The Opposite of Fate (15 page)

I exaggerate in saying we
never
had fun. My parents did allow certain versions of
family
fun, like walking around the campus of Stanford University, a form of entertainment that besides being free served to remind me of a destination and a reward second only to getting into heaven. Both rewards could be attained
only
if I listened carefully to my parents, meaning no boys, no pizza, and of course, no rock ’n’ roll.

A
few months before my fortieth birthday, I found myself suffering from a bad attitude aggravated by chronic neck pain—symptoms common among authors on book tour. In my case, I had been on the road nationally and overseas for the better half of a year. Most people think that when writers go
on tour they’re having loads of glamorous and exciting fun. Those people have good imaginations. As a touring author, I had lost mine.

I was spending the productive years of my life not writing but eating hot dogs at airport chuck wagons and obeying signs to “fasten seat belt while seated.” I was depleting supplies of brain power trying to figure out which city I had awakened in or how to act spontaneous answering the same questions ten times a day for twenty days at a stretch.

Although happily married, I was spending more nights alone than with my husband. I had been sleepless in Seattle, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Boca Raton. In hotel beds, I would obsess over dumb answers I had given that day, over how inarticulate I had sounded, how I was a complete disgrace to American literature. After reviling myself, I would listen through thin walls to what sounded like a woman having her tonsils removed without anesthesia, to a man who was either auditioning for the lead in
Falstaff
or suffering from explosive gastrointestinal problems. To help lull me to sleep, I would recall scientific details—such as the fact that the biggest source of room dust, accounting for something like 99.87 percent, is sloughed-off human skin. I would imagine years and years of skin particles from happy and sad strangers who had slept in this very bed now circulating in the air I breathed.

This was my mental state when I returned from my latest book tour. This was my attitude on November 6, 1991, when I heard the fax machine churning out what was sure to be a request to do yet another author appearance.

It was from Kathi Kamen Goldmark, the media escort who’d taken me to numerous book-related publicity events around the
Bay Area. As I recall, her fax said something to this effect: “Hey, Amy, a bunch of authors and I are putting together a rock-’n’-roll band to play at the ABA in Anaheim. Wanna jam with us? I think you’d have a lot of fun.”

I pondered the fax. Did I look like the kind of writer who had time for a lot of fun? As to singing in public, could there be anything more similar to a public execution? Furthermore, how could I, the author of poignant mother-daughter tales, do something as ludicrous and career-damaging as play in a rock-’n’-roll band in front of thousands of readers at the American Booksellers Association convention? Amend that to a
mediocre
rock-’n’-roll band.

Two minutes later, I faxed Kathi my answer: “What should I wear?”

The very next day, I began exercising my middle-aged body into stamina strength. And soon after, Kathi and I went on a shopping spree at Betsey Johnson, the choice of every respectable fourteen-year-old. We perused the sales racks and tried on half a dozen skintight dresses. There I found it, spandex and sequins, a version of my lost youth, also known as Every Mother’s Worst Nightmare.

The prospect of being a rock-’n’-roll singer presented only one small obstacle: namely, the fact that I couldn’t sing. I am
not
being modest. When I was thirteen, my mother took me to a voice teacher, thinking I could learn to accompany myself Liberace style on the piano. The voice teacher had me sing progressively higher scales: “Do, re, mi, fa—
oops.
” After twenty minutes, he gave his verdict to my mother: “My dear Mrs. Tan, your daughter has no vocal skill whatsoever.”

Suffice it to say, about two months before our first gig in
Anaheim, I woke up one night, drenched in sweat. I called Kathi the next morning. “Kathi, Kathi,” I panted, “I can’t sing at ABA.”

“Oh, no! A conflict came up in your schedule?”

“I mean I
can’t sing.
”

Kathi’s brilliant solution was twofold: I could practice singing into a live mike at a sound studio that belonged to David Phillips, a friend of hers who was reportedly a very sweet guy. Second, I could overcome stage fright by performing at a karaoke bar filled with festive patrons who, Kathi assured me, wouldn’t be able to hear me above the clinking din of cocktail glasses.

At the sound studio, it took me forty minutes before anything resembling even a squeak came out of my mouth. My vocal cords were paralyzed. David, as promised, was a sweet guy—a sweet guy who played in a real band, The Potato Eaters. Plus he was cute. I had been counting on humiliating myself in front of a dweeb.

