Tina Turner

The nice thing about being sick with a sore throat is that when I sing I sound like Ruth Pointer of The Pointer Sisters.  My voice doesn’t naturally go that low, nor does it have any kind of shading.  It just sort of sits in the middle somewhere, beige and boring.  So I try to sing as much as I can when a sore throat sets in.  It’s worth the pain.  

I was in the car with my father in early 1984 when “Automatic” first came on the radio.  It’s one of the few songs on which Ruth, with her deep, guttural voice, sings lead.  “That’s The Pointer Sisters?” my father said.  “I thought it was a man.”  I had the same reaction when I first heard Tina Turner.  I was thirteen years old and completely unaware of her troubled past when she released her “Private Dancer” album in 1984.  They called it a comeback, but from what I had no idea.  The only thing I knew about Tina Turner was that my father, apparently, had once said he thought she was attractive, and my mother used this as a reason to question his judgment.  About anything.  “Dad thinks I should buy this one,” I’d say about something and my mother would say: “Yeah, well, your father thinks Tina Turner is attractive.”  

When I first saw Tina on TV in 1984, I was fascinated.  That hair, her mouth, that hoarse, emotional voice.  I couldn’t believe this was an actual person.  At first glance she was like a train wreck, and as they say about such things, you can’t look away, and the more I looked the more I noticed.  Tina Turner was one one of the most interesting people I’d ever seen, a complete character, unquestionably unique and entirely worth imitating.     

November 25, 1984

1.  Better Be Good to Me, Tina Turner

2.  Cool It Now, New Edition

3.  You’re the Inspiration, Chicago

4.  Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, Wham!

5.  I Just Called to Say I Love You, Stevie Wonder

6.  I Feel For You, Chaka Khan

7.  Hello Again, The Cars

8.  All Through the Night, Cyndi Lauper

9.  The War Song, Culture Club

10. We Belong, Pat Benatar

Once a year my high school would hold an assembly during school hours for those in a band.  A concert.  The bands would play on stage in the gymnasium and the rest of us would sit and watch, whether we wanted to or not.  One band would play a few songs then clear the way for the next.  To keep the crowd entertained between setups, someone had the idea to hold a lip-sync contest.  Except it wasn’t a contest; it just was.  People got up, lip-synced, then left, never to be heard from again.  

The first year this happened I was a sophomore.  I watched the lip-syncing and thought to myself:  Amateurs.  Where’s the choreography?  The attention to detail?  Where’s the surprise?  The following year, Janelle Scarcelli, a senior, was in charge of the tryouts and carried around a sign-up sheet, so I stopped her in the hallway between classes one day and told her to add my name to the list.  “What song?” she said as she finished writing the wood of Southwood.  “Better Be Good to Me,” I said.  “Tina Turner.”  

I’d already had the choreography all worked out, beginning with my back to the audience then turning for the slow reveal.  In a perfect world I would rise from beneath the stage on a hydraulic lift.  I would have dry ice and pyrotechnics at just the right moment.  At the very least I would have a spotlight.  But we were a Catholic school with limited funds, so were lucky to have a curtain.  It was old and faded and patched in places, the kind of thing Dolly Parton would write a song about.  I knew that to rise above it all I had to pull out all the stops as Tina Turner.    

As I talked about my plans with one of my teachers, she said nothing for the longest time then finally, quietly, said:  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”  She thought people would say I was gay.  And? I thought.  I didn’t see the problem.  For all I knew people already said it.  She rattled off a list of names, boys from the senior class, who she was certain would harass me.  “Don’t you care?” she asked, marveling at my stupidity.  It’s not that I didn’t care. Who wants to be harassed?  It’s that the thought of caring never entered my mind.  In the first place, I was never picked on in school, never harassed, and nobody ever bothered me, and in the second, I certainly didn’t think that getting up on stage and doing a spot-on imitation of Tina Turner singing “Better Be Good To Me,” of all songs, was going to turn the tide against me.  Honestly my only concern was finding an affordable pair of fishnet stockings. 

I had spent years in front of the mirror studying every nuance of Tina’s mouth.  Every twitch, every curl, every syllable she formed.  I knew the position of her arms, the movement of her legs, the way she tilted her head and swept the hair from her face.  The thought of caring never entered my mind because I was completely confident that when I got done with that stage people would be too stunned to even consider harassing me.  

“Ian, could I see you in my office a minute?”  The principal was leveling her eyes at me from just over the rim of her glasses.  Miss Moira A. O’Day was a former nun with short white hair and a thin, blunt voice.  I followed her into the office, and she gestured toward a chair.  She was wearing a shapeless tan skirt with a matching blazer over a white silk blouse with a bow at the top.  As I took my seat she closed the door and sat opposite me.  She had gotten wind of what I was planning to do and told me that under no uncertain terms could she allow me to do it. 

“Why?” I asked.  "Because," she said.  "If you remember, last year, five of the junior boys got up on stage in blackface and wigs.  People were offended.”  I was one of those people.  Not only were they in blackface but their lip-syncing skills were terrible.  I asked Miss O'Day what this had to do with me, and she said: “Well, Tina Turner’s black, isn’t she?”  I assumed the question was rhetorical.  Even when I knew nothing about Tina I knew at least that much.  “Yes,” I said, “but I’m certainly not planning on getting up there in blackface.  And besides, those guys weren’t being anyone specific, they were just being offensive.  I’m being Tina Turner.”  How could she argue with that?  I thought.  She had always seemed like a reasonable woman.  Not the friendliest, and certainly not the most fashionable, but reasonable.  

