How to Cook Your Daughter (13 page)

CBGB was a small club, and even from blocks away, we could see people spilling out of the doorway and onto the sidewalk. The street lamps highlighted purple Mohawks; blue, spiky coifs; leather jackets; chains; plaid plants; and fishnet stockings. The music coming from the building was loud enough to fill the neighborhood, but in those days, few people lived on the Bowery. I don't remember which band was playing, just that it sounded fast and angry. I had a twinge of fear when we went up to the door to pay our $5 because the three of us were very underage. But the huge bouncer at the door stepped aside and let us pass. Then someone stamped our hands, and we had arrived.

The club was packed, filled with cigarette smoke, sweat from crazed dancers, and an overwhelming smell of hairspray that rose from spiked, stiff heads. We were desperate to know these cool kids around us, desperate for even a word from one of Them. By two in the morning, I was elated because some guy with a homemade Clash T-shirt asked me for a light. I walked home on air to the sound of his voice: “Hey, you have a light?” I saw him in my mind's eye, covered with sweat from dancing so hard, black, spiky hair slipping over his forehead. I even got a “thanks” after my shaking fingers lit a match for him. I was too overwhelmed to do anything other than mumble “you're welcome” before he disappeared into the crowded dance floor. But one of Them had spoken to me.

The next weekend we went to CBGB again. After that, we braved other clubs, Tier 3 in TriBeca, the Mudd Club on White Street, Max's Kansas City near Fourteenth Street. We went anywhere and everywhere punk music played. We met other kids, most of them older than us. We met bands and became privy to the word-of-mouth grapevine that fueled where to go. Soon, Iana, Krisztina, and I became one of Them too. And when the “bridge and tunnel” crowd turned up at the
current hot spot, we simply moved somewhere else. I made my room into a mini version of the First Avenue thrift store and left all my ripped clothes in a huge heap next to my bed. On the way home from clubs, we would peel street posters announcing concerts by our favorite bands off buildings and lamp posts. Then I'd re-paste them to my six-foot walls. All around my room the posters screamed: “THE BUZZCOCKS—HOTEL DIPLOMAT, THE CLASH—LIVE AT THE PALLADIUM, THE STIMULATORS—TIER 3, THE BAD BRAINS—CBGB.” Every inch was covered. My mother said nothing; my father was livid. He told me I “looked like a dead rat” and that he found me insufferable. We fought endlessly about trips to the clubs, and he set curfews that he was seldom home to enforce. He would say things like “You need to be home for family dinner tonight, Jessie,” which I found absurd considering that my father never bothered to come home unless it suited him. He thought the English bands I idolized were a “bunch of whining gits” and were precisely the reason he never wanted to live in England again.

Now, I realize he was angry because he was losing me. I suddenly had a group of heroes, and none was him. And I wonder if he also knew that I was finally understanding the impact of what he had done. I know how irritating I must have been at that age—full of attitude, dedicated to being a bored teenager when I was with my parents, pouting and playing with the safety pins in my ears during the rare occasions when all of us sat at the dinner table. But my father never acknowledged the role he played in making me what I was then. I had watched his “bad behavior” for years, and now, I was giving it back.

I thought I was rebelling against my parents, but the idea that I could outdo my father—either in wit or bad behavior—was folly. I re
member walking into Max's Kansas City one night and seeing him chatting at the bar with Debbie Harry of Blondie. He wasn't
trying
to be cool, as I was. My dad
was
cool. I fled the club and went somewhere else, suddenly feeling terribly embarrassed about all the efforts I had made to look and act punk. I didn't realize that the true rebel of the family was my sister, slaving away at her books, saving money to buy a horse, dreaming of becoming a doctor, and quietly plotting her escape from the world of Tony Hendra. She also, as all of us began to notice, had gone from Thunder Thighs to a thin teenager well on her way to Twiggy. Her steely personality gave her the resolve to lose weight. And my father taunting her as a child gave her added incentive. I was having my own food issues. But I had none of Kathy's fortitude. Instead, I followed my father's pattern. I went on and off starvation diets. I berated myself for “cheating.” When I cheated, I hated myself, and when I hated myself, I cheated more. Instead of coke, I popped Dexatrim or speed. The Black Beauties came from a friend of Krisztina's and were cheap. I took them in an effort to cut my appetite, but that never helped for long. Often, I swallowed five or six times the regular dosage of laxatives in an effort to purge myself. I almost enjoyed the gut-wrenching cramps and the hours in the bathroom. I saw them as punishment for my being “bad.”

