Revenge of the Cootie Girls (10 page)

All my friends, the ones I hung with more or less regularly, were either younger than me or older than me, and so there were a lot of areas where we didn't quite jibe. My younger friends had different expectations, different cultural milestones, a slightly different collective point of view, as did my older friends.

My friends my own age and my college girlfriends, alas, those same girls who impressed me with their cheerful amorality when I first moved to New York, were now married, homeowning, bridge- and golf-playing mothers, in the Junior League, or—no shit—the DAR. It was like they were growing older in a parallel universe. Maybe, in some other parallel universe, I too had a husband and a home and kids.

But in this universe, they were lost to me in many subtle ways, pulled away by their own busy lives. Julie, I hoped, could be found again. Just as Phil and Helen found some common history only they understood, Julie and I had that too. A lot of it.

We picked up the parade at Sixth and 18th, a grand stretch of old dry-goods stores known as Ladies' Mile. Back at the turn of the century, Ladies' Mile was where gentlemen dropped their wives while they headed a few blocks over to the Tenderloin to gamble and gambol with women who were not considered “ladies.” Now it's the closest thing we have in Manhattan to a mall, with one chain store after another from 23rd Street to 16th, where the “mall” ends at the New York Foundling Hospital.

Behind the blue police barricades lining the parade route, the people were ten deep. As my luck would have it, all the tall people were near the front. We could hardly move, and all I could see were the tops of some floats.

“Come on,” Tamayo said, taking my hand and leading me through the crunch to the front of the barricades. She ducked under the barricade when the nearby cop was turned away, and I followed. We walked against the parade stream, through a group of people dressed as various New York buildings in a walking skyline. Two guys in a cow costume came past us, followed by a man in a white coat holding a big butterfly net.

“Mad cow, get it?” Tamayo hollered back at me.

We skirted around the gay high-school marching band, led by what looked in this light like a forty-year-old male majorette in white go-go boots and red spangled hot pants. Probably the math teacher. But he did twirl a good baton.

A mermaid in a glass aquarium drifted by. Two giant red high-heeled shoes, about six feet tall, clomped past. A float bearing a bunch of muscle men approached, blasting out the Bangles' song “Walk Like an Egyptian.” Tamayo danced alongside. One of the muscle men reached down and hoisted her onto the float, which bore the legend, in gold, silver, and green tinsel, “The 52 Sons of Ramses.”

“Robin, I'll catch up with you laterrr …” Tamayo called, waving, disappearing. That's Tamayo, always getting swept up in parades, going where the breeze blows her, and somehow making out more than just okay. Not long ago, things hadn't been going so well for Tamayo. A trip back to Japan resulted in her being publicly denounced in the Japanese Diet because of some rude jokes she made about Japanese Diet members, sumo wrestlers, and their assorted sexual habits. Right after that, she lost a network-development deal that was given to a “nicer” Japanese girl comic, Noriko Mori. Tamayo got depressed, but even when she was depressed, she managed to laugh. She didn't get the blues like other people. If I had to ascribe a color to Tamayo's melancholy, it would be lavender.

Oh well, I thought as she faded into a dot in the distance, I can make better time without her for now.

I got out of the parade on 13th Street, and as soon as I did I realized my phone was ringing in my purse.

“Hello?” I said, sticking a finger in my free ear to block out the parade noise behind me.

“I can't hear you!” I shouted. “Call me back in …”

I was heading down Fifth to Washington Square Park and wouldn't be able to duck into a quiet place until West 3rd Street.

“FIFTEEN MINUTES!” I shouted, and hung up.

It took me almost fifteen minutes just to get through Washington Square, once a graveyard, also a popular place for hanging criminals, and now the heart of NYU and Greenwich Village. The square was packed with folks in costume, cops, and people hawking things, from hot dogs to marijuana. By the statue of Garibaldi, I had to squeeze past a guy who was holding a big stick full of Ariel the Little Mermaid dolls. I wondered if you could kill someone with a stick full of mermaid dolls.

