and after a while you are, too. So you learn to curb your holiday and birthday expectations because you’re starting to piss people off. Who do you think you are, anyway? At a certain point you see some Buddhist quote in a coworker’s email signature about how expectations create suffering and you start saying it to people when it seems appropriate. This is usually around Christmas or on their birthday.

But you fantasize anyway. In the weeks leading up to the holiday season, you daydream about some vague fireplace that may or may not actually exist, about throwing a Christmas cookie party, buying a knitting app. The night before your birthday, you catch yourself wondering for half a second if anyone might be planning something. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. These fantasies save us from the truth, which is that it’s plenty hard down here on planet Earth. If we can distract ourselves for a moment, we might find that we feel better on the other side, which means fantasy is a survival tool like water or oxygen or the Above & Beyond 12-inch remix of “Nobody Knows Me.”

I needed Madonna when my parents were getting divorced and I could hole myself up in my room making up routines to “I’m Going Bananas” ’til I dropped from sheer exhaustion. I needed Madonna when my entire high school was line dancing to Garth Brooks. Oh, I was pissed about the gold tooth—it was hard enough to defend her as it was—but I stayed true and when the critics all admitted
Erotica
was some of her best work, I was justifiably smug. I needed Madonna when my heart was broken, again, and “Future Lovers” reminded me that there is probably a bigger love out/up there who will never just want to be friends.

But those Madonnas and the countless others she has been for me are all fantasies, all impressions. They’re smoke signals or drawings in a book someone read to me a long time ago. Madonna the Actual Woman isn’t my poster of Breathless Mahoney or my busted up
Ray of Light
CD. She’s not the refraction of twenty-five years of my devotion and admiration. She’s a five-foot-four-inch person. And, loath as we all are to admit it, she ain’t that pleasant a person to be around, by all accounts. Apparently, you can’t make an icon without breaking a few relationships—it’s the price we pay for all those beautiful photographs, all those incredible nights on the dance floor pulsing to “Holiday,” all the mid-1990s minds blown by the profanity, the Vanilla Ice moment, the schizoid pop that is
Music
.

Is it sad? Maybe a little. Like my fictional fireplace or my confetti birthday parade, I will likely never put my arms around Madonna or serve her spaghetti. But does she like hugging? Do I?