“Let me ask you a question,” Miss O'Day said.  She settled back into her chair.  We were sitting alongside a table with the chairs turned toward each other and she had one leg crossed over the other at the knee.  Her foot hung in mid-air, encased in a basic black shoe, and I was analyzing the size of the heel, thinking how much larger I’d want mine to be as Tina Turner.  “Why do you want to do this?”  she asked.  It seemed like a strange question because the answer was so obvious to me.  “Because it’s there,” I said.  “It’s there to do.  And I can do it better than anyone.”  She pressed on.  “But why do you want to imitate a woman?” And then I realized.  Tina Turner’s race wasn’t the issue at all.  It was her sex.  And mine.  “I don’t,” I answered.  “I want to imitate Tina Turner.  She just happens to be a woman.”  Miss O’Day wasn’t nearly as impressed by the answer as I was.  

My friends tried to convince me to be someone else.  Someone white.  Samantha Fox was popular at the time with songs called “Naughty Girls Need Love, Too” and “Touch Me,” but in the suggestion they were making the same mistaken assumption Miss O’Day had made, that I simply wanted to put on a wig and dress up like a woman.  But unlike Miss O’Day the possibility of it didn’t scare them.  I knew that no matter what I chose to do, if it wasn’t as a male I’d never be allowed on stage.  And I just didn’t see the point in being what I already was.  Where’s the surprise?  I thought.  

I like to think that somewhere, perhaps in a bar with her friends with a drink in her hand, Miss O’Day is looking over the rim of her glasses at a drag queen, lip-syncing a song, and thinking to herself what was the name of that boy?  The one who wanted to be Tina Turner?  Now that I would pay to see. 

Fall Into the Gap

When I started college I took a part-time job as the activity room monitor on the second floor of my dorm building.  I sat at a desk with a big key chain and took reservations.  One room had a pool table, another had a piano and another was rehearsal space for the actors and singers.  My friends would sit with me around the desk and we’d talk and do homework.  I made four dollars an hour.  They made nothing.  The following year I thought I should upgrade to a job that, at the very least, required me to wear shoes.  I walked seven blocks north to 5th Avenue and 17th Street and filled out an application to work at the Gap.  I lasted three months.  

September 14, 1990

1.  Unchained Melody, The Righteous Brothers

2.  Praying for Time, George Michael

3.  I Don’t Have the Heart, James Ingram

4.  Say a Prayer, Breathe

5.  This is the Right Time, Lisa Stansfield

6.  Something Happened on the Way to Heaven, Phil Collins

7.  Heart of Stone, Taylor Dayne

8.  Dirty Cash, The Adventures of Stevie V.

9.  Can’t Stop Falling Into Love, Cheap Trick

10. Vision of Love, Mariah Carey

At the interview I sat in a chair in a back office opposite an overeager manager who asked me what I would do in various hypothetical situations.  “What if you saw a coworker stealing a pair of socks?” she wanted to know.  My first thought was that I’d probably try to reason with the guy and tell him he’d be better off stealing from Barney’s, but I knew that wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear.  It’s never quite as fun giving people the answer they want to hear when so many other answers are there for the taking.      

In high school we did a production of “Barefoot in the Park” and between shows on a Sunday afternoon some of the cast and crew broke into the school cafeteria and helped themselves to handfuls of ice cream sandwiches.  They even shared the wealth with the rest of us.  The next day, when the lunch ladies opened the freezer and discovered that dessert was missing, we were called into the Dean’s office.  He asked us each in turn if we’d eaten any ice cream, even one bite, and I, truthfully, answered no.  “Why?” he asked.  “Why is it everyone else here had ice cream but not you?”  He wanted me to say something along the lines of: “Because it’s wrong to eat stolen food,” but instead I said, “Because no one offered me any.”  It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear, but it was funnier, and in that moment of tension that’s all that mattered to me.  It also happened to be true.  

Whatever answer I gave to the Gap manager about the stolen socks must have been what she wanted to hear because the next day I was folding pocket T’s.  It was a tedious, boring activity.  No sooner would you have your table folded when a customer would come along and start touching things.  These customers annoyed me.  All customers annoyed me, really.  They were always in my way.  I would have much preferred it if management had just kept the doors locked, let me fold everything and then sent me home.  That’s a job I can get behind, feel good about.  But with people free to roam the store there was never any sense of accomplishment.  

At the Gap a color is never what you think it is.  Red is never red.  It’s “Mercury” or “Rose Parade” or something completely baffling like “Piñata.”  On the first day of work I was given a handbook with all the color names.  I was expected to memorize them.  Like the folding of the shirts, this was a ongoing task because the names kept changing.  Week after week new stock would arrive, and a green shirt called “Moss” on Monday would, by Tuesday morning, be called “Wasabi.”  I refused to participate.  “I need the tan in a medium,” I’d say to the stockroom person.  “Tan?” they’d say, as if I’d invented the word right there on the spot.  “Yes, tan,” I’d say, “light brown.” “Oh, you mean Chickpea.”   

After closing, we were expected to stay for an extra hour or two to restock the shelves and bring out new merchandise.  If there was no new merchandise, we simply rearranged what was already there.  Mannequins were given makeovers, racks were moved, shirts on hangers were folded and put on shelves, and pants on shelves were unfolded and put on hangers.  The objective was to fool customers into thinking there was new stuff when really it was just old stuff in a new place.  Katie, a perky manager with a lisp, was often in charge of this, and her favorite expression was “cool beans.”  Tell her you finished arranging all the jeans by size and she’d say, “cool beans.”  Tell her you’re about to take your break and she’d say, “cool beans.”  Tell her you’re coughing up a lung and won’t be coming into work that day and she’d sigh and tell you how many other people called in sick and then question the severity of your sickness.  Appease her by saying you’ll do what you can to drag yourself down there and she’d say, “cool beans.”  I spoke to her only when absolutely necessary.  

