Tango (3 page)

By the time fourth grade rolled around, I had become fairly comfortable with most of the boys in my class simply because I was familiar with
them, as it was a small school. Nonetheless, I didn't play or socialize with them. I'd had several girlfriends, and as a matter of fact I had “married” Patty Chase in second grade. Her sister performed the ceremony in her parents' house, and I was devastated when I was told we weren't going to be allowed to live together. Obviously, when no one took our marriage seriously, I became disillusioned. Well, they had their chance . . . Anyway, I had several girlfriends in the fourth grade, including Kim Bell who wore white go-go boots to school. I was very happy because I got to sit next to her and stroke her go-go boots, which to me had the texture of marshmallow fluff, one of my favorite treats. Kim didn't seem to mind me stroking her go-go boots one bit, and my teacher didn't stop me because I think she was relieved that I was showing interest in a girl instead of trying to be one.

 

 

IN 1964, MY PARENTS BOUGHT A THREE-BEDROOM ranch house in a development at the edge of town. Our street was paved, but the rest of the
freshly plowed area consisted of red clay. The Kendalls, our neighbors to the rear, had a son named Greg who was a bit younger than me, and I quickly became friends with him. In their front yard they had a great big boulder that we used to play on, until someone fell and scraped their knee and the boulder had to be removed. That's how it was then. They tried to keep us from climbing trees in case we fell out. They removed boulders so no one would skin their knees. I'm surprised they didn't put cotton bunting on the sidewalk in case someone fell. It was all about the safety of the children.

Next to the Kendalls, a new house was being built. Eventually, a couple moved in with their daughter, Eva. They had an aboveground pool, which was very exotic, and they were almost, but not quite, hippies. The Brinings were young and cool and much hipper than anyone else in the neighborhood. Eva became one of our best friends. Greg, Eva, and I played together every day. But one day when we knocked on her door, her father said that Eva wasn't living there anymore. Our parents told us that she wouldn't be
coming back because her parents were getting a divorce. This was the first time anyone we knew had parents who got divorced, and it was sad for us because our friend just disappeared.

 

 

THE BRININGS' HOUSE WAS SOLD TO AN AFRICAN American man named Mr. White. Mr. White was a bachelor and the first African American man to move into our neighborhood. We were very excited and wanted to welcome our new neighbor. We didn't know how to make a pie and our mothers were busy so we decided that since we had just gotten a new set of crayons, and since he was a “colored” man, Greg and I would write him a poem using all of our new colors:
Red is nice, we like red. Green is nice, we like green
. . . making our way through all of the colors . . .
we like purple, blue
. . .
we LOVE White!
Then we got to black.
Black is ugly, we hate black
.

Very excited and proud of our poem, we knocked on Mr. White's door, smiling from ear to ear, and handed it to him. We said, “Welcome to our neighborhood, Mr. White!” He looked at
the card. We were sure he would be delighted by our neighborliness but instead he looked very shocked and asked, “Do your parents know you wrote this?”

“No. We did it on our own, Mr. White. We would have baked a pie but we don't know how.”

He didn't seem at all pleased with our gift, which was very confusing to us. We went home and told our parents Mr. White wasn't very friendly. Soon, they received a phone call from Mr. White and we got into big trouble. We hadn't realized Mr. White was black, we thought he was colored, which is why we wrote him a poem about all the colors we liked. Most kids prefer red or green to black, but we didn't realize that saying we hated black would be an insult to Mr. White. Our parents brought us over to his house and, in tears, we apologized. “We're so sorry Mr. White. We didn't know you were black.”

He was very nice to us from then on, although he moved out a few years later. In all honesty we were glad he moved out because we wanted someone fun like Eva to move back in there. And Mr. White didn't let us swim in his pool.

FINALLY, A NEW FAMILY MOVED IN. THE HUNTERS. They had two boys, one of whom was my age, named Michael, and his older brother, named Bobby. On Michael's first day of school I discovered he was in my class at Pangborn and our teacher Mrs. Schmid, clearly with an agenda, decided I should show Michael around since he was my new neighbor. I was very interested in knowing what Michael was like but I was also suspicious of the motives of adults, and I quickly realized this was her attempt to find me a boy friend.

