Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (33 page)

So this whole album was about my growing up and the stories around my childhood. I added “On the Sunny Side of the Street” because I grew up listening to Louis Armstrong, and I needed another up-tempo song. There were too many slow, deep ones, and if we didn’t pick it up we’d have to give out razor blades with the record so people could cut their wrists. Anyway, here was a song about being positive instead of negative, about taking everything that was sad and just saying, “Okay, all of this is sad, but I can deal with it, and I’m going to choose to walk on the sunny side of the street anyway.” And that’s how my life always was.

Another up-tempo one I included was “Makin’ Whoopee” with Tony Bennett, but I got in a little trouble with Tony. I was looking for a way to do the song differently, because it was so straight. I listened to how Ella Fitzgerald did it with Louis Armstrong, and I liked the way Louis talked a little in between singing, so I figured I’d do that. He got mad at me though, because he didn’t understand all the speaking stuff and he wanted me to be like k.d. lang, his frequent duet partner. He also wanted me to know the song really well before I got there. I didn’t want to, though, because I wanted to learn it with his band before he got there so that I could perform in their rhythm instead of just singing on top of it.

So even though I didn’t write any of those songs, it was very autobiographical, because I was taking bits and pieces from my life when I felt crushed or saw someone was crushed. Or who was having her little garden party and being joyful. Growing up, we still had this color, the different people and ethnicities, and the different fashion
they wore, the different things they said. It was like Shakespeare to me. In the meantime, like I said earlier, my mother was always taking us to the Delacorte Theater to see Shakespeare. I always felt I could find Shakespeare right in my neighborhood, when I’d watch everyone walk down the block from the factories to where the trees started on our block. It was tree-lined after our place because my grandfather chopped down the tree by our house. So the trees didn’t start until Mrs. Schnur’s house next door.

Mrs. Schnur was friends with my grandmother, and these women were very much a part of my journey and my awakening. I saw this generation of women before me have all their hopes and dreams dashed, ripped up like my aunt Gracie’s photographs. I saw all these women, the lady across the yard, my mother, her sister, my grandmother, who had no shot, who didn’t go to college, the girl who was twelve years old and pregnant with a kid who everyone passed by. All of these stories moved me to make a change in any way I could. And I’m sure I changed things in just a little way, but it was something, and for one second, it was cooler to be different than it was to be your normal conservative person.

At Last
was never meant to be a radio album, and then all of a sudden the record company wanted to play it on radio. I kept saying that my voice was loud in the mix—you couldn’t even play it in a club because if you turned it up, my voice would kill you, but they didn’t listen. I felt like it was the kind of album you could have playing at a dinner party.

Art is interpretive, and it’s important to take inspiration from your life. The album cover is a painting of the stories put together, and you’ll see that on the cover of
At Last
I have on a black cocktail dress, with the city in the background, and I’m in a manhole, coming up out of a barge. In the video for “Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China)” I
came out of a manhole cover, too, and I wore Chinese pajamas. I wore a black wig that I put in pigtails, and I had on glasses and a hat. (It was pretty funny, but I don’t know, now that I look back on it, I think it’s a little racist.) My mother was in the video in a rickshaw, and my aunt Gracie too, which is kind of sweet.

Anyway, it’s funny about the sewer, because I did come from the bottom; I did feel like nothing before I felt like anything. Through the years, I’ve always studied a lot of self-development stuff, which has sometimes helped me and sometimes not. I’m intense because the work I make is intense and because when I sing I’m intense. I’m just an intense little motherfucker, what can I tell ya? I try, I listen to the Buddhist CDs, the Abraham CDs, to the point where I had one assistant say, “Oh my God, not again, please don’t.” Those CDs are maddening after a while, because you just feel like, “Shut the hell up and get on with it. If you want to be successful, just fucking do what you need to do. If there’s a wall in the way, fine. Let me take a step back, let me make my way around it and get to point B.” That’s how I try to do things now.