“Oh, Joey!” one young girl with a distinctly New York accent shrilled above the din. “Stop, Joey! You're killin' me.” Near the bocce court, a boy with a big ring through his nose was nose-kissing a laughing girl with pierced eyebrows, which looked to me like an ugly accident waiting to happen.

What will kids do next? I thought. I hear some get branded—you know, with hot irons. Still, these two looked kind of sweet and hormonal, in the full grip of The Madness. What brought them together, I wondered, and what would tear them apart? Kids. So cynical, this younger generation, and yet they still fall in love.

On West 3rd, I found a Korean greengrocer, a bright circle of light on the corner, with the typical alfresco fruit display, oranges, limes, apples, melons—bright colors gleaming in the darkness, like Aladdin's cave of jewels. I popped in and got an Evian, very efficiently snatching it out of the cooler and plopping it down with two bucks on the counter. The greengrocer ignored me. He was looking out the door at a parked car and a man who was studying the front tire closely.

“Wait for it,” he whispered to me.

The man bent over and tried to grab something stuck halfway under the tire. After several tries, he stomped off cursing.

The grocer burst into laughter.

“It's a ten-dollar bill. I put it there,” he said to me, and winked. He laughed some more and took my money.

What people do to amuse themselves. I swear to God, everyone in this city is nuts.

The Backslash was on Bleecker, just down from where it meets MacDougal, aka Coffeehouse Junction because there is a coffeehouse on every corner of this intersection. It was coming back to me. We had come to this place after the disco with George and Billy, when it was Cafe Buñuel. Julie had read about it in one of the magazines, or seen it in the background of a fashion layout or something. It was an old-time, beatniky Greenwich Village place where you imagined a bunch of goateed guys in berets and black turtlenecks discussing The Bomb and Burroughs with pale girls in black capri pants. When Julie and I went there in 1979, it was bereft of berets, but something of that atmosphere still lingered.

Now it was an Internet café, essentially a coffeehouse with computers. Patrons get a java and sit down in front of a computer screen to go online, interacting not with each other, but with folks in cyberspace. It was weird, quiet, just the hum of computers, the click of mice, and the squoosh of the cappuccino machine. Very spooky and antisocial.

After getting me a coffee and asking me the skill-testing question—“Who was Hummer High's Athlete of the Year in 1975?”—the languid young man behind the ornate antique cash register handed me an envelope. This time, the skill-testing question wasn't about me, not directly. The answer was: Doug Gribetz. Kathy wouldn't know this answer.

“Someone else was in asking about the envelope,” the young man said.

“Who?”

“A woman in a green wig and Groucho glasses, but she couldn't answer the question,” he said.

“Hmmm. Thanks,” I said, and took my coffee to a little round marble table.

Inside the envelope, there was another cootie catcher, a photo, and half a dollar bill. The typed note inside the cootie catcher said, “Wait for contact.” That was it.

The half dollar bill had French handwriting on it. George had spoken to me in French again here, and at that point, to cover my ass, I'd told him that I read French better than I spoke it, though I did neither. He wrote something on a dollar bill and handed it to me.

“What does it say?” Billy had asked.

“May all your dreams come true,” George had said. “It's good luck.”

After nodding stupidly, as if I knew what he'd written, I took the dollar and put it in my purse. George said something else to me in French, and when I didn't answer, he winked again, and started talking in English. The thing about the dollar bill was, later that night, when we got back to the hotel, I ripped it in half and gave half to Julie so we could each have some of the good luck contained therein. The plan was, we would tape the dollar together the next time we came to New York and spend it on something for both of us. Somehow, we believed this would activate the good luck and make our wishes come true.

Now I had a little French under my belt, and I could read the partial sentence on this half-dollar.

“Il essaie …” it said. He is trying.

How strange. I wondered what the second half of the dollar bill said. I had it tucked away somewhere.

The photo, which showed Julie with George in front of the old Cafe Buñuel, stopped me cold. I looked more closely at it. You know how sometimes you see a movie you first saw a long time ago, and you recognize a now famous actor in it? When you watched it the first time, he or she was unknown, and so he or she didn't really register with you. The supporting or minor character played by the now famous person appears larger, and the movie takes on a whole different dimension.