Expressions are bad enough but worse when they involve food.  “He’s a good egg,” people sometimes say.  I don’t like picturing people as eggs.  This could be because I don’t like to eat.  I like to cook, but I don’t like to eat.  It takes too long.  I’m a very slow eater.  My partner says I eat like an eight-year-old girl, but I once saw an eight-year-old girl stuff down an entire lobster roll in half a minute flat along with a side of curly fries and a can of Sprite so I’m not exactly sure what he means.  

Stores often use acronyms to teach their employees about customer service and sales techniques.  Ours was GAP ACT.  G: Greet the customer.  A: Ask them if they need help.  P: Provide them with what they want.  This all seemed like common sense to me and therefore nonsense.  Why wouldn’t I provide them with what they want?  Sure, customers annoyed me, but I knew enough not to show it.  This is pretty much my approach to kids.  I don’t care for them either, but I’m not about to go knock one over.  

A: Add-on.  In other words, Accessorize.  “Do you need any socks today?”  They expected us to say this to people, preferably while P: providing the socks, those that weren’t being hypothetically stolen by barefoot employees I guess.  C: Close the sale and T: thank the customer.  “Thank you for coming to the Gap.”  They expected us to say this, too.  I always shortened it to a simple: “Goodbye.”  In other words, Go.  Get Out. 

When I returned to the city after winter break, the managers called me into the back office and gave me the good news that I was getting a raise.  Fifty cents an hour.  I gave them the good news that I was quitting.  

Years later, I’ve found that certain aspects of the job have stayed with me.  I’m compelled to straighten up in Macy’s, and I’ve often asked myself, Do I need socks?  Even things I resisted took hold.  People often comment on the color of my eyes.  Most say they’re green.  I say they’re Avocado.  

In Washington D.C.

We boarded the train at 7 AM, my father, my sister and I.  It was August 1985.  Four years later I would take this same train to New York City, and my mother would leave the station in tears before I’d even board the train.  “What’s wrong with her?” I’d say to my father, who would have come in from Chicago to accompany me to college.  I’d be too preoccupied with my own fears of leaving home for the first time to consider my mother’s feelings, but on that morning in 1985 I was fairly certain she was feeling glad to be rid of my sister and me for the week.  My father was taking us to Washington D.C.  

August 28, 1985

1.  The Power of Love, Huey Louis and the News

2.  St. Elmo’s Fire, John Parr

3.  We Don’t Need Another Hero, Tina Turner

4.  Freedom, Wham!

5.  The Summer of ‘69, Bryan Adams

6.  Freeway of Love, Aretha Franklin

7.  Dare Me, The Pointer Sisters

8.  Take on Me, A-ha

9.  Life in One Day, Howard Jones

10. Cherish, Kool and the Gang

As the train left the station and we settled into our seats, my father went to the dining car and returned with three cups of coffee.  I had never had coffee and had no interest in the beverage, but I drank it anyway because in the first place I was tired and figured I could use the caffeine and in the second place because it seemed like the adult thing to do.  Gotta start drinking it sometime, I thought.  

Every adult I knew drank coffee, a drink seemingly as essential to their lives as oxygen.  Is there any coffee? they’d say.  Who wants coffee?  Would you like more coffee?  I need coffee.  Morning, noon and night the subject was coffee.  Even in August.  Which never made sense to me.  “How can you drink coffee when it’s so hot outside?” I asked my grandmother one Sunday morning as we sat eating breakfast in the enclosure.  She had remodeled her kitchen and turned the back porch into an actual room with walls and a bay window and took to calling it “the enclosure.”  I continued calling it “the porch.”  She sipped her coffee and shrugged her shoulders.  “Because it tastes good,” she said.  Habit.  Addiction.  Boredom.  Any of those would have been acceptable answers, but taste?  Like beer, cigarettes, and wearing flip-flops in public, coffee was one of those things I never developed a taste for.  The cup I had on the train that morning was the only cup I’ve ever had.  

When we arrived at Grand Central Station in New York City, we had to transfer across town to Penn Station to continue on to D.C.  We had some time to kill, so my father enthusiastically suggested we rent lockers, ditch our bags and explore the streets of Manhattan, but my sister, apparently having seen one too many episodes of Cagney and Lacey chasing down drug dealers and murderers, wanted no part of it.  She planted herself on a bench beside a marble pillar and refused to exit the building.  Had a fire broken out, she most likely would have chosen to stay and die of smoke inhalation rather than step out onto 42nd Street and risk becoming a victim of one of the many crimes sure to be occurring at that very moment.  Manhattan to her is like coffee to me, although where I at least drank a cup she wouldn’t even take a sip.  And still won’t.  

We covered all the main attractions during our stay in D.C.  The Capitol, The White House, the Watergate Hotel.  Inside the Smithsonian we saw Fonzie’s leather jacket and Archie Bunker’s chair, and from the steps of Lincoln Memorial we took pictures of the Washington Monument reflected in The Pool.  “We should come back at night,” I said, “when it’s all lit up.”  I had seen a postcard of the Lincoln Memorial taken at night and it looked like quite the thing.  Sensing enthusiasm, my father agreed and later that day, when we were in our hotel room and darkness fell, he stood up and said, “Okay, let’s go.”  “Go where?”  I said.  “To the Lincoln Memorial. I thought you wanted to see it lit up.”  I was surprised he had remembered and hated to let him down but the truth was the moment had passed.  In the first place I was tired and in the second place “The Muppets Take Manhattan” was on HBO, a channel we didn’t have at home, and in the days before DVR, YouTube and Netflix, before even VCRs were as ubiquitous as blenders, opportunities to see a favorite movie were limited and unknown, so when it aired on TV you watched it, American landmarks be damned.