I thought, I'll give this Michael boy a chance. He talked about how he had lived in a very nice neighborhood in New Jersey, much nicer than the one we lived in, and told me that his father's company had provided all the glass for the new United Nations building. I thought to myself, “This boy's full of crap, and I have to take him down a notch.” He was very full of himself and clearly was seeking to impress. I approached relations with most boys with an air of studied disdain, but Michael Hunter had my hackles up immediately. I was unaware that the UN building
had been erected in 1952 but I knew well enough not to believe him. I didn't come straight out and call him a liar, but he could tell that I knew he was full of it.

One thing I was pretty sure I knew how to do was to be condescending to men and boys. Having three teenage cousins during the era of women's lib had taught me quite a bit about sarcasm and just how far a good roll of the eyes could take you. These were the times when you couldn't turn on the TV without a news report making reference to the women's movement,
Roe v. Wade
, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. Gloria Steinem was on with her frosted hair and wire-frame glasses, and Bea Arthur was starring in a sitcom called
Maude
in which her famous line was “God'll get you for that, Walter,” which not only put her husband Walter in his place, but God in hers. My greatest role model on television was Cher.
The Sonny and Cher Show
always had a segment where Cher would one-up Sunny with her put-downs.

Any chance I got to show my finely honed skills at bitchiness was okay by me. I didn't
really think of it as being mean, I thought of it as having fun. Michael Hunter might have thought otherwise. I can't remember what I said to him that first day in school, but I know I made him feel like shit. By the end of the day, I had definitely not made a new friend. Nonetheless, I had begun one of the most intense relationships of my early years.

In many ways, Michael was everything that I was not. Brash, confident, athletic, and charming in a guileless, almost needy, sort of way. He had brown hair, which got much lighter in the summer, brown eyes, thick eyebrows for a kid, and one unusual feature that we all noticed immediately: the last section of his index finger had been reattached. I forget how he lost his finger, and even if he told me it was probably a lie. I always said his mouth ran so fast he probably bit it off himself.

 

 

AT THE TIME MICHAEL MOVED INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD I was extremely active in the Cub Scouts of America. It was one of the only activities that
my parents got me involved in that I enjoyed. I liked dressing up in the uniform, and there were lots of activities that I thought were fun: hiking, camping, and yearly Pinewood Derby races. My father and I would work together to make my Pinewood Derby car. I remember the first year I wanted my car to look like a Corvette Stingray and we carved the aerodynamic model car out of a kit. I also got to choose the color, which was a kind of metallic green that I had seen on Liza Minnelli's fingernails when I watched a little part of
Cabaret
on TV one night. I was sent to bed shortly after the movie began, but not before I had time to clock those nails.

I never really have thought of myself as a competitive person, but with that first Pinewood Derby race I realized I liked winning. The car was allowed a certain weight, and in order to achieve that weight my father carved a ridge inside the car and melted lead into the front before gluing it back together. My car took the lead immediately and I won the race and was presented with a huge trophy, which still hangs from the ceiling in my parents' basement. The next year, when I
was trying to come up with an idea for what I wanted my car to look like, I took my inspiration from a Warner Brothers cartoon and we carved it to look like one of Bugs Bunny's carrots.

My best friend at the time was a boy named Jay Floyd, who lived down the street. I made his mother very nervous. She was a kindergarten teacher at our school and I had always been a very outspoken, some might even say sassy, child. As I mentioned earlier, this was the era of women's lib, and I always liked seeing news reports of feminists on TV marching for women's rights, burning their bras, carrying signs, and asserting that both genders were equal. Somehow, in my mind, I'd come up with the theory that if men and women were equal, it wouldn't matter if I was a man or a woman. I made a sign that read
Kids Lib!
and started carrying it around the neighborhood. If men and women were equal, then kids should be equal too. My friend's mother didn't agree with my philosophy at all. She said children weren't supposed to be liberated, they were supposed to listen to
their parents, and she sent me home and told me never to come over with that sign again.

