Episode 13 ❤️‍🩹 1976-78 : A Tale of Two Dreams

One of dying violently. One of being seen seated between Johnny & Ed

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I stared at the ceiling from my childhood bed, warm, sleepy and okay, a little stoned, under blankets and a growing pile of dirty clothes, trying to figure what’s next. I didn’t want to go back to some job-job. I didn’t have a job-job to go back to, or any job-job skills.

So far, I’d been a halfway decent short-order cook, terrible waitress, karate school receptionist, file clerk, bar bimbo. Quit, fired, quit, fired, fired.

I wasn’t making career decisions—that would’ve required thought and consideration. I was reacting, responding, and not much more self-determined than an amoeba recoiling from a beam of light.

Graduating school at sixteen, without a Regents diploma, all I had was an assload of potential that’d remain unliveduptoable for years.

I imagine I’d spent the weeks since being fired popping the occasional Seconal or Tuinal, whatever I found in the lint and loose tobacco of my pockets, the bottom of my bag; emerging from my bedroom in the attic for food and the occasional pee. The Mardi Gras had required no skills, and I’d still fucked up because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

Engage Brain Before Opening Mouth
That sign—a gift from my father—was on the wall over my bed. I rolled over, Mom stared from the doorway.

“You’re going to get a job, go to college, or you’ll find somewhere else to live. You’re not laying around here all day.” She was shaking, her face white and strained.

She was terrified I’d turn into one of the strays I was always dragging home.

In the movie in my memory, I roll back over, face the wall, curl around my pillow.
I was tired. I was lost.

She’d gone back downstairs. If she cried—she probably did—my father’d punish me later, for upsetting “his wife.”

I’d never planned on college.
I’d planned on being dead by 23.

On Dying Violently

I’ve had the dream every night since I was 15, since they kicked Snake out of the house. It’s four days after my 23rd birthday, someone shoves me onto the tracks in front of a speeding train. Seconds before the Westbound LIRR cuts me into a thousand soft bloody pieces, I see him. Snake. My best friend’s uncle. One of my strays.

We’d met the day he came home from prison. Or jail.¹ I was fifteen. He was probably 30-something. He wore long-sleeved black button-down shirts in the heat of summer—to hide track marks (I figured out years later), and I learned about fixing the shakes with a morning drink from him. I moved him into our house. He asked me to marry him that first day. I said yes.

When Snake showed up I was invisible. Unlovable. Unwanted. How was it he saw something in me, something worth claiming? I hadn’t yet found my way to be naked in front of strangers, to feeling seen and pretty. That was years away. Of course I said, yes.

I never knew what he’d been charged with. I don’t believe I asked.
I didn’t ask how he got my phone number, who’d told him about me, why he couldn’t go to his sister’s house.
I didn’t ask—a lot.

He’d gotten my number from the boy I’d given my virginity to eight days earlier, a few days before my 15th birthday. I was 14 , he was 17; we were each other’s firsts in the sand behind the backstop of the East softball field that sits between Parking Lot 2 and Parking Lot 3. Being deflowered in sand, in the middle of the day, close enough to the restrooms to read the upside down WOMEN sign, when you arch your back and look behind you is exactly as romantic as you imagining.

I’d like to tell you I’d been taking control of my sexuality, and I was curious, but I’m sure I hadn’t yet heard the word, sexuality. Nor would I understand it was something one could take control of. A friend who was a year younger (13) had been having sex in the giant sewer pipes of the sump between our streets. I wanted what she had, desirability.

My father would say men give love to get sex, and women give sex to get love. I think he believed that that’s what love was, is. We tell ourselves stories. We make the narrative fit how we want to see ourselves, believe what we need to believe to get through a day, mold facts to fit a truth we can accept. At 14, how could I know that love isn’t transactional.

So, when Snake asked. I said yes.
He was not the last person to suggest marriage.
I said yes to all of them.

There are only two possible answers to this question: “Will you marry me?”
You can say Yes, or say Goodbye.

To the men I’ve known it’s always been shorthand for: If you say no, I’m leaving you.

By the time the second ask came around, I already knew any “relationship” would die off pretty quickly, so saying Yes was easy. It was win/win—He (whoever he was at the moment) got his hostage and I’d leave whenever I started to feel claustrophobic.

I’d say yes four or five times and never plan a wedding.

Get a Job, Go to College, or Find Somewhere Else to Live.

Any decision-making process would’ve grown out of my mother’s expectation that I could do anything if I put my mind to it and lived up to my potential. And my absolute surety my father’d never wanted children, didn’t want me, that I’d never measure up to his bigger than life stories.

When I ran away at 11, they knew where I was headed. He was happy to let me go; she forced him to go get me. I’d thought he’d been supportive of my “adventurous” spirit, but he just wanted time alone with my mother.
I was a distraction.
I was competition.

We competed with each other.

He wanted her attention and love; she wanted mine.
I wanted his attention and love; all he could see was my mother.
She stood between us, metaphorically and physically, shielding me from his anger, distracting him from...
A distraction meant to keep me safe, all I could see was that she had her back to me.