My sister and I, leaning against the Lincoln Memorial.

With my father, disappointment always arrives with a quiet sigh.  So quiet his mouth often never even opens.  The sigh escapes through his nose as a stream of air, followed by silence.  A casual observer might mistake this for breathing, but those familiar with the event know it as much more.  Between the two of us, my sister was usually the cause of this sigh, but in this case, that night in the hotel room, it was me, which surely pleased my sister.  Surely, the words I’m glad it’s him and not me this time ran through her head.  In Washington D.C. my father could do only as much as my sister and I wanted, which, on that night at least, was watching Miss Piggy get mugged in the middle of Central Park.  Had I looked over at my sister I’m sure I would have seen her nodding her head knowingly.  You see? she’d be saying.  I was right to stay inside.   

My One and Only

“Good morning, St. Mary’s,” my grandmother would say as she answered the phone, and I, on the other end, would say “Hi, Marge.”   There’d be a pause and then recognition would set in and her voice would light up.  “Oh, it’s you!”  

I liked calling my grandmother by her first name because I liked imitating people.  “Oh hi, Marge,” her friends would say upon bumping into her at Tops Friendly Markets or spotting her at the cemetery, across the tombstones, watering geraniums.  These were usually women around her age, with hairdos and brooches, and they talked casually and comfortably, the way  people do when they’ve spent their entire lives in the same town.  “Oh hi, Marge.”  Some people called her Marjorie, but I liked the bluntness of the single syllable.  Marge.  It seemed like a fun word to say, so I took to using it with her at every opportunity.  On the phone, at the back door, upon entering a room.  “Oh hi, Marge.”  

Pretending to be a sixty-three-year-old woman was, to me, infinitely more interesting than being an actual fourteen-year-old boy.    

July 11, 1985

1.   Walking on Sunshine, Katrina and the Waves

2.   The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough, Cyndi Lauper

3.   Crazy in the Night, Kim Carnes

4.   Glory Days, Bruce Springsteen

5.   Heaven, Bryan Adams

6.   The Power of Love, Huey Lewis and the News

7.   We Don’t Need Another Hero, Tina Turner

8.   Just As I Am, Air Supply

9.   St. Elmo’s Fire, John Parr

10. Cannonball, Supertramp     

My grandmother was the secretary at St. Mary’s rectory, which stood beside the church on Fourth Street, a block away from our apartment building on Third Street in downtown Niagara Falls.  The streets were separated by a weed-covered lot which provided an unobstructed view of my grandmother’s workplace from my bedroom window.  Years later, after I’d moved away, people would build a Holiday Inn on the lot, and then years after that different people would tear it down, leaving an empty lot again, this one covered with cement and used for parking, mostly by gamblers wanting to use the casino that was opened next door to the rectory. 

When the church bells rang at noon I knew my grandmother would soon be heading home for lunch, and I’d call to let her know that I’d be coming with her.  She drove a white Buick with beige highlights and steered it down Whirlpool Boulevard like the captain of a ship, forsaking the white lines on the road to create her own personal boat lane.  Along the way, she’d often stop at a grocery store to “pick up a few things.”  Cold cuts.  Cottage cheese.  Crystal Light.  Marge was a big fan of Linda Evans, one of the stars of “Dynasty,” who was starring in a series of commercials for Crystal Light, a new sugar-free soft drink.  Voices would sing: “I believe in Crystal Light / ‘Cause I believe in...” and then Linda Evans, standing in the midst of exercise equipment and wearing a headband and a pastel-colored leotard with a towel draped over the back of her neck, would point at herself with her thumb and say “...Me.”  That was all my grandmother needed to hear to start drinking Crystal Light.  I believe in me, too, she probably thought to herself.  She’d mix up a pitcher of the lemon-lime at lunchtime and we’d sit together.  Cold cuts.  Cottage cheese with fruit cocktail.  And Crystal Light.  Not only was I acting like a sixty-three-year-old woman, I was eating like one, too.  

After an hour or so, Marge would return to her boat and sail back to St. Mary's while I’d spend the afternoons working outside in the garden, cutting the grass, watering flowers, pruning, weeding, digging, trimming.  Whatever needed to be done.  The flower beds ran the entire perimeter of the back yard with additional beds encircling the house.  Peonies on one side, hydrangeas on another, with roses, phlox, daisies, lilies and a dozen more varieties in between.  When the neighbors saw that I was cheap and willing labor, they pounced, none more so than Irene Jenkins, a crippled woman who lived across the street.  Mrs. Jenkins lived alone and would sit in her kitchen window and talk to me from where I stood on her empty driveway.  The window slid open sideways like a drive-thru at McDonald’s and from there she’d pass me gardening gloves, pruning shears, plant food.  Whatever I needed for the day’s work she had planned.  