Jay used to take me into his father's workroom where I saw lots of great big pictures of his mother that his father, evidently an amateur photographer, had taken. She was in lingerie posed seductively in front of the fireplace. Ordinarily, this would have seemed like a very exciting, glamorous thing because I loved looking at the photos in the lingerie section of the Sears catalog. They were the only pictures I could find of women posing in gowns like the ones I saw on TV. I used to sit and draw gowns, imagining how one day when I got older and my boobs came in, I would design my own. But Janice Floyd looked nothing like Cher, believe me, so I thought the pictures were creepy. Jay had two older brothers who played rock-and-roll music. One of them worked at McDonald's, which made him very cool in my eyes because he would bring Happy Meals home. Sometimes I would get to stay and eat McDonald's at their house. Unfortunately for Jay, his father was rarely home, so he didn't
have much help when it came to making his Pinewood Derby car. The second year I competed in the derby race, Jay's mother was one of the judges. As the race began I was very confident. Because I had won the year before and because the carrot shape of my latest car was even more aerodynamic than the last year's, I was certain that I would be victorious again. I was rooting for Jay because he was my best friend, but obviously I wanted to win. Before the race was even half over, two wheels fell off of Jay's car. My car, my carrot, Bugs Bunny's carrot, wasn't quite as aerodynamic as I had hoped so it didn't shoot out of the gate quite as quickly as my green Corvette Stingray from the year before.

It was a tight race, a very tight race, practically a photo finish. Nonetheless I was sure I had won, but someone else was declared the winner. To this day I swear I heard Janice Floyd whisper into the ear of the other judges, “He won last year; I think we should give it to . . .” and with that my hopes of victory were dashed. I took it personally. Even then, I knew that for
people like Janice Floyd, I was a menace to the status quo with my signs, my opinions, and my forbidden knowledge of her lingerie model past. And I couldn't help but feel that she was taking out on me her dissatisfaction with the fact that her husband wasn't there to help her son build a winning car.

 

 

I ADMIRED JAY BECAUSE HE WAS SMART, A VERY good piano player, and because he liked to roller skate. He was also the first kid I ever knew who wore glasses.

I wanted to wear glasses because Sandy Duncan, my favorite TV star at the time, wore glasses. Tragically, Sandy Duncan had to leave her number one TV show
Funny Face
on CBS on Saturday nights because she had a brain tumor and had a glass eye put in. I read about her in the movie magazines and I admired her courage and the strength it took to recover from a life-threatening brain operation. After she got out of the hospital there were lots of pictures of
her wearing very chic oversize glasses. I wanted glasses too. I wanted to be just like Sandy Duncan and survive a brain tumor so that everyone would know what I was made of.

I read in
Photoplay Magazine
that her hair was auburn, so I took all the money from my piggy bank and bought some auburn hair dye. I was terribly upset when my mother wouldn't let me color my hair. I didn't know why you couldn't dye your hair at seven years old. I thought I would look very good with auburn hair and glasses. But instead of helping me dye my hair, my mother confiscated my color and sent me to my room.

But that didn't stop me from choosing Sandy Duncan as the figure in history whom I would most like to be, at a Cub Scout meeting. The other boys chose to be people like Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, General Robert E. Lee, or John Wayne, but I chose to be Sandy Duncan, a one-eyed pixie who had her own TV show and who was on a TV commercial where she sat in the middle of a wheat field pluckily eating crackers out of a cardboard box!

BY THE TIME MICHAEL HUNTER HAD MOVED INTO the neighborhood I had graduated from being a Cub Scout into a Webelo, which was sort of an older version of a Cub Scout, but not yet a Boy Scout. My mother was the den mother. For some reason, my mother and I did not get along at those Webelo meetings. I don't know if she picked on me excessively or if the way I behaved made it clear to her that I was not like the other boys, but it was not fun. Whatever the reason, I felt like she treated me differently than she did when we were alone and I didn't like it. She was very critical of me and I hadn't experienced that constant criticism from other adults. So what used to be fun for me became a sort of torture.