Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (3 page)

So when you ask me if I knew that “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” would be a hit, and I say I didn’t want to do the song at first because I didn’t think it was especially good for women, maybe you understand better why. But then my producer Rick Chertoff said to me, “Think of what this song could
mean.
” And then I saw my grandmother’s, my aunt’s, and my mother’s faces in my head. And I thought that maybe I could do something and say something so loud that every girl would hear—every girl, every color. And I said to myself, “Hell yeah, I’ll make an anthem! Maybe it’ll be something that will bring us all together and wake us up.” It would be a movement right under all the oppressors’ noses, and no one would know about it until there was nothing they could do to stop it. I was going to make it work come hell or high water. I’d make it work for every poor sucker whose dreams and joys were dashed out.

I
HAD WANTED TO
go to a performing arts high school so badly. But when my mom went to discuss this with my eighth-grade guidance counselor, he asked her if she wanted me to end up waiting tables like she did. He made her cry over the idea that I might wind up in her shoes one day. That rat—I never liked that guy. So this so-called authority told my mom that because our family had worked in the fashion industry and my uncle had made a name for himself as a pattern maker, the High School of Fashion Industries would be a better fit for me. Miraculously, I passed their entrance test.

The best thing about going to Fashion Industries was the adventure of going to a vocational school in Manhattan on the A train. I spent a ton of time on the subway watching the straphangers. I took a great pleasure in being part of that community. Manhattan wasn’t remotely like Ozone Park, Queens. As a high schooler, I was living the life my mom never did. I was going to school in Manhattan! My grandparents had it so wrong. This wasn’t about becoming a whore. It was about becoming cultured and educated and wanting more. I was going to the mecca of art, music, and fashion. I was traveling every day to a place where people were more glamorous. Maybe they were
afraid that if my mother became cultured she wouldn’t accept “safe” and “meek.”

I was never good at time management, so there were many frenzied moments. Once I cut and sewed together a dress for school and then ran up the six blocks to Liberty Avenue, like I always did, in chunky high shoes, carrying my portfolio in my hand and my books under my arm and a handbag over my shoulder. The dress had the seams sewn on the outside, which I thought looked good—it was just that the idea of deconstruction hadn’t really come into its own yet. I must have been a sight.

As a freshman at Fashion Industries you took different kinds of sewing classes, like the power-sewing machine class or the fine-material machine class. I got a little depressed in the shoe-making class because all we sewed was a calfskin knife case. I also imagined that the class led to a job at a shoemaker under a pile of broken shoes that needed to be mended. My fine-material machine sewing class teacher dressed in a very old-fashioned way, with a knee-length straight skirt and a short-sleeve shirt with cuffs, and she’d always stuff a pressed handkerchief up the left sleeve. She gave me a seventy and told me the knots on the end of my needle and thread for hand stitching were like torpedoes.

The art class was the kicker. I actually loved it but got on the far wrong side of the teacher. She wanted me to move my seat and I didn’t understand why, so I said I wouldn’t. Then she said the only way I’d pass was if I brought in twelve paintings by the end of the term. So I painted and painted. And I loved it. I would stay up all night in my room with poor ol’ Elen in the other twin bed next to mine, with her head under her pillow while I painted. Looking back, I see that I was very selfish for having the light on. But my big sister was a good sport. I used watercolors and poster paint, which was very easy to maneuver
without an easel. I just painted on the floor. I created pictures of the woods at night or my grandmother’s garden, which was moonlit right outside my bedroom window.

Then the day came when I proudly handed them in to my teacher. But she was being threatened by one of the bigger girls in the class, who told her that she better not fail her. The school wasn’t exactly in the best neighborhood and there was always some rough trade to maneuver around. Since she was busy, I said, “Here are the paintings,” and put them down in front of her and left.

When I got my report card, I received a zero in art. The teacher said she never got any paintings from me. I should have remembered one of those Aesop’s fables—the one with the moral that goes something like “Always get a receipt.” I was crushed about losing all that work. There were other failures, too, like my English and math classes. I had mostly spent my time painting and I never got much else done.