Occasionally she’d venture outdoors, shoving her wheelchair out the side entrance then dragging herself up into it.  The first time I saw her do this I was shocked.  It was the sound that first drew my attention.  The sound of metal hitting metal, repeatedly.  The side entrance had two doors, a wooden one that opened in followed by an exterior storm door that opened out, the kind that would immediately spring back into place upon release, as if irritated you would ask it to do what it was designed to do.  It was this metal door that I heard slamming against something, and as I poked my head around the corner, I saw that the something was Irene’s wheelchair.  Irene herself was on the floor of the entrance, sending the chair out ahead of her.  She’d give the storm door a good push to swing it out wide, then push on the wheelchair,  then...slam.  Again, she’d push on the door, push on the chair...slam.  Push on the door, push on the...slam.  Push on the...slam.  Slam.  Slam.  As far as I knew, crippled meant immobile, but this woman was clearly on the move.  She was built like a blob, with a Dutch boy haircut, and wore soft slippers on her swollen feet.  Her arms were big and thick and lifted each limp leg into place once she finally got past the storm door and settled into her chair.  She’d then propel herself across the thick grass, her hands straining to roll the wheels.  It looked exhausting, and judging by all the huffing and puffing going on, it was.  Still, she never once asked for help and needed no sympathy.  She’d inspect my work, giving pointers and praise, and every now and then she’d pick up a tool to show me a better way of using it.  

Marge became jealous.  “You spend more time over there than you do over here,” she said while pouring herself a glass of wine from the gallon jug she kept beneath the kitchen sink.  “That’s because she pays me,” I said.  It was simply an explanation but Marge took it as a demand for money, which I gladly took when she offered it.  

My grandmother called me her “One and Only” and used it in everything she wrote to me.  Birthday cards, letters, packages from home when I went away to college.  “To My One & Only.”  My sister eventually took issue with this.  “Her one and only what?” she’d say, usually with her hand on her hip.  “She’s got two grandchildren.”  She took the argument to my mother, who listened with her mouth ajar as she often does when something she should have picked up on has escaped her notice and is being brought to her attention.  “That’s a good question,” she said, which is what people say when they don’t have an answer for it.  So the two of them confronted my grandmother.  “You’ve got one daughter, one son, one granddaughter and one grandson,” my mother said to Marge, “but he’s your one and only.  Your one and only what?”  “Oh for God sakes,” Marge said.  “You’re both being ridiculous.” 

She dismissed their complaint with the obvious answer, that I was her one and only grandson, but my mother and sister weren’t buying it.  They were convinced it was a commentary on our family.  “My one and only”...normal person.  “My one and only”...sane person.  “My one and only”...friend.  But this was far from the truth.  Because every day at noon, as the church bells rang, I picked up the phone and demonstrated that I was perhaps the most abnormal of all.  “Good morning, St. Mary’s.”  

“Oh hi, Marge.” 

Why Argue?

When we lived in our fourth floor apartment on Rainbow Boulevard, it was my job to wash the dishes and my sister’s job to dry.  She once asked if I could make the water “as hot as possible” because she’d heard somewhere that hotter water dries faster.  “So basically, “ I said, “You want me to burn myself to make your job easier.”  She accused me of being uncooperative.     

June 16, 1986

1.   Who’s Johnny, El DeBarge

2.   Invisible Touch, Genesis

3.   Greatest Love of All, Whitney Houston

4.   All I Need is a Miracle, Mike and the Mechanics

5.   There’ll Be Sad Songs To Make You Cry, Billy Ocean

6.   Your Wildest Dreams, The Moody Blues

7.   The Glory of Love, Peter Cetera

8.   Bad Boy, Miami Sound Machine

9.   A Different Corner, George Michael

10. On My Own, Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald

Inevitably, when two people wash dishes together, the drier dries faster than the washer can wash, so my sister would often be standing there with nothing to do, irritably biting the corner of her mouth while watching me work up a sweat with cleanser and SOS pads.  Eventually she took to just tossing in the towel, literally, and letting the dishes pile up in the rack, allowing air to do most of the work for her.  This was just fine by me because oxygen was a far better audience for my singing.  

Back when pop singers still had some originality and could actually carry a tune, there was a good chance that if you were black and a female I was a fan.  Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan.  If you were a guy who looked like a mechanic or dressed like a trucker, my sister was all yours: Springsteen, Steve Perry, Pat Benatar.   

Our bedrooms were at either end of a hallway that was no more than six feet long, so if we’d wanted to, we could have stood in our doorways, leaned out, and smacked each other.  The bathroom was between the bedrooms, in the middle of the hallway, and sometimes my mother would be in there with the door open, standing at the sink, fixing her hair, while my sister and I would be in our rooms with the doors closed, she in hers listening to Springsteen, me in mine with Patti LaBelle.  A few minutes might pass before we’d hear our mother’s voice rising above the music.  “Jesus Christ!”  Opening our doors to see what the fuss was about, she’d be in the hallway with her hair half-teased, waving a comb around.  “I get one song from this side and another song from that side, and I can’t understand a goddamn word of any of it!”  

My mother never simply asked you to do something.  She was too creative for that.  Rather than say, for instance, “turn the music down,” she’d ask in a way that included an explanation of what it was you did, intentionally or not, that drove her to the brink of insanity.  But it didn’t end there.  She’d keep coming back, having discovered new ways of expressing the same thought.  “It’s not so much that I can’t understand the words,” she’d say.  “It’s the beat.  It’s this one going boom boom boom boom boom, while that one’s going boom, b-b-boom, b-b-boom!”  Where most people leave a situation and only then think of something better that they should have said, the “should have” part never mattered to my mother.  She’d actually come back and say it, prolonging the argument over the course of an hour with periodic coffee breaks.  You’d hear the quick, muted pounding of her stockinged feet on the carpet growing louder and think, Oh, no, here she comes again.  She does the same thing today, only now it’s with the phone.  “You know what else?” she’ll say, skipping the hello.  It’s as if the writer in her is constantly rewriting the argument and then coming back to see how it sounds.  