I envied the ninety-pound Kathy and thought,
Why can't I be like her? Why can't I live on half a cup of cottage cheese, an apple, a carrot, and a plain salad the whole day? Why am I so weak?
Then I heard about a new method of dieting. A friend who was already a compulsive overeater and bulimic told me you could “eat all you want and then just throw it all up.” She made it sound so simple, and when you're a teenager, you don't think about the consequences of things
that sound so simple. You don't know that if you make yourself throw up, your teeth begin to rot. That your throat gets sore. That your stomach aches all the time from the bingeing and purging. That bulimia is one endless cycle of self-hatred that simply takes over your life.

To me, vomiting sounded like a good way to eat all I wanted and never gain weight. But I found it more difficult than it sounded. My friend's instructions were simple: “Just stick your finger down your throat, and that's it.” But it wasn't that clean or that simple. You had to stick your finger so deep down your throat that it hurt. You had to lock yourself in the bathroom with your head over the toilet trying again and again to get your finger down far enough so that something came up. You've already binged on all the food you found in the house, so there's no turning back. And if you managed to puke, you felt dizzy and sick and were left with sour breath and cramps. Sickeningly, as with my laxative agonies, I actually got satisfaction from the pain.

It was a full-time job to keep up-to-date on all the hip places and happenings in New York. Classes just got in the way. In early September, I went way uptown to 205th Street to my new school, the Bronx High School of Science. I walked into the massive building; stared down the loud hallways; heard the clang and clutter of lockers opened and slammed; took one look at the eager, hardworking student body; and walked right out of the building. I never went back. I had no notion of the consequences, of permanent school records, of upsetting my parents, of ruining my academic life. I thought I was making some kind of important antiestablishment statement by getting on the downtown subway and abandoning my first day of high school. They were all, as my dad might have said, fascists anyway. In truth I was scared, confused, and in pain. I thought I was angry about unemployment in England or wanted “Anarchy in the UK” (worthy worries if I
were an underprivileged Londoner). But what was really on my mind was trying to figure out why I was so drawn to the destructive behavior that had begun to consume me. School got in the way of clubs and hanging out, so I decided not to go. I left the house each morning to preserve the illusion that I was attending classes. Some days, I rode the subway for hours. Other times, I wandered the few blocks to Stuyvesant High School and hung around outside, sitting on parked cars, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and talking to the kids I knew, including Iana, although she only occasionally cut class to sit with me. She thought school was beneath her and that most of the teachers were “idiotic.” But she had too much sense to trash her academic career. Krisztina, like me, wasn't thinking beyond the night to come and which club we would hit. She often met up with me outside Stuyvesant rather than attending the High School of Music and Art.

I was deluded enough to imagine that no one noticed my absence from Bronx Science. After a few weeks, I learned otherwise. I came home one afternoon to find the mail lying by the front door of Twenty-five East Fourth Street. Looking up at me was an envelope with the school letterhead addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Hendra. At first I simply stared at it, thinking how odd it was to see my parents so formally addressed. Who were these people, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Hendra? Certainly not the people I lived with. They never seemed like Mr. and Mrs. anything. Then, I tore open the letter.

I WAS BEING SNITCHED ON
:

“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hendra,” it read.

“It has come to our attention that your daughter, Jessica Hendra, has been absent from our institution for the last consecutive three weeks….”