Years ago, my husband would walk in and look at me while I did spirit dancing with my friend Marion. We would burn down our villages and build them back up again in our heads. The Honduran housekeeper and the nanny, who were sisters and I think were also Jehovah’s Witnesses, were really freaked out—I’d see these two heads through the door, watching me. Before I met David, during the
Vibes
era, I also did yoga, and with Ginny Duffy I did creative visualization, which made me understand how I got to where I wanted to be: I always saw myself there. If you can’t see yourself doing what you want, how is it going to happen?

I don’t mind being this intense. When things get to be too much, I space out, I pop into a different reality where I see things differently—that’s been how I’ve lived my life. I always felt like I had this guardian
angel, one I talked to my whole life. But now I feel like, “You know, maybe you got a guardian angel, maybe you don’t. But be here now, be compassionate, try and open your freakin’ mind and your eyes to what is happening now.”

What maybe adds to my intensity is that I’m often alone. I’m in hotels a lot, and I’m home by myself when Dec is in school. But I have my dog, and I leave the television on sometimes just to have a talking voice in the background. I keep looking for a job where I won’t have to leave my kid, but I don’t know if it’s possible. Someone said to me once, “Why don’t you just do private events, and then you can be home and make the money you want?” But the whole idea of not making music for the public anymore really freaked me out. And when I write, I have to be by myself, but I want to be with my family. So often I write late at night. I don’t mind getting up in the middle of the night to do that. It works for me, and then I can see them. And of course, I have my imagination, so I’m never totally alone.

During the year when I worked on
At Last,
my father told me that he went to the doctor and he had skin cancer. And I said, “Dad, skin cancer is easily cured, did they take it out?” He said they got it all, but then he said it had spread to his lymph nodes and I didn’t really hear that part at first.

With my first experiences with the health-care system, I was lucky—when my mother got ovarian cancer, she got great care. I wanted my dad in Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, one of the best places in the country, but he couldn’t go, because his AARP insurance wouldn’t pay. But they would pay for Columbia, which didn’t have as good care as Sloan-Kettering. But I just didn’t have enough money to put him in Sloan. There was a very kind nurse at Columbia who helped me find a hospice for my dad to die in. And that’s what I did. I put him in a really nice hospice, the best I could find.

But when my father was dying, I blamed myself for never selling out—I might have had integrity, but I didn’t have the money to do anything for him. Instead of investing in preventative care, the medical system invests in “you get sick, we take your money, honey.” They don’t want doctors who take your blood and prescribe vitamins, because then that would keep you alive.

I tried a lot of different things when my dad was sick in hospice care. I brought a qigong woman, I brought a healer, but they weren’t having much luck with him. I tried doing reiki too, while the qigong woman worked on him—his head was hot and his feet were cold, and I drew the heat down to his feet. I got all kinds of rocks and stones, and brought another Reiki healer named Michelle, who works with doctors. I also brought all kinds of music, and when one high-pitched vocal played, my dad looked at me like, “What, are you kidding me?” That made me laugh.

I kept telling the doctors and nurses, “Just give him more drugs, because I don’t want him in pain.” My stepmother was not okay with that, probably because she didn’t want to let go. She said, “Why do you want to keep him so doped up? You don’t want him to die, do you?”

When my father did pass, my stepmother said she would send him to be cremated and then we would get the urn back. But I felt like, when he gets cremated, it’s all over, and there he is, just sitting on the friggin’ counter in an urn? So I decided to go to the cremation, and I was surprised when my husband, who was fearful for his own dad’s health, came with me. Earlier I kept telling my father, “When you get better, I’ll take you to the Great Wall of China.” So I brought a silk scarf from China to the cremation. When I asked to see him they said, “That’s extra.” Fine, I said and they showed me a cardboard box. I put the scarf around him and pink flowers over him—over his heart, to heal any sadness.

I called Elen while I was there, and she said, “What’s that music in the background? What are you playing?” I said “Requiem for a Death” or something. She said, “Why don’t you play some Hawaiian music? He played Hawaiian guitar.” So I made them put on some Hawaiian music when I said goodbye to him. As my father was going into the fire, this one song came on, a classic Hawaiian tune called “I Like You,” by Sol Hoopii, and David said, “This is like a Woody Allen movie.” I played the whole album,
Master of the Hawaiian Guitar, Volume 2.
My dad liked that music. He always brought the world home to us, my dad, and I loved that about him.

