Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (2 page)

 

Derek was Marie’s ex-boyfriend, and a prime, grade-A creep. Marie had been seeing him in the months since Dad left for good, and she had finally gotten around to dumping his ass a few weeks ago. Mom knew nothing about Derek while Marie was dating him, and it’s a good thing, too, because I’m sure she would have had him arrested, or banned Marie from ever leaving the house again if she’d gotten wind that her fifteen-year-old daughter was dating some sleazy old dude in his twenties. I have no idea what the hell Marie saw in Derek: he wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t charming; in fact, all he had going for him was that he owned a car. Marie was way too good for him. She’s was a really beautiful girl, and I used to feel hopelessly inferior to her, despite the fact that we were twins and most people claimed that they couldn’t tell us apart . . .

 

That’s why the whole Derek thing puzzled me. The whole idea was gross, and I reminded Marie of this whenever I got the chance. When Marie finally got rid of him, I was really happy about it. The downside was that ever since she dumped him, Derek was all that Marie seemed to talk about.

 

“Don’t ruin my night!” I begged as we saw the car idling a little farther down the block. “I don’t wanna hear about Derek, okay? We’re having fun tonight.”

 

“Okay,” Marie said, sounding unsure. “He just makes me nervous. He’s CRAZY, Cherie! I’m not kidding, sometimes he really freaks me out . . . I think he’s been following me.”

 

“I’m not surprised, Marie. He’s a freak! Why the hell did you even date him? You’d better not ruin tonight by talking about Derek.” I spat the word as if it was so distasteful that I could barely stand to have it in my mouth. “He’s lame. He sucks! Don’t waste your breath talking about that loser . . .”

 

At this, Marie finally smiled. As we stood next to the car, she finally conceded, “Yeah. You’re right. He does suck.” Then she smiled, all of the worry finally falling away from her pretty face.

 

I pulled the door open. My best friend, Paul, was behind the wheel. His eight-track was blasting the soundtrack of the evening: Diamond Dogs by David Bowie.“Hey, girls!” He laughed. “Jump in . . .”

 

Paul was our designated driver for the evening. He was seventeen and an only child. His parents gave him anything he wanted, including a yellow Camaro Sport with a black stripe down the side. It was Paul who’d introduced us to Bowie, glam rock, everything that had become the center of my universe. Paul was a strange introverted guy who was totally obsessed with David Bowie. He talked through his teeth, and had this weird phobia about never eating anything that he had touched. When we were at McDonald’s, he would eat every part of a french fry except for the part that his fingers came into contact with. And he had this strange, wheezy laugh that reminded me of Muttley from Wacky Races. Despite all of these quirks, I liked Paul: I thought he was cute; weird but cute. I guess he was handsome in a bizarre kind of way; he dressed and even looked a little like Bowie. Plus he had cool taste in music. I would have gone out with him if he had asked me to. He just never seemed interested. I sensed something uncomfortable between us whenever I got too close to Paul.

 

Uncomfortable really summed Paul up. I didn’t know too much about boys and how their minds worked back then, and it wasn’t until years later that I found out he was gay. He was one of the coolest guys I knew, my best friend back then. There was a time when Marie was my best friend, but over those past few months I’d been closer to Paul than to Marie, who had been sucked up into the vortex of Derek. Over the summer we had begun to slowly drift apart: Marie was hanging out with her own circle of friends, most of whom I thought didn’t like me. Tonight was typical behavior from her. We’d been talking about going to this Bowie concert for months, and now that the day had finally arrived, Marie was too busy worrying about her goony ex-boyfriend to enjoy herself.

 

“Jesus,” said Paul as we pulled away, “what’s with the frown, Marie?”

 

“I’m NOT frowning!” Marie screeched. “I’m just worried about Derek . . .”