It was far more entertaining when her words were directed at others.  Throughout high school, we were, on occasion, required to have our parents with us to pick up our report cards.  The school made an evening of it, setting up tables in the gym with a teacher at each one, receiving parents and students, doling out praise and airing grievances.  The first time we attended, in my freshman year, we sat before Dr. King, my homeroom advisor, who taught chemistry and physics to the juniors and seniors and was moderator of our school’s chapter of the National Honor Society.  He slid my report card across the table to my mother and pointed out that although my grades were good, my lack of involvement in extracurricular activities would jeopardize my chances of induction into the National Honor Society come junior year.  “We like well-rounded individuals,” he said, and I suppose some parents may have taken that opportunity to turn to their son and crack a whip, to round out my apparent squareness, but my mother could see that Dr. King was hanging the threat of exclusion from an exclusionary club over my head and she wasn’t having any of it.  “Well,” she said, and she leaned forward and crossed her arms on the table, which was a clear sign that she meant business.  “Maybe if your school offered something other than football it wouldn’t be an issue.”  She argued that when a school offered nothing but sports, it left few options.  “My son is artistic,” she said.  “He’s a creative person with many interests, but tossing a ball around is not one of them.  So the problem,” she concluded, leaning back again, “is with your school, not my son.”  

My sister and I don’t have a lot in common.  Our taste in music is still at odds, and I live in the middle of Manhattan while she lives in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere.  Still, we get along just fine and we’re not much for arguing with each other.  It’s as if at some point we both realized that our mother is so much better at it than we are, so why bother?  

Just Ask

One day when I was in first grade, sitting at my desk, I wet my pants.  It wasn’t an accident.  I did it on purpose.  

Eight years later, in June 1985, as I stood in the mirror of my bedroom, adjusting my tie and preparing to graduate from St. Teresa of the Infant Jesus, the only school I had ever known, the memory of that day came back to me and I thought about how much I had changed.  I wasn’t necessarily wrong, but I wasn’t completely right, either.  I know now that my reason for doing what I did will never change.        

June 5, 1985

1.   Heaven, Bryan Adams

2.   Walking on Sunshine, Katrina and the Waves

3.   Everything She Wants, Wham!

4.   Into the Groove, Madonna

5.   The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough, Cyndi Lauper

6.   The Search Is Over, Survivor

7.   Invisible, Alison Moyet

8.   Crazy For You, Madonna

9.   Crazy in the Night, Kim Carnes

10. One Night in Bangkok, Murray Head

As a kid I was what they call “painfully shy,” although my shyness never led to  pain so much as awkwardness and, on that day in first grade for instance, a rash.

I’d been sitting at my desk, holding it in for some time, as Miss Arnold stood in front of us, her class, talking about something for what seemed like forever. It was probably no more than twenty minutes or so, but when you reach the point where it feels like you’re peeing internally, even five minutes is forever.  My original plan had been to continue holding it in for the rest of the day until I got home, but I soon realized I would need a new plan, and I was not about to raise   my hand and alert the teacher, much less the entire class, of my need to use the bathroom.  Aside from the fact that it didn’t seem like any of their business, I had other issues.  For starters, what to say.  We’d always been told to call it the lavatory, but this word meant nothing to me.  I had no idea what it looked like, how to say it, or why it was a word that meant bathroom.   The cool kids shortened it and called it the “lav,” while the dumb ones said “lab,” which also confused me, but either way I’d always been, and continue to be, opposed to getting chummy with words.  Chard for Chardonnay.  Delish for delicious.  Natch for naturally.  These all make my head explode.  “I’m making hamburgs,” my grandmother would say, and my head would explode.  Even “burgers,” though still offensive, would have been marginally better, but “hamburgs” made me want to go take a shower.  Same for “lav.”  That word was not about to come out of my mouth and the full version was beyond my comprehension, so even if I’d been brave enough to raise my hand, I would have, to my ears at least, sounded like a fool.  And the last thing a shy person wants is to sound like a fool.  Or look like one.    

So I formed a new plan, which, to my undeveloped, six-year-old mind, seemed foolproof.  Genius, even.  First, I would raise my legs straight out in front of me to a horizontal position, parallel to the floor.  Then, I would pee.  It was my firm belief that because my legs were raised, the pee would travel sideways along my pants and soak into the material before ever reaching the leg openings and hitting the floor.  I was emboldened by the fact that I was wearing corduroys.  Yes, I thought, staring at the ridges, those look very absorbent.  I knew that we wouldn’t be getting up from our desks for quite some time and by that time, I assumed, my pants would be dry again.  It was a perfect plan.  So after careful consideration and several test runs of raising my legs, I executed the plan.    

What I discovered is that not only was my brain undeveloped, so were my leg muscles.   

“Ian,” one of my friends whispered to me, “There’s a puddle of water under your desk.”  I feigned ignorance, then surprise.  “What?  What are you talking about?  Oh my God.  Where’d that come from?”  I may have been shy but I was a solid actor.   I looked accusingly at the ceiling, thinking maybe I could pass it off as a leak but even I couldn’t sell that one, so I quickly changed course and adopted the expression of one who has suddenly remembered something inconsequential.  Oh, that.  That puddle.  “I spilled a glass of water,” I said.  “From earlier.”  This is old news I seemed to be saying.  Where’ve you been?

I think some of the dumber kids bought it, but not Miss Arnold.  She made me sit with my puddle of “water” for the rest of the afternoon.  “Next time,” she said as she wiped it up after school, “Just ask.”  She made it sound so easy.  

By the time I’d reached eighth grade, year and year out with the same classmates, I’d become more comfortable with speaking in front of others, mostly by pretending to be someone else.  Not anyone in particular, just someone who liked hearing the sound of his own voice.  As myself, I could rarely take anything I said seriously.  We were once assigned to stand in front of the class and explain a step-by-step process, and while most of the other eighth-graders talked about scientific things like photosynthesis and mitosis, I opened my mother’s cookbook and explained how to make rice pudding.  