Here’s what I remember:
They were locked together in an angry bubble, I was on the outside.
I couldn’t reach her and he didn’t see me.

She thought I could change the world.
He called me a whore for putting my socks on at the kitchen table.

Neither one of those visions of me felt like a good fit.
I didn’t have one of my own.

At 17, 18, 19, I was…unmoored.
It’s all so easy to see fifty years and a lifetime later.
Love isn’t finite. There’s enough to go around, it’s a deep, bottomless well.
None of us knew that.

I wouldn’t find the key that unlocked all that until he’d been dead for almost twenty years and she was a few years into mild cognitive impairment, far enough in that her internal editor was gone and secrets came tumbling out.

But it’s 1977 or 1978 and I don’t know any of anything.

On Being Seated Between Johnny & Ed

I’d thought I’d be a lawyer, until I worked in a law firm.
I thought the bars would be easy money, and fucked that up.
My plan had been a factory job & a cold-water walk up². I lasted one day in a factory making little spools of copper wire from giant spools of copper wire. Eight hours of winding wire bobbins, fingers too swollen by clock-out to fold my hand enough to hitchhike or fit a finger into the hole of a rotary dial payphone to ask for a ride. I remember sitting on the curb and crying. I have no idea how I got home. So, add that to the list of stellar careers I’d started. Factory: quit.

I drank in neighborhood bars and corner dives. I shared joints and myself with strangers in parks, hid in dark rooms, dank bars, discos with lighted floors and tried to figure out—what now?

I thought about joining the army and learning a trade, like demolition, after which I’d get a job working for the mob blowing things up.
I considered running away & joining the circus; settled for sleeping with the manager of a traveling carnival and working a night or two in a gorilla costume in the haunted house.³
I dreamed of being statuesque canary in a blue-sequined gown singing torch songs to a scattering of melancholy & messy drunks in a smoky half-empty bar with overflowing ashtrays, but I was a big-boned gal who could neither carry a tune nor keep to a beat.
I wondered how one went about becoming a madam.

Truthfully, I didn’t want a job.

I wanted to be divorced and get big alimony checks, for which I would handwrite lovely thank you notes each month.
I wanted to be the widow of a very rich, very old man, and get a huge inheritance when he died on the honeymoon.
More than anything, I wanted to be a regular on the Tonight Show, semi-permanently sandwiched between Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. I wanted to be Carol Wayne. Or Charles Grodin. Guests invited because they were clever and funny.
I wanted to be a wanted guest.
I wanted to be wanted.

Get a job, go to college, or find somewhere else to live.
Looking for the option most likely to get me the seat between Johnny and Ed, I enrolled in Nassau Community College (NCC)—community colleges have to take you no matter what—with a plan to become an Academy Award-winning actress.

Lazy, I couldn’t memorize lines. Never got past “There once was a man from Nantucket.” But my plan involved an Oscar not an Emmy, I’d only have to memorize one scene at a time.

The reality of auditions and competing for roles ended that dream.
I had yet to try to do anything.
Things fell into my lap, I stumbled over them, or defaulted to them.
If they were hard, had a learning curve or I had to struggle, I quit.
If I had to work to get something, I didn’t.

I did some tech on the performances, where I could get dirty, get my name on the program and never had to be seen. I’d graduate from a two-year college with an associates degree in theater —which qualified me to be a waitress—never having read Shakespeare, Chekov or Ibsen.

Some True Things about Money

Facts & truths can disagree, things can still work out just fine.

1. I’d paid my own tuition for community college, 1976-1978.

2. In 1977 I earned $8. Eight dollars. Eight. Dollars.

When you’re young and arrogant you’re making Art, with a capital A. It’s inspired, the world should recognize you as a goddamned artistic genius. Decades later, rummaging through a drawer looking for a pencil or a battery that hasn’t started leaking potassium hydroxide and crusted over in crumbling white crystals, you’ll find it when, re-read or re-view and think, “Goddamn, I was a moron, this is shite.”

At NYU, in the summer of 1979, I made a 16mm student film. We viewed it as a class and I haven’t seen My Film since. I knew it was bad then, I feel secure saying that the intervening 40+ years has not made it better with age. It was not wine, cheese and definitely was not Art. Not even art.

I don’t know if I completed that semester, if there was one class or more. Both parents working full-time had a combined income was $11K⁴. We didn’t borrow. If you couldn’t pay cash, you went without. There was no way I could’ve come up with NYU level tuition. I’d gotten a scholarship. I felt poor, dirty and ugly.

It felt like pity.

How would your life change, if you knew when it was going to end?

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1. Jails are for shorter bids, usually less than a year, prisons are for longer-term sentences.

2. Cold water walk-up, a phrase I’d heard who knows where, and yet another thing I didn’t know any of anything about.

3. And a few years down the road, when I’m offered a spot traveling and working for Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus, where I’d have had a chance to learn to work with the big cats, I turned it down.

4. Equivalent to $60K in 2025. In NY the middle class two income range is $106,000 to $150,000 in 2025.