Busted…if my parents saw it. But the good news was, I found the letter first. That made it all the easier to toss it in the trashcan that stood by the front of our building. Then I paused, pulled it out, and looked at it again. It was serious. I could tell. And I wish I could say that I was having second thoughts. Instead, I ripped it to shreds, stuffed it at the bottom of the garbage and headed upstairs feeling guilty—just not guilty enough to tell my mother the truth. But the Board of Education doesn't give up. After another week without me, the assistant principal of the school called the loft. I wasn't there to intercept this time, and when I came home that day, I found my mother in the kitchen with an unusually stern look on her face.

“Jessica, I got a call from Bronx Science this morning. The principal said you have not been in school one day this entire term!”

What could I say?

“I'm sorry, Ma,” I stammered.

My mother, the Queen of Stoicism, had finally reached her limit. She had tolerated the transformation of her youngest daughter from a pretty, quiet girl into a terrible teen. The knife-cut hair, the attitude, the safety pins, the loud music, the room that looked like a junk heap, the refereeing of the fights between my father and me. The phone call from the school proved more than she could handle.

“My idea of hell is being with you as a teenager for all eternity!”

I stood silent, shocked to hear this kind of emotion from my mother. She hadn't exactly yelled. And it wasn't even close to…say, my father screaming at the TV. But it had served its purpose. I stood in front of her feeling stupid and ashamed, and realizing, perhaps for the first time, that my mother wasn't impervious to her surroundings. Her outburst rightfully was directed at me, but I could sense the pain, the real pain, of my father's affairs, his drinking and drug habit, of Kathy's increasingly obvious issues with food, of me destroying my future. It almost made a serious and lasting impression—but not quite.

My father, of course, was furious, ranting and raving about my “fucking idiotic behavior” and threatening me with military school. I said I was sorry, more out of fear than remorse, and he countered by telling me I was “grounded,” which I thought was an unbelievably 1950s Americana term for my dad to use. The idea of military school didn't appear his style either. Hadn't he warned me against the evils of militarism and patriotism all my life? What about safeties and not raising my hand for the Pledge of Allegiance? What about the Brownies
being Hitler Youth? Hadn't he always encouraged me to resist authority? But faced with the messed-up product of his utterly confusing parenting, I suspect he thought the military sounded like a good idea. Not being grounded himself, Dad left in a passion and didn't return until the early hours of the morning. By then, he was irredeemably stoned and refused my mother's pleas to go with her to the Bronx, even though the letter from the school requested both of them present. So Mom and I trekked uptown without him to plead my case in front of “The Gang of Four,” as my mom dubbed the principal and his associates. My father, as far as they knew, was “out of town.” The Gang of Four took one look at my hair and accessories and suspended me. My career at the Bronx High School of Science ended before it began.

The next stop on my educational path was our local high school, Seward Park. My mother and I walked over one afternoon to sign me up. I thought I was now a street-smart fourteen-year-old punk rocker, but I shook in my combat boots when I saw the kids at Seward. They were tougher than my classmates at P.S. 3 and were much, much bigger. I knew I would never make it through a single day there. My mom knew it too, but private school exceeded our budget. My father didn't care if I got the shit kicked out of me. He thought it would do me some good and was nothing less than I deserved for “fucking up” such a wonderful opportunity as Bronx Science. Maybe he was right. As it was, I ended up getting accepted to a public school on Seventy-first Street that had a “gifted” program. I wasn't feeling the least bit gifted, but Krisztina, who had been kicked out of Music and Art for truancy, was going there, so it seemed as good a place as any. And I went, at least a few times a week, and congratulated myself in my diary: “…I suffered through a whole day of school today,” I wrote. “Actually it wasn't that bad; you just have to get used to it. I'm going to try to go a
whole month without missing a day. Not much of an accomplishment for the average person, but for me….”