As my lips moved voicelessly next to the mike, David would cast knowing but worried looks at Kathi before gently coaxing me yet another time: “Okay, that was a good try. We’ll just . . . well, try it again.”

At the karaoke bar, I sang with horrible stiffness, but was comforted to find I wasn’t the only egomaniac foolish enough to think I could sing publicly. The following week, I left for a vacation in Hawaii. For five hours a day, I sat on the beaches of Kona, wearing headphones and singing harmony on “Mammer Jammer” and lead on “Bye Bye, Love.” To an audience of porpoises and turtles frolicking in the waves, I sang my heart out, loud and strong, bouncing my head in rhythm to the background
instrumentals Ridley Pearson had recorded for the benefit of the musically disadvantaged. My husband later told me that when beachcombers came within earshot of me, they retreated with the same haste people employ for avoiding sidewalk fire-and-brimstone preachers.

W
hen I was fourteen, I used to go to the beach on weekends, supposedly to recruit kids for Christ. That was the only way my parents would let me go. By then my hormones were raging to sin. I was no longer content to sing hymns in the church choir as my only excitement. I fantasized shrieking at the top of my lungs while running along the beach—not too quickly, of course—as lanky bad boys chased me, threatening to pick me up and toss me into the ocean. The real boys did not chase me. Nor did they accept my offers to come to a “youth fellowship shindig.”

Every afternoon, while practicing the piano, I mourned that I was not a popular girl. I was not the kind who got invited to after-school garage parties where 45s were played at top volume and 7UP was laced with vodka. I hated myself for being perceived as the “good girl,” unlike the “bad girls,” who ratted their hair, slouched around in their fathers’ white dress shirts, and stole nail polish from Kmart.

That same year, I actually discovered something good about my parents, and that is that they didn’t know a thing about bad words, not the real ones at least. While they forbade my brothers and me to say “gosh,” “darn,” “gee,” and “golly”—those being variations of “God” and “damn”—we could utter “bitch,”
“pissed off,” “boner,” and “hard-on” with impunity. My parents were blissfully ignorant as to what those words meant. My older brother, Peter, had bought a Fugs record, and when my mother asked me what this word “fug” meant, I said it stood for “happy-go-lucky,” and that “Fug you” was an American way to greet someone. Well, it was, in a way.

By using my parents’ naiveté to my advantage, I discovered how to be a popular girl. For one thing, I ran for freshman class secretary, which my parents interpreted as my natural Christian desire to do public service. To increase my very slim chances of winning office, I painted butcher-paper banners with the following campaign slogan: “Amy Tan Has Sec. Appeal.” I already counted on my parents’ not getting the pun, and indeed they didn’t. But my school’s vice-principal did. Just as I had figured, he made a huge stink over this inappropriate campaign slogan and ordered the banners be torn down, which then incited protests of unfair censorship from not only the freshman class but
all
the students. In short order, my name became widely known.

To clinch the election, I made a campaign speech in which I promised to raise money for school dances through the sale of kazoos, which students were not allowed to play on campus. In my speech, I passionately reasoned that there was no rule against the
possession
of kazoos. “Stop censorship,” I said. “A vote for me is a vote for kazoos.”

I’m happy to report that I won the election and kazoos became the ubiquitous symbol of freedom, waved at every basketball and football game. Unfortunately, my newly elected social status did not confer upon me sex appeal. Instead, I became the confidante
to girls who confessed that their lips were bruised from kissing too much the night before, or to boys who wanted to know what to do when girls got mad at them for going too far.

As freshman class secretary, I also had to help organize the dances. I argued persuasively with my mother about the necessity of my going to the dances as well: “Come on! I have to be there to take care of things. What if someone doesn’t pay to get in? That’s like stealing. It’s not like I’m going there to dance or anything.”

Before going to a dance, I used masking tape to shorten my dress and asked my girlfriend Terry to lend me her tube of white lipstick. Neither measure had any effect on the boys. At the dance, I stood near the punchbowl, mortified as Terry, then Janis, then Dottie, then Cindy were asked to dance. The flick of a rotating mirrored ball beat into my brain with hypnotic force:
Nah-nah . . . nah-nah . . .

