You Must Go and Win: Essays (10 page)

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Authors: Alina Simone

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But it did not take long for me to realize how elusive a quality Amanda’s ambition was to capture in a still photograph. All the viewer ever saw was a young woman eating a bagel or sitting on a folding chair and talking on the phone. They didn’t see the patina of poignancy that Amanda’s youthful dreams cast over the scene. They had no way of knowing that this young woman was a precelebrity, and her half-eaten bagel and telephone would soon be available on eBay.
Or
that she was tragically fated never
to become famous. That she would end up on the street, unironically clutching a paper cup that said “Have a Happy Day,” begging for change in Harvard Square and mourning the halcyon days of bagels and telephones.
The people photographing fat men making toast did not have this problem. That’s because theirs was not a nuanced story of a young woman at the crossroads of fate and desire, but an unambiguous story of fat men making toast. To understand Amanda, I decided, the viewer needed more context. And so I switched to videotape, which I quickly found had a lot of advantages. With a video camera in my hand, my information-gathering powers broadened considerably. I could ask a million different questions, breaking Amanda’s ambition down into its molecular components. I could grind away at the witnesses, her family and friends, her bandmates and lovers, until I came to understand the source of her confidence. And in the end, I would be able to gather all that evidence, those endless miles of footage, and from the safety of a darkened room, study it until the answer revealed itself—the secret ingredient, the Three Fundamental Categories, the Four Noble Truths, the twelve-step plan—whatever thing it was that made success finally possible.
 
 
As it turned out, I didn’t watch the tapes for nine years. I transferred all the Hi-8 tapes to VHS for easy viewing, then put them in a cardboard box, stuck them in a broom closet, and forgot about them. When I finally did decide to watch them, it wasn’t because I was looking for a primer on how to get famous; it was because my back went out and I couldn’t do much else. It happened one day after the cat threw up on the rug. I had washed it as best I could in the bathtub and then laid it out on the balcony to dry. But as luck would have it, the next day it rained, and it
continued to rain for two weeks straight. The rug developed a fungus, a cheerful, cotton candy looking thing that raced along the rug’s edges. It looked too happy to be there to go away without a fight. I decided to throw the whole thing away, but didn’t figure on how heavy the waterlogged rug would be when I bent down to pick it up. That’s how my back went out and that’s when I remembered the tapes.
I shuffled into the living room and slipped the first VHS tape into the player. I was eating a yogurt—an activity that mercifully required no back muscles—and the cat jumped up onto the coffee table, politely drilling me with his stare. The cat was fat and I wasn’t supposed to give him any yogurt. He kept staring. I gave him some yogurt. The cat went cross-eyed with pleasure. And the tape began.
 
 
I was back in Lexington with Amanda again, in the passenger seat of her old silver station wagon. It was autumn and brilliant-colored leaves swirled across the lawns like scratch tickets blowing through a Shell station.
“Should we start in chronological order?” I am asking Amanda, who for some reason is wearing a wreath of tinfoil stars in her hair.
“No, there’s too much,” Amanda says. “We should pick a few choice sites. Let’s see … there’s the bridge above Grant Street and the story of Randy Jeffries, there’s the Hastings grave where I broke up with Jason, and then there’s the bungalow by Granny Pond where I gave my first blow job, but I didn’t know how, so it wasn’t a real blow job …”
“More like a tentative licking?” I supplied.
“Yes,” she agreed, nodding. “More a tentative licking.”
We needed some heartbreakingly raw footage of Amanda recalling her tawdry upbringing on the streets of Lexington to juxtapose
against all the footage that would come later, the postfame footage. I had decided it was better to tape it now, before the Givenchy ads and charity telethons, the plastic surgeries, addiction to prescription painkillers, and botched third-world adoption schemes. Yes, better now, while Amanda was still relatively fresh-faced and unself-conscious. I had planned to intercut this footage with another interview, where I’d asked Amanda to describe Lexington, the colonial town where we’d both grown up, for someone who’d never been there before.
“Lexington is
so safe
. It’s the
safest place in the world
,” Amanda exhaled heavily before continuing in a sing-song voice. “You can leave your bike out on the lawn, you don’t really have to lock your house. It is so clean and so well manicured and the
people
there are so well manicured. They all have a prop. Whether it’s their baby carriage prop, or their newspaper prop, or their intellectual book prop. They all convene at Starbucks and they all order triple short lattes with a shot of hazelnut and no whipped cream and low-fat milk. And they say it
so quickly
. It arrives in their cup and they pay their four dollars and they walk out into the sun and they sit on a bench and they watch their neighbors go by and they smile and wave and the dogs stop to sniff at each other’s asses.
And everything is perfect
. Not a thing is amiss, not even the little punk kids in their little punk clothes that cost them lots of money, also sitting outside of Starbucks talking about how
fucked up
Lexington is and how
fucked up
the world is.”
Then I remember the dilemma that Amanda faced growing up in Lexington, once the site of revolutionary bloodshed, now the site of Philip Ciampa Salon & Day Spa, Evolve Pilates, and La Riviera Gourmet. She wanted trouble—the one commodity in short supply. The year I graduated from high school, a woman who lived out on Ridge Road was stabbed in her home and ended up bleeding to death because the guy on duty at the local fire department
assumed that hers was a prank call. Which is just another way of saying that Amanda had her work cut out for her when she launched her own private war of independence. She was arrested at fifteen for shoplifting, the same year that she had an affair with her thirty-five-year-old piano teacher. But these were run-of-the-mill transgressions, the stuff of after-school specials. By graduation she had perfected the art of being a fuckup, attracting police attention for stunts like crashing Lexington’s legendary Patriot’s Day parade with a group of friends dressed in tutus and ski goggles calling themselves the Scottish Socialist Tea Party. Myself, I’d always been jealous of the simple fact that Amanda managed to get out of taking
math
in high school. “It just wasn’t going to happen,” she’d replied briskly when I asked her about it once. This was something I’m sure I could never have accomplished, not if I’d shown up at school with a harpoon sticking out of my eye.
We drive to the bridge above Grant Street where her parents once caught her making out with a “wayward” youth, really just a kid from our high school who lived on welfare with his mom in the Battle Green Inn. We stop at Dunkin Donuts for coffee because it is not Starbucks, and then continue on to Battle Green Square, which might best be described as New England’s most historic traffic island. I train the camera on Amanda as she climbs up onto the Minuteman statue and spends a good minute up there groping the Minuteman’s crotch.
“I always thought he had the best ass ever of anyone in the world,” she calls out, slipping back to the ground. “It’s, like, so perfect and rounded and firm, you know?” Without a beat, she turns to point at a stately brick Colonial across the street. “That’s the rectory of the church I went to. I should totally take you there.”
But unsurprisingly, we head in the opposite direction from the church, over to the Old Belfry, where Amanda smoked her
first cigarette. Then we drive to the site of the aborted blow job, a little stone bench nestled in a patch of woods that happened to be located on someone’s private property. There, Amanda tells me how it ended, with Peter Tortelli zipping up his pants and refusing to ever speak to her again, even after she sent him the lyrics to “The Same Deep Waters as You” by the Cure, painstakingly written out in longhand on romantic paper. We make our way back to the main road. New England autumn, at its tourist trapping peak, explodes all around us. The camera shakes as I follow Amanda out of the woods, back to her car. And that’s where the footage suddenly breaks off. There is some static, and when the picture comes back into focus she is gone and suddenly I am back in the kitchen of my parents’ house, where I find them arguing over a casserole.
 