One afternoon, Krisztina and I were sitting out on my fire escape, smoking. It was okay for Dad to smoke cigars and pot in the loft, but he had a fit if he smelled cigarette smoke. It didn't matter. We sort of liked the fire escape. It was narrow and rickety, and the black paint was peeling, but for us it served as a private back porch. We took pillows out there and sat for hours, talking and smoking countless Marlboro Lights. Next door was a parking lot, and Krisztina and I could see right down onto the roof, spying on drug deals and guys taking a piss on the cars.

It was cold, and we were huddled in our coats, having the typical conversation of that year: “Madness is playing at Irving Plaza tonight. Do you think we can copy the stamp? I don't have any dough,” Krisztina said.

“I can't go anyway. Daddy had a fucking attack when I asked if I could go out tonight. God I wish we lived alone, just the two of us. Then we could do whatever the fuck we wanted.”

“Jessie, I was looking out my window the other day. (Krisztina and Olga had moved to an apartment on East End Avenue.) It's only three stories high. I know I could climb down out the window. Or maybe I could get a really long rope and get down that way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean I can leave whenever I want, and my mother never has to know.”

I just looked at her.

“Okay, listen. I did it last night, and it worked. I climbed down and went to Tier 3. She never found out.”

“You snuck out of your house and went to Tier 3 without me? You bitch!” I punched her shoulder lightly.

“I'm sorry. But there has to be a way for you to get out too. I mean where does this fire escape go? Nowhere at the bottom, but it goes up to the roof, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, can't you get up the stairwell to the roof?”

“But the door to the stairwell is locked from the inside.”

“Yeah, but I can get out of my house, come down here, open the front door with a key, walk up the stairwell, and unlock the door.”

“Then we can both go down the stairs and out the front door. Do you think it might work?”

We decided to try. I gave Krisztina my key. And while she went back through the loft and up the building stairs to the roof, I climbed three flights up the fire escape. It didn't feel at all sturdy, and looking down through the iron slats made me dizzy. I looked across at where the Lower East Side met the gray sky of early winter. I hoped it wouldn't be too dark if I tried this at night, but if I could find a way to sneak out, it was worth it. I walked across the tarpaper roof, and passed the water tower, opened the stairwell door, and found a smiling Krisztina waiting for me. “It works!”

Krisztina and I agreed to try it for real that night. The problem was timing. We had no idea what hour Olga might go to sleep, so Krisztina could sneak out her window undetected. And I had to wait for her to open the roof door before I could get out. It was too risky to rely on it staying unlocked all evening considering that the artist and part-time drug dealer who lived on the eighth floor checked it each night. I would just have to get ready to go out and sit by the fire escape until I heard Krisztina coming. The plan called for her to knock on the fire escape door when she'd made it in. It would be safer if my parents were asleep, but it was impossible to know when, or if, my father was
coming home. We reasoned that because the loft was so long and my parents' bedroom was on the opposite end from the fire escape door, no one would hear us sneak off even if they were awake. If Kathy found out, we felt certain she could be trusted to keep quiet. Maybe we might even get her to sneak out with us one night.

That night I “went to bed” early—meaning I went to my room, got dressed in a ripped plaid dress and fishnets, and waited in bed for my mother to go into the front room to read. Having told me to be home that night, Daddy was still out. We ran an enormous risk of meeting him coming home, either in the stairwell or on the street, but I decided not to think about it. At around 11:30
P.M
., I heard my mom leave the living room. I made a “body” out of pillows and blankets, so the bed looked occupied. Then I quietly stole to the fire escape door. I sat by it, wrapped in my long, black coat to protect against the draft that came through the cracks. After what seemed like years, I heard a tentative tapping. I unlocked it and peeked out. Krisztina's eyes, defined in black, met mine in the flood light from the parking lot. We had a whispered conference.

“Was your mom asleep?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I almost fell out of the stupid window. I hope no one saw me!”

“My dad's still out.”

“Shit, what if we meet him on the street?”