We were taught by a man named James Calire, who wore mismatched clothes and a hairpiece that was, more often than not, crooked.   His pants, exceedingly long, pooled at his feet like silk draperies, and he owned a Cabbage Patch Kid that he talked about in ways that made us question his sanity.  He was a man who obviously cared little for what other people thought of him, and I admired that.  Even aspired to that.  During a test I once raised my hand and asked him if perhaps he’d written a question incorrectly.  I knew the answer he was looking for, but as written the question had no answer.  When I brought it to his attention Mr. Calire acknowledged his mistake.  Then suddenly, as he walked away, he turned to me and yelled “Next time just answer the question, buddy,” and by buddy he meant smart ass.  I was many things as a fourteen year-old -- skinny, neat, and, according to my sister, “fucking annoying” -- but a smart ass was not one of them.  Later, when Mr. Calire apologized for his outburst, I realized that my question had embarrassed him in front of the class.   As a kid, I had always thought shyness and embarrassment were childish things, traits that were outgrown like sucking your thumb or watching Saturday morning cartoons in your footie pajamas.  But as an adult I know that’s not true.  Shyness stays with you like herpes, flaring up at inopportune moments, and the only thing you can do is disguise it.

When I graduated from eighth grade in June 1985 I thought my shyness, like my brown, wet corduroys, was a thing of the past.  But that fall when I started high school, it started all over again.  The same nerves, the same fear, it all came back to me.  And just as in first grade, I never asked to use the lavatory.  Throughout four years of high school I never once went to the bathroom.  People say there’s nothing quite like a Catholic school education.  And St. Teresa’s had taught me well.  But as I stood in the mirror, tying my tie, reflecting back on those years, it never occurred to me that one of the most important things I’d learned was how to hold it in.    

Parade

Somewhere along the way I became the type of person who makes things more difficult than they need to be.   Ask me to empty the vacuum cleaner and five minutes later the entire thing will be disassembled on the living room floor and I’ll be in the kitchen soaking all the removable parts in a bowl of suds and scrubbing the folds of the filter with a Q-tip.  Shortcuts never seemed to interest me.  So when I was asked, in my senior year of high school, to read the Gettysburg Address at the city’s Memorial Day parade, I took this to mean: Memorize it and give it all you’ve got.    

May 23, 1989

1.  Wind Beneath My Wings, Bette Midler

2.  Through the Storm, Aretha Franklin and Elton John

3.  This Time I Know It’s For Real, Donna Summer

4.  Soldier of Love, Donny Osmond

5.  After All, Peter Cetera and Cher

6.  I Only Wanna Be with You, Samantha Fox

7.  Iko Iko, The Belle Stars

8.  We Can Last Forever, Chicago

9.  Like a Prayer, Madonna

10. Giving Up on Love, Rick Astley

Niagara Falls had three high schools, and the city would rotate asking each for its valedictorian to read an historic speech at the annual parade, and, as luck would have it, the stars aligned for me.  The vice-principal stopped me in the hallway one day and handed me a typed copy of the Gettysburg Address, asking if I’d be interested.  It never occurred to me to say no, which proves that I wasn’t nearly as smart as people thought I was.   The real clue, for anyone who’d been paying attention, came two years earlier when I’d foolishly agreed to dress up in a rabbit costume and hand out candy to the participants of the science fair held in the gym for the local grammar schools.   To be punched in the nose on a normal day is, I imagine, bad enough, but to be punched in the nose while wearing an oversized rabbit head by a sixth grader whose lopsided volcano entry merely gurgled and coughed but by no means erupted escalates you to a level of stupid reserved for a select few.    

I was required to wear a tie to school Monday through Friday, so wearing one on a Sunday afternoon was not my idea of a good time.  It was warm that day, and I sat beside the mayor in the back seat of a white Cadillac convertible as it crawled along the parade route, up Main Street to a triangular patch of grassy land opposite the post office.   The mayor and I took our seats on a portable stage along with a rabbi, other city officials, and a tiny woman who was introduced as the city’s oldest-living World War I widow.   She got applause for standing up.  

Among the gathered crowd were my mother, my grandmother, and my Great Aunt Angie, a woman convinced that anyone holding a plate covered in Reynolds Wrap is either going to or coming from a party.  “Look at that,” she’ll say, spotting some random people with aluminum foil.  “I’ll bet they had a party,” and she’ll nod and smile in approval because Aunt Angie approves of all parties.  Blinking lights.  Toothpicks.  Saran Wrap.  These things all signal potential fun, for which she is always on the lookout.  So in preparation for my reading of the Gettysburg Address, Aunt Angie, wearing a polyester pant suit, spread a blanket in the shade of a tree and used her patent-leather purse to anchor down a large, helium-filled balloon with the California Raisins on it.    

When the moment arrived I stepped to the podium and silently congratulated myself for having had the foresight to memorize the speech, because no one affiliated with the event had bothered to supply me with a copy of it.  Why I hadn’t thought to bring my own copy is further proof of my stupidity, but that was that and there I was, on my own, just me and my memory and a park full of people.  And so I began: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  One of the organizers stepped up behind me and whispered for me to move closer to the microphone.  I wanted to turn to him and say And then what?  Because I had no idea what came next.  My mind had gone blank, replaced by a white hot burning sensation that had shot its way from my stomach straight up into my head.  I stood there and stared at my hand for an inappropriate amount of time, hoping for the words, even just one of them to get me started again, and when none came I seriously considered making my next ones: Sorry, that’s all I’ve got and then walking away. 