 

I rolled my eyes at Paul, and he grimaced, well familiar with the ongoing saga of Marie and Derek. It was Paul who’d originally introduced us to all of the hot clubs in L.A. It was Paul who’d first brought us to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, a club on the Sunset Strip that was ground zero for glam rock in L.A. It was Paul who’d taken us to the Sugar Shack in North Hollywood—an under-twenty-one club where they played all the best new music, all of that amazing English glam that I loved: Bowie, Elton John, the Sweet, Mott the Hoople . . . The Sugar Shack had become a home away from home for me in those past few months, a place where I could forget about all of the problems I was having at home since Dad left, a place to have fun, dress up, and dance. And Rodney’s! Everybody was a star at Rodney’s, and the club was a frantic mix of young kids dressed in their most outrageous, sluttiest, sexiest outfits, groupies, faces from the glam scene, and the weird, older guys who’d congregate to ogle all of the barely teen jailbait staggering around the dance floor in revealing outfits and six-inch platform boots. Of course, that’s where Marie met Derek.

 

“Don’t worry about Derek.” Paul sneered. “He’ll be at Rodney’s tonight. Like always . . .”

 

“But—”

 

“Shut UP!” I yelled. “Derek, Derek, Derek! I don’t want to hear his name again tonight!”

 

We pulled into a run-down gas station on Ventura Boulevard. The attendant was a fat slob in grease-stained denim overalls chomping on an unlit cigar. We smiled our sweetest smiles, and asked for the key to the bathroom. He looked us up and down, and with a grunt tossed it over to us. The key itself was tiny, but it was attached by a chain to a piece of two-by-four as big as my arm. We hurried around the corner and let ourselves into the bathroom.

 

Inside, the place was even worse than I’d imagined. The toilet was backed up with wads of paper, and the bowl was full to the brim with yellow water and God knows what else. The tiled floor was cracked and dotted with puddles of pee and dark smears of who knows what. Around the bare flickering lightbulb, flies swarmed and swirled. The mirror was cracked and filthy, but it made no difference to us: tonight, this was our dressing room. Using the tiny sink as a dressing table, we began our transformation.

 

“This place is really gross!” Marie shuddered, pulling out her red-glitter-covered jeans and her makeup case.

 

I said, “Uh-huh,” trying not to breathe through my nose.

 

We stripped down to our underwear, careful not to touch any of the disgusting surfaces in the place, well used to this routine by now. Piece by piece the old Cherie started to disappear. In her place, this new Cherie-thing was appearing, Cherie the glitter queen: fire-engine-red satin pants, a T-shirt with a purple glittery thunderbolt emblazoned across it, and silver five-inch platform space boots. I admired my look in the mirror: I was so bright, so shiny, that for a moment I forgot I was standing in this shitty, gross public restroom. As Marie applied her shocking-pink lipstick, I began the delicate process of gluing a string of rhinestones onto my eyelids with eyelash glue. Everything was borrowed from Mom’s makeup case. When I was done, I looked perfectly bizarre, an alien princess crash-landed in Southern California. It was not just a physical transformation; it was a mental one, too. When I was dressed like this, I finally felt at home in my own skin. I was not just plain old Cherie Currie, sweet little surfer girl from the Valley anymore; I was the Cherie-thing: something wild, untamed, and glamorous. I was my own creation, something monstrous, mysterious, and powerful.

 

When we emerged from the bathroom, the attendant’s eyes nearly popped right out of his head. We dumped the key back on the counter with a smirk. We left him staring, his mouth flapping open, as we ran on unsteady heels back to Paul’s car.

 

“Hot!” he exclaimed as we jumped into the car. “Love the eyes!” Then with a squeal of rubber on asphalt, we were off into the night again.

 

But not for long! At Lankershim Boulevard we came to a dead stop—there was a sea of chrome, stretching off into the distance. The night air was alive with the sound of horns honking and the screams and laughter as an impromptu party started spontaneously taking place in this insane traffic jam. Lights flashed hypnotically, shining up into the night sky with a steady rhythm; people stood up in their convertibles dancing to music that we couldn’t hear. As we crept forward, you could feel the electricity growing in the air like the prelude to a thunderstorm.

 

“There must be a million people coming to this concert!” I breathed in wonder. I had never seen such a mass of humanity before. I could barely believe that I was about to see David Bowie in the flesh. It seemed almost too good to be true.

 

“It’s the last concert in town,” Paul said. “Half these people probably don’t even have tickets. They think they’re going to be able to get some from scalpers. This is chaos . . .”