“I don't know. Let's just get down the stairwell. If we hear him coming up, we'll hide. Once we're out on the street, we can make a run for it.”

The wind felt sharp as we began our ascent to the roof. I went second and felt, even more than I had on our test run, that I might plummet off the side of the fire escape or that it might fall away from the
building entirely.
Oh, well, it's too late now.
In a few minutes, I would either plunge to my death sprawled atop a Chevy in the parking lot, or I'd be on my way to see one of my favorite bands. The fire escape held. We made it over the roof.

As we crept down the stairs, we listened but didn't hear my father's footfalls. Krisztina did a “Tony check” of the street from the front door and found it all clear. Into the freezing night we scurried, pulling our coats over our heads in an imagined disguise. We ran all the way to Irving Plaza. There, we searched the crowd outside for someone we knew who had a hand stamp from the club. Then Krisztina took out the black pen she always carried and deftly copied the stamp onto her hand and mine, and we made it in for the last few songs. At about four in the morning, I slinked back into the loft from the fire escape and got into bed. My parents never knew.

The Great Loft Escape became our almost-nightly routine. Considering we slept about two or three hours most nights, it's not surprising that we fell behind in classes. But I had found a way to escape without battling my father, and I was going to take full advantage. Once I had a near miss when I was walking up Fourth Street at five-thirty in the morning and Dad was letting himself into the building. I hid behind a car in the parking lot until he had plenty of time to get upstairs. Another morning as I headed to school, I heard Krisztina calling softly to me from the basement. She had arrived home to find that her mother had gotten up in the night and bolted the front door. She couldn't sneak back in her house, so she came downtown on the subway at dawn and spent a few hours among the mouse traps and discarded furniture.

Sneaking out could be avoided if I could wrangle permission to stay at Iana's. Her parents never watched the clock, and 3:30
A.M
. was
our usual ETA at their Seventeenth Street loft. Iana and I were now very close. In my diary, dated February 9, 1980, I wrote, “What tonight really turned out to be was ‘talk' night. First off Iana and I had the greatest conversation…. she told me her ‘deepest darkest secret'[whom she had a crush on at the time, which was not the kind of thing Iana usually revealed]. Well I told her my secret, about Daddy.”

My two closest friends, Krisztina and Iana, knew. Still, I never mentioned a word to any adult. I saw no point to it. What had happened happened, I reasoned, and talking about it wasn't going to change anything. But it
had
, to some degree. Telling my friends
had
made me feel better. It seemed to relieve some of the pressure that had built. And they still liked and accepted me regardless.

Miraculously, given that we were fourteen or fifteen, none of us got raped, mugged, or murdered. I had a radar for avoiding scary people—or, at least, scary men—and if I ever grew wary of someone coming toward me on a dark night, I dodged down another street or hid until he passed. The three of us all knew never to accept an invitation to get into a car, and cars weren't really part of our world anyway. Not when we lived in Manhattan. The subway made me more than a little nervous. It seemed so easy to get trapped by some nut case. One night I came home with a friend who had dreamt up a unique defense against predatory men. She acted as though she were schizophrenic. She even kept an Alka-Seltzer or two in her pocket. In real emergencies, she'd break open a packet and put one under her tongue to create the illusion of rabid drool. We noticed a guy following us into one of the subway cars, and almost immediately, she started talking to herself, kicking and screaming at imaginary assailants. The guy got off at the next stop. I was glad she hadn't pulled out the antacids. I felt too timid to try any of this myself and once had to escape a stalker by jumping
off the subway and sprinting through the Times Square subway station until I lost him. It never occurred to me to find a cop. They might wonder what I was doing out at three in the morning. Krisztina had skipped one of our clandestine dates because she jumped a turnstile and was arrested by the transit police. Olga had a near collapse when she had to go down to the station and bail her out. The police were not our friends. I preferred to walk rather than get on the subway. But the most frightening trip I ever had was in a taxi.