I
N THE SEVENTIES,
I was so afraid all the time for the people I knew who were gay, like my sister, Elen. People were so fuckin’ crazy. At first, in the seventies, you thought life was going to get better—especially with Harvey Milk being a city supervisor in San Francisco. That was a time you felt like, “Oh my God, we’re living in a new time where people will finally just let people be who they are.” And then the guy was killed, and it was awful.

Even the police were really cruel to the gay community. They’d raid gay bars, and arrest people, and the whole thing was wrong. I was very worried about my sister because people act so stupid with someone who is different, and gay bashers were coming in from out of state (which still goes on to this day). I’d think, “Oh my God, my sister is a small woman, what is going to happen to her in New York?” I worked with this one musician, a really talented kid, who was beaten because he was gay. The attacker got away with it, because when he went to the hospital, he said, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” Yeah, he was fine, because it was like, what was he going to do? He didn’t want to go to the police. Some people think they’re not going to be taken seriously, so a lot of times, this stuff isn’t even reported.

Elen went to CUNY Queens College but dropped out when she was a freshman to find out why the world was the way it was. So as I said earlier, she had a lot of different jobs. She was a ship’s plumber; she worked on the railroad fixing boxcars; she worked in a garment factory; she was a carpenter, a masseuse, then an acupuncturist. And there came a time when she joined the socialist movement, and she was going to go help poor people fight in Nicaragua. She was still pretty young, and I was like, “Are you shitting me? Why are you going there? Just stay away from that.” But she didn’t listen. And then she went to live in Phoenix, where she saw all these injustices against the Salvadoran refugees and the poor, and a ton of corruption in the local government. Ya know, our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, gets a dollar a year for a salary. He insists on it and he doesn’t take bribes from anybody. But these other guys were corrupt. So she ran for mayor of Phoenix as a Socialist Workers Party candidate. One reason was to help the Salvadoran refugees get sanctuary. At the time she was working at the Marathon Steel Company in Phoenix, cutting hot steel with a blowtorch. And I happened to be really famous at the time, so
People
magazine did an article on her in 1985. Dave Wolff went wild, saying, “She can’t even balance a checkbook—how’s she going to balance the city?” I told him, “You don’t understand what she’s talking about doing there. She’s talking about corruption. She’s talking about standing up for people.” She didn’t win, but she called attention to what was important to her. And years later, the same guys she said were corrupt were indicted for corruption.

Me, I don’t think socialism really works. And communism is a load of crap, because every country that has it has communists . . . and a couple of people who happen to be doing really well. Politics is about power. And power corrupts. There’s always someone at the top of the food chain living large.

Elen worried about me, too, which is why she introduced me to Carl and Gregory, so that they could watch over me when she wasn’t there. She really thought society was going to fall apart because it was so evil in the seventies. People were buying Nixon’s and Agnew’s lies. I’d get depressed because my friends and I all thought, “Wow, Americans believe everything they’re told. What happened to the generation that was going to change and save the world?” Elen has always been very upbeat, positive, and compassionate. And in the end she went back to school to become an acupuncturist and an herbalist, which is what she is now. It’s the perfect job for her because she really cares about people.

She came out in her twenties. It took a long, long time for her to come out to herself, and at first, she was bisexual. Later, she was fully out. Elen always wanted to be Peter Pan when we were playing—she always wanted to be the guy. When we made music, she’d play the drums, which none of the girls wanted to do. She was really good. My mother used to try and dress her in girly clothes but Elen would never wear them. Never! We all wore jeans, but we’d have to go into the men’s shop and be fitted for them because they didn’t sell girls’ jeans at the time. I’m sure she was very comfortable like that. My mom even gave Elen a Toni perm. Poor Elen. In the meantime I used to look at that perm and beg Mom to teach me how to do it. I was always cutting my Barbie and Pollyanna dolls’ hair. I lined them all up and put a cloth around their necks, like they were at the beauty parlor. Barbie was a real heartbreaker, but then all of a sudden, Barbie was freakin’ bald. That was a shocker.