Everybody told me to study hard, but nobody ever taught me how to study. I was just told that I’d better learn or I’d wind up like everyone else around me, which was very upsetting. But I just never knew where to start, and it was always a daunting task that I would put off, until I just fell asleep. There were times when I would open up a book and leave it open next to me, completely terrified. I was too anxious to study and felt doomed to fail. So I failed. I figured if I was going to fall, I might as well hit the bottom and get the worst of it over with. I remember bringing home a report card with every grade a failing one, and the zero in art. I guess there was a moral I should have learned from that experience, too, but it was too crushing to think about. I remember my stepfather looking at my report card and saying, “You failed gym? Isn’t that like failing lunch?”

But before I flunked out, I was put in something called a nonachieving-genius class. There was this English teacher in there who
actually was very inspiring. She brought in a Janis Ian song and laid it out like a poem instead of lyrics. Song lyrics at their best are poems, and that part interested me. What inspired my English teacher to think I was worth helping was my understanding of the Hemingway novel
The Old Man and the Sea.
I guess she didn’t want to throw me back in the water once she saw how that book caught my interest and how I understood the metaphors that she loved so much.

But in the end I wasn’t a nonachieving genius—I was just a nonachiever. And that’s how I entered the Richmond Hill High School annex as a freshman again. My sister, Elen, was a senior there and I was always welcome at her lunch table, and there I didn’t feel so left back. And when Elen graduated, I stayed on with younger friends and did half the freshman year again. I got very depressed, though. I just failed and failed. I started to feel like I was in a recurring bad dream and that somewhere there had to be a different reality.

For me, the little pleasantries, like the sunset or sunrise, or when the trees bloomed, or birds sang, or I saw the flowers in my grandmother’s garden, were the only distractions I could find to keep myself going. I never felt inside that I fit into this world. I always had one foot where I stood and one foot somewhere else. They used to say I was just a daydreamer. I did daydream, but I used to write a lot of poetry, too, and draw whatever I could.

The few friends I had after Elen left school declared themselves gay, and when they came out, I thought, “Ooh, I’m gay because they’re gay.” So I tried. One of my close friends said she was in love with me. Well, I didn’t want to lose my friend, so we held hands, and then we would kiss, but it wasn’t how I was feeling. I even read
The Fox
by D. H. Lawrence, but no matter how I tried, I just wasn’t feeling what she felt. I loved her, but not like that. I had to tell her the truth: I wasn’t really a lesbian. I had to come out as a heterosexual.

As graduation kept slipping a year ahead of me, and my extra time in high school started to feel like serving a double term in misery, I quit. I was washed up. I was seventeen. After I left, I had a few friends who helped me forget my predicament. One was a girl from the neighborhood, Susan Monteleone. She lived around the corner and across the street from me. She even had an older sister the same age as my sister. And best of all, she played guitar like us. She was always a better guitar player than me. (I’m grateful to just be able to play at all. I find it soothing, even though now I usually just play dulcimer and only use guitar for writing. I even tune my guitar in fifths, like a dulcimer.)

Susan also turned me on to the women’s movement. We went to a demonstration for women’s rights together at the
Alice in Wonderland
statue in Central Park. First we met some women Susan knew at a hotel. They seemed a little angry and some looked like hard-core lesbians. Once I heard some older men from my neighborhood refer to the women’s movement as “a bunch of angry lesbians.” I guessed at the time that what they meant was that a woman just needed to get laid, and then she would go back to the old boys’ system quick enough. But when I listened to these women talk, it seemed they had a lot to be angry about. They were talking about civil rights for all women, theirs and mine too. This was beyond all stereotypes—this was revolutionary. Susan was talking to a woman she knew, and then when everyone started to leave for the park, somebody said we could go with them in their limo.