Well, that's how I felt when I looked at the photo. I recognized George from somewhere other than that night, somewhere since. George was smiling broadly for the camera, his arm around Julie.

The photo was of poor quality, but as I remembered it, both George and Billy were good-looking in a swarthy kind of way, George a bit taller with distinctive flaring nostrils, Billy a bit plumper with a piggy nose. I couldn't be sure. There were no pictures of Billy, and I couldn't for the life of me fix his face in my mind.

A couple of years after that trip, when I was older and wiser, etc., I figured that Billy was camera-shy because he was probably married. He didn't wear a ring, but lots of men didn't, and don't, even today.

Now I wondered if Billy wasn't secretly gay. Though he didn't look gay—he was macho to the nth—a lot of gay guys I know don't look or act “gay,” and some latent gays overcompensate with hypermasculinity. Billy stuck to George like glue, and was more interested in watching him on the dance floor than watching me, and they went to the men's room together a few times. Wow. I'd never thought about it before, but now I figured either they were doing coke in the john, or Billy was trying to cop an ogle at the urinals or something.

Come to think of it, George must have picked up on that weird vibe from Billy too, I thought. At Cafe Buñuel, he had whispered something in Julie's ear before he went to the men's room, and when Billy tried to get up, Julie pulled him down, put her arm through his, and said, “Don't desert us!” We held him there, laughing. We thought it was a big game.

Of course, I couldn't tell then that either or both of them were gay. I didn't know the Village People were gay stereotypes until I had been living in New York for about six months and one of my college friends told me, that's how naïve I was.

Wait for contact, said the typed “clue.” Contact would be helpful, since I hadn't a clue where to go next. I remembered a lot of things we did on that trip, but I didn't remember exactly when we did them. Time and geography blend together after the passage of years. Even my ex, Burke, and his fiancée, Gwen, after knowing each other just under a year, confused their memories of shared events. At dinner in L.A., they told a story about their European vacation and had to keep referring to each other during their joint storytelling—“What day did we get stuck behind the long line of turnip trucks?” “In Slovakia, after we took that wrong turn?” “Yeah.” “Monday, Tuesday, the same day we lost the muffler on the Skoda.” “No no, we lost the muffler in Prague.…”

Another reason I didn't remember that evening as clearly as I should, aside from the passage of time and all the wine spritzers, was that I was so self-conscious, so focused on not giving myself away in the face of all our big old lies, that I didn't pay attention to a lot of other stuff going on.

Where the hell did we go next? I remembered Julie and George whooping it up on Bleecker Street and Julie asserting at the top of her lungs that she wasn't tired. “I'll sleep when I'm dead,” she said, her motto du jour. This was, after all, the city that never sleeps, and we were young. George put his arm around Julie and they giggled, while the morose Billy and I walked behind them in silence. Shortly after, as I recalled, some friends of George and Billy's arrived and Billy left with them, while George, Julie, and I continued on.

Next … next. I wracked my brain. Was it the … the Staten Island Ferry? Yeah, we'd taken the ferry for the ride past the Statue of Liberty at 3
A.M.
There were hardly any people aboard, and we drank coffee out of paper cups with one of the ferry engineers, who showed us pictures from his last vacation at a nudist colony.

No, that was the night I went out with Ricardo, a disco promoter I met in the hotel lobby, and Julie went out alone with George. Ricardo was back in his hometown for the big disco convention. Though Julie was anxious about him—“He's Puerto Rican or black or something, you don't even know him”—I took up his offer to go out because he'd made me laugh in the lobby and seemed like a nice guy … and I was sick of hanging around with Julie and George, who only had eyes for each other. Ricardo took me to eat at a Brooklyn diner called the Blue Bird Diner, then we went back to Manhattan to a disco in Spanish Harlem. I was the whitest person there, which was strange for me, coming from a pigmentless part of the nation, but nobody made it a problem for me, even though I was with a dark-skinned man.
Au contraire
. Everyone was really friendly. Anyway, we ended the night on the Staten Island Ferry. That was my third or fourth night in New York.