 
I was sorting through the tapes, looking for another good bit to watch and remembering that the road to fame was a twisty one, and there was a time when Amanda, like me, was all talk and little traction. She would wax on about writing songs, forming a band, playing shows, getting famous … but whenever I checked in, she wasn’t doing any of these things. What she was doing was falling into bed with guys she happened to sit next to at Café Pamplona and standing on a milk crate in Harvard Square while tourists took her picture for a dollar. Maybe this is why we came up with the idea of the road trips—because aside from shooting Amanda performing as the Eight Foot Bride or mooning around coffee shops, there wasn’t much of a story here.
But there must have been some deeper explanation for why we decided to drive aimlessly around the country for weeks, videotaping the Eight Foot Bride in a series of increasingly improbable locales. My loneliness? Her desperation? A mutual desire to live out some kind of Jack Kerouac,
On the Road
fantasy? The tapes
were poorly labeled, though, so I managed to find only one other clue, from the night we spent in a trashy motel near Niagara Falls. We had gone to a strip club downtown earlier that evening, where Amanda had kissed me. She did it right there at the table as we were nursing our watery cocktails and watching a Chippendale’s wannabe grope a drunk Buffalo housewife on her birthday. It was the first time I’d ever kissed a girl, but after a few days of life on the road with Amanda, such things had come to seem normal. It would have been more shocking, I think, had we just watched some
Full House
reruns and gone to bed early. Anyway, we returned to our motel room, where a photo mural of an island paradise was fighting a losing battle with the very real landscape of urban decay just outside our window. Amanda dumped half a bottle of bubble bath into our heart-shaped Jacuzzi and let the hot water run. When the tub was full, she crawled in. I am off to the side somewhere, as usual, taping.
“Why are we here?” I ask her. “What is the purpose of this trip?”
Amanda leans against the red plastic lip of the tub, arms akimbo and pit hair in full bloom. A delta of black mascara has formed beneath each eye. There is a pause. And then she shrugs.
“I just love the idea of putting things where they don’t belong.”
I was one of those things, I thought to myself. The less-glamorous hanger-on. I had been twenty pounds heavier back then and now cringed whenever I saw myself on tape. I hit fast forward and watched Amanda watching rainbows suspended in the mist of Niagara Falls until the tape ended. There were other questions that I wanted answered, but the tapes defied any kind of logic. Whenever I cued up a new one, it invariably started in the middle, in some weird and disorienting new place. Like this scene, here, where I am crashing over a carpet of dead leaves, then stopping to zoom in on a hand-painted sign that reads: IN BAD WEATHER, STUMP SERVICE WILL BE HELD IN THE AUDITORIUM. We were in Lily Dale, a small community in upstate New York that was home to the world’s largest community of “Spiritualists,” tromping through a pet cemetery, looking for a good place for Amanda to set up the Eight Foot Bride.
“We haven’t gone to the Healing Tree yet, have we?” I call ahead to Amanda.
“No,” she shouts back over her shoulder.
Amanda is dressed like a trick-or-treater minus the paper bag, in a shiny purple cape with leopard-print trim. By the time we arrive at the Forest Temple, it is too late. The sun is setting through the trees and there isn’t enough light left to shoot. So we get back in the car and then drive to Cleveland. We sleep in Amanda’s station wagon, in the parking lot of a Days Inn, and set off to try our luck again in the morning. Time jerks ahead. We are pulling into the tranquil landscaped grounds of the Our Lady of Lourdes Shrine and Grotto in Euclid, Ohio, with Swollen Members’ “Paranoia” blasting through our open windows. Amanda turns to flash a crooked smile at my ever-ready Hi-8 cam and then slows to give a nearby statue of Jesus a jaunty thumbs-up. We pause to make an offering of fifty cents at the grotto altar. Good insurance, I suppose, considering what was to come.

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