There was a lot of hubbub and excitement in the car. Susan and I had been practicing what we would say and what we would burn for a couple of weeks. Susan was burning the hard plastic rollers she slept on for years to make her hair look good. That, I understood. How long can you put up with that before throwing the damn things out? That was thrilling, as thrilling as riding in the big long limo with all
of those different types of women, whose mere chatter was the most inspirational information I had heard in a long time.

I understood everything they were talking about in that limo and for the most part agreed. But deep down I secretly still loved some of the fashion they looked down on, even though I agree that there are elements of fashion that are anti-women, like high heels that slow us down. Being in that car at the age of fifteen was so intense though that I could never say, in my hand-me-down Queens vernacular, “I still love them shoes, though.”

As for my big moment in front of the trash can, I brought one of my mother’s old bras that she gave me after I outgrew my training bra. It was pointy and old-fashioned. I walked up to the mesh trash basket, held up my mother’s old bra, and said, “I burn this for me, for my mother, and for my grandmother!” It was a good moment in my life that offset a lot of not-so-victorious moments. And I also felt my mom should have thrown that bra away, anyway.

This was a new time. It was the time of protests and thinking free and being free. Although I always thought that “free love” thing seemed like a dirty deal for women. It was free, but for who? Say you felt like you wanted all the liberties a man was afforded, and you wanted to sleep with whomever, right? You still were considered a tramp. And say, like a man, you chose not to sleep with someone? Then you were frigid or a lesbian. You should be able to have control over your body and your life—just like a man. But birth control had come into play over the previous decade. And at the time, young women and girls were dying all over the United States from illegal and unsafe abortions.

Susan and I also formed a folk duo called Spring Harvest. (What the heck? I shoulda known that wouldn’t work. There’s no such thing as a harvest in the spring.) But it was still a great experience. We performed twice together in a small café in Queens, on a road that ran
from Woodhaven Boulevard to the Alexander’s store on Queens Boulevard. It was a cute place, but they didn’t pay, and we had to get our friends to come see us. Later on in my professional life, I would come to know that setup as a “pay-to-play” situation. Instead of the club paying you, you’re kind of paying them by bringing your friends.

At our first gig, a comic opened for us, and Elen and Wha came with their friend Dominic, who heckled the poor guy. Unfortunately Dominic was funnier than the comic, which was a big problem for us. When we went to check out everything before the place opened, the owner said to me, “Look, girlie, there’s no microphones here. But there’s an acoustic tile right up there on the ceiling. Aim up there, and everyone will hear ya.” Now, as far as I know, acoustic tiles control sound reverberation and are used to make the room sound better. But this guy didn’t have a whole ceiling of acoustic tiles like you’re supposed to—he just had one tile hanging slightly on a diagonal from a dropped cork ceiling, like the kind my friend’s father used to refinish their basement. I aimed for that tile from not really a stage, but more like a wooden dance floor in the center of the room. I aimed and I aimed all night, especially on the soft high singing parts I did in Eric Andersen’s “Thirsty Boots.” The guy had me believing that it worked. (Hey, it was my first gig.) Funny how now I can still aim my voice if I need to.

The duo was a distraction and contrast to school and home and my sister leaving. All of a sudden I could function and define myself. I felt like maybe there was something for me to be good at. But that didn’t work out, because we were so young. We did have a meeting with an agent/manager once. Susan found him. Susan was one of those really informed take-action types of people. Susan was even writing Joan Baez’s mother letters. I guess it started as fan mail and turned into her asking for advice. And to Joan Baez’s mom’s credit, Susan got responses. Anyway, we played for this agent/manager and
he informed us that we needed to have some boys in the band, so that if we got married, we wouldn’t split up. What the heck?

While this was happening I was still struggling in school. I will always remember that zero I got in art, because of how I felt like such a zero sitting in what felt like a remedial art class. I remember being handed small round-edged scissors, like the kind you used in kindergarten. I was told to cut paper to make paper cones, which we would glue together with a nontoxic glue (because some of the kids in the class were already in-toxic-ated).