 

I breathed in, and let the excitement fill all of the empty places inside of me as we pulled into the parking lot. I could not remember ever having felt this excited before—my first rock concert! Tonight was all about David Bowie, my beautiful, wonderful David.

 

“You know what Derek said to me?” Marie said, suddenly breaking the spell. I shot her my dirtiest dirty look and snapped, “I don’t want to know.” Instead, I turned the stereo up, and David Bowie’s voice began to shake the interior of the car, filling me up again with good feelings . . . I can’t quite put it into words what exactly David Bowie meant to me back then. Over the past few years, Bowie had filled all of those empty spaces inside of me, spaces that began to appear, like wormy wood holes in old furniture, since the day my dad upped and left.

 

That day was still a fresh wound. I’d often run it through in my head, wondering if I could have done something, said something, that would have made it end differently.

 

I was twelve years old. I woke up first that morning, chilled to the bone by the air-conditioning, my stomach churning with fear and excitement. Today was a special day . . . today was the day that Dad was coming home!

 

I peered out from under the covers and surveyed the bedroom. Clothes lay in piles on the floor, records covered every available surface. The room was so bad that Mom wouldn’t even come into it anymore. Maybe she was afraid that the mess would eat her alive. Across the room, Marie was still asleep, dead to world. She always sleeps silently, no snorting or sleep-talking, just like a little princess. Everything Marie does is just so. She sleeps daintily, she eats daintily. She’s so perfect. I’m sure that when I sleep I snore, or talk or do something else that is awful and embarrassing. Despite the fact that everyone says that we’re identical, we’re not really . . . Marie’s face is fuller than mine; prettier, too. I wish that my face looked like hers. People get us mixed up all of the time, but I can’t understand how. I feel like the ugly stepsister, the twisted mirror image of the perfect little girl that is my twin.

 

Marie blinked awake and noticed me staring at her. This didn’t faze her anymore; she was well used to waking up to find me looking at her with a weird mix of envy and adoration. She just stared back without saying anything. Then, noticing the air-conditioning, she said, “I feel like a polar bear,” and we both laughed.

 

Mom was in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Outside, the heat was stifling already. We lived in Encino back then, which is to say the Valley. The Valley is always at least ten degrees hotter than the rest of Los Angeles. I looked at Mom and wondered if she was thinking about Dad, too. I wondered what she’d say when he walked through the door. I wondered what she’d say to him when they made up.

 

I got myself a glass of orange juice and sat watching my mother reading the paper. She pulled a face every time she read about something horrendous. It was nine-thirty in the morning, and her platinum hair was already perfectly coiffed, her makeup impeccable. Back then, my mom was the most glamorous person I had ever known. She reminded me of Marilyn Monroe with a little Lucille Ball mixed in.

 

My mom came out to Hollywood from Illinois when she was just eighteen years old to be an actress. With her parents’ permission, she and a girlfriend got a ride to California and rented a tiny one-room apartment in Hollywood with a Murphy bed for thirty-seven bucks a month. She found work as a Burger Shack carhop, bringing trays loaded with burgers, french fries, and chocolate malts to the customers parked in Ford Model A’s and Chryslers parked outside. All the time she was waiting for her big break. My mom was blond, beautiful, and determined: she eventually paid her way through acting school by working nights as a cigarette girl at a Hollywood after-hours club. I remember her telling me that Orson Welles once tipped her ten dollars for a pack of Camels. My mom’s looks and grit eventually landed her movie roles. She was under contract with Republic Pictures and starred alongside the likes of Roy Rogers and the Andrews Sisters. She found that she was particularly adept at playing the ditsy blonde. That was a long time ago. Mom doesn’t act anymore, but every morning she still dresses as if she were auditioning for a role.

 

“When is Dad gonna be here?” I asked.

 

She took a sip of her coffee and sighed. “He didn’t say, really. It could be anytime. You know your father . . .”

 

That is all I could get out of her. Mom hadn’t said much about our dad since they announced that they were separating. The months leading up to the separation were unbearable. Their fights—which we had never been used to—were intense and heartbreaking. I remember watching my father holding my mother’s wrists as they fought on the front porch, in a desperate attempt to stop her from hitting him. And my mother’s sobbing phone calls would echo down the halls. “I found him there! In the hotel . . . with . . . with that floozy!”