What could they do?  They couldn’t force me to say what I couldn’t remember.  Oh sure, I might be reviled for a while, written up in the Gazette as the rain on the parade, the low point of the day, the guy who made a mockery of Abraham Lincoln right there in front of the oldest-living war widow, but I was willing to accept all that if I meant I could go sit down again.  

But then the words returned.  Slowly at first.  And to hide my panic that’s exactly how I said them.  Slowly.  As if the pauses were intentional.  As if I were making it all up on the spot, writing it myself.  I calmly crossed one foot over the other and took hold of the podium, as if to say I’m settling in here, folks, and you should too because this could take a while.  I gave it all I had, turning each word, each phrase, carefully out of my mouth and looking out at the crowd as if asking everyone to really listen to what I was saying.  And, clearly listening, everyone looked back at me as if asking themselves Where the hell did they get this kid?     

Years later when I was asked to do a reading at my grandmother’s funeral, the cheerful woman planning the mass gave me a copy of a passage from the Book of Deuteronomy.  I read it over once or twice and then, having learned my lesson and taking no chances that I’d find a bible in the church, folded it and slipped it into one of my pockets.  By the time the priest called me up to the podium, I’d forgotten which pocket.  With a suit on there were at least six possibilities.  As I stood there at the microphone patting myself down like a criminal, searching for the feel of crinkling paper, I felt the uncomfortable silence in the church growing longer and saw a bunch of swollen, soupy eyes staring at me, imploring me to get the show on the road.  So I began from memory.  “Four score and seven years ago...”

Oh. Canada

It was a Monday evening, around the time when we would normally eat dinner, five-thirty or so, when my mother announced to my sister and me that we were going on vacation.  Our destination was Canada, and it took us all of twelve minutes to get there.  On foot. 

1.   Papa Don’t Preach, Madonna

2.   Invisible Touch, Genesis

3.   The Glory of Love, Peter Cetera

4.   The Edge of Heaven, Wham

5.   Nasty, Janet Jackson

6.   Who’s Johnny, El DeBarge

7.   Modern Woman, Billy Joel

8.   Venus, Bananarama

9.   Dancing on the Ceiling, Lionel Richie

10. Mad About You, Belinda Carlisle

We lived in The Jefferson, a stately apartment building on Rainbow Boulevard in downtown Niagara Falls, at the Canadian border.  From our fourth-floor apartment we could see the rising mist of the Falls, which, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, would sometimes fool us into thinking it was raining.  This usually happened early in the mornings, when my sister and I would head out into the dull grey quiet to stand on the corner of Third and Rainbow and wait for the bus to take us to school.  “Shit,” she’d say, “it’s raining.”  I’d point out that, no, it wasn’t raining, it was simply the mist from the Falls.  “I don’t give a flying fuck where it’s from,” she’d say, putting up her umbrella, “it’s still water and it’s ruining my hair.”  

When my mother, my sister and I arrived at the customs booth the official looked us up and down and asked why were coming to Canada.  “For a vacation,” my mother announced cheerfully.  She seemed pleased with the way it sounded paired with the way it looked.  The three of us just standing there, empty-handed, no luggage, no maps.  She pointed back across the bridge in the general direction of our apartment building and explained that we lived “right over there” and were coming “to have some dinner and see the sights.”  She said it as if we’d never seen them before, as if we’d just discoverd this mysterious place called Canada and had decided, on a whim, to find out what it was all about.

Outside the customs booth a walkway led to a topiary park with shrubs and trees and pebbled walkways.  It was all, in my mind, very European.  Flowers were planted in measured rows and were sometimes arranged by color to spell words like “Canada” or “Welcome.”  This was in stark contrast to the grounds on the American side of the Falls, where the flowers were illiterate.  Where the trees and shrubs did whatever the hell they wanted, and weeds flourished, as did litter.    

My mother led us to a casual restaurant overlooking the Falls, and we ate cafeteria style, sliding our trays along a metal track and picking up plates of prepared food along the way.  Meatloaf.  Chicken in mystery sauce.  The Canadians may have excelled at horticulture but cuisine was another matter.  After dinner, we did some sightseeing with the other tourists, though the sights we enjoyed most were the tourists themselves.  When we’d had enough, we walked back home and talked about what a nice vacation it had been.  

The next night, around five-thirty or so, after the summer heat had eased, we did the same thing.  Walked across the bridge, through customs, along the pebbled walkways, then pushed our plates through the cafeteria, stared at the Falls, watched the tourists, then headed home at dusk.  On Wednesday night we did the same thing again.  

By Thursday my sister had developed a permanently pissed-off look and refused to go.  “I’m sick of Canada,” she said.   I really couldn’t blame her.  I was starting to hate it myself.  The same walk, the same sights.  Even the customs official was sick of seeing us and took to just waving us through.  But my mother wasn’t budging.  “This is our summer vacation,” she said, lighting up a cigarette.  “I’m the mother and you have to do what I say.”  My sister and I argued that since we returned home every night and slept in our own beds it didn’t count as a vacation, but my mother disagreed.  “It’s whatever I say it is.”  And she was determined to vacation until the end of the week “because I am not turning on that oven.”  My sister and I realized that if we wanted food without having to cook it ourselves we’d have to go to Canada to get it.  

My mother and I, on vacation.

We bought no t-shirts, no mugs, no pieces of fudge in the shape of a maple leaf.  We had nothing to declare when we passed through customs upon our returns.  It was the only vacation we ever took together, my mother, my sister, and I.  

“What’d you bring that for?” my sister said when she saw the camera in my hand on Friday night.  “It’s our last day of vacation,” I reminded her.  I pointed the camera at her and told her to smile.  She didn’t.