At the end of each dance, Terry did her best to console me: “Did you see that creep who asked me to dance? The one with the great big zit at the end of his chin—I was freaked he’d drip it all over my shoulder. And then I could feel his boner pressing into my hip. God! I’d rather die a virgin. . . .”

Over time, at other parties, a few boys asked me to dance. You know the ones I’m talking about: guys who belonged to the United Nations Club, whose attempts at shaving left them with bleeding pimples, who always raised their hands in class, smug that they knew the answers. In other words, they were dorks like me, and through natural selection we, the dregs of the school, had found one another.

More often, I stood alone, unasked. Well, a girl can go to the
bathroom only so many times before she has to concoct another reason why she’s not dancing or otherwise thoroughly occupied. I pretended to be fascinated with the band, which was always a bad version of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, or The Lovin’ Spoonful, and sometimes all three rolled into one. I fantasized that the lead singer would finally spot me and beckon me with his surly lips—“Yeah, you, the Chinese girl with the moon face. Come up here and do primitive movements with me onstage.”

That would show them, all those guys who asked the other girls to dance.

And then reality would set in. That would never happen, not in a million trillion years. The lead singer? Singing to
me
? No way.

I
t’s now May 1993, on a dark road somewhere between Northampton and Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m in a van with Barbara Kingsolver, Ridley Pearson, Tad Bartimus, and Al Kooper. We’re sprawled out over rows of bench seating. Bob Daitz, our road manager, is at the wheel. It’s probably close to one in the morning, and we’ve just finished performing to a thousand screaming middle-agers. We should be exhausted. But instead, we’re pumped full of adrenaline, steaming up the windows. Bob turns the air-conditioning on full-blast to reduce the body-odor factor.

Al slips a tape into the deck. The music is a compilation of his favorite oldies, including “Short Shorts” from his days with The Royal Teens. The song baits us: “Who wears short shorts?” Barbara, Tad, and I answer back: “We wear short shorts!” Forget
napping on the way back to the hotel. Our teenage hormones are surging now.

Another song comes on and Al turns up the volume. I don’t know the lyrics, but magic and miracles are floating in the air, and my voice somehow finds the harmony. A third above lead, a third below—I can switch back and forth effortlessly. Or perhaps I can’t do either, but I’m so elated I
believe
I can sing with the best of them.
Ooh-wah, ooh-wah.
I could do backup for Carole King. Another song comes on. Al is singing lead and clapping.
Ooh-wah, ooh, wah.
I could do backup for Aretha Franklin. As if on cue, all of us place our feet on the ceiling of the van and begin to dance. Hot damn, I could be an Ikette. I’m dancing. I’m dancing to the moon. I’m bebopping the night away. I’m putting dirty footprints on the ceiling of a rental van. At last, finally, I’m doing primitive movements with the lead singer.

Come to think of it, on a couple of songs, I
was
the lead singer.

I
t was Al who suggested I sing lead on “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” When I first saw my name written on the song list next to the title of this Nancy Sinatra classic, I was filled with the same sort of outrage I felt seeing my high school yearbook picture defaced with a mustache.

I called Kathi. “Tell Al to forget it. Of all the songs in the world, I hate that one the most. It’s a joke. I wouldn’t sing it in a million years.”

Kathi, ever so diplomatic, broke things to me gently: “
Actually, I think this could be a great song for you. You know how you always worry about whether you can really sing? Well, with ‘Boots,’ you don’t need a great voice, just a lot of attitude.”

“Attitude?”

“Yeah—you know, a bad-girl attitude. You could look cheap and sexy. You could smoke cigarettes and have guys fall all over you. Then again, you could do ‘Bye Bye, Love.’ That’s always cute.”

For my “Boots” outfit, I combed through a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue and found a pair of zip-up patent-leather booties that would transform an ordinary pair of black business pumps into awesome, man-stomping thigh-high intimidators. At a local S&M shop, I bought a biker’s cap and a leather dog leash, as well as studded cuffs, collar, and belt. Like any girl vying to be prom queen, I fretted over which of three outfits I should wear. The see-through leopard leotard? The tawdry fishnet lace? Or how about the classically simple little black bustier?