Episode 8 ❤️‍🩹 1975: Unlovable & Invisible, I Became Someone Else

I might never be pretty, but I could learn to be desirable

Feb 28, 2025

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I was never a pretty girl.

Growing up in Levittown, I was a cute kid, sure, but by sixth grade it was over.

There’s a photo, a group of kids just back from caroling, crowded into someone’s mother’s kitchen having hot chocolate. All girls, all regular happy kids.

And me. Hair heading in a million different directions, looking like I cut it myself, which maybe. I’ve been known to hack at my hair—a friend says it’s a self-hate thing. I think I’m looking for the haircut that will change my life, make my life better.

In the movies, women on the run are always cutting and dyeing their hair in the dingy back bathroom of some roadside gas station and transform into a-dor-able and French in big black sunglasses and a perfect Jean Seberg pixie cut.

Mine frequently looks like it was cut in a poorly-lit, dingy gas station bathroom.

In this particular post-caroling childhood photo, wearing black octagon framed glasses, I’m clenching my teeth, straining directly into the camera — showing all my teeth and gums. I look….maniacal. It was what I thought a smile was supposed to look like.

I had no idea how to be in my own skin.

A chubby, awkward kid with no idea how to fit in, what it meant to be a girl, a friend, or how to make people like me. Since 6th grade—

Judging by the collection of class photos, that summer between 5th and 6th grade was when something happened, went wrong—comfort and innocence were lost, my skin went sallow and someone, maybe me, hacked at my hair.

—I looked like a middle-aged school teacher with a bad haircut, I would most of my life. I’d had a 35-year-old demeanor when I was barely 12, a teacher-librarian thing, not in the take off the glasses, shake out your hair and you’re hot way. Looking at my life through a Beverly Hillbillies lens, I aspired to Ellie May Clampett, but the mirror saw Miss Jane Hathaway.

I was always Ethel, never Lucy.

I still hear my boyfriend’s voice telling me that his older brother’d pulled him aside and said, “Dump her, man, she looks like a teacher.”

Brother wasn’t wrong. I was 17, and I didn’t get dumped, but that sentence would echo off the walls of my brain for decades

What I saw in the mirror was unlovable.

Robbie’s Mardi Gras changed everything.

The first time I was pretty, I was behind the bar at Robbies.

Seventeen or eighteen years old, a line of men sat at my section of the bar because they wanted my attention. They saw a different me, not the chubby weird kid I saw, they saw a new girl and they wanted me to see them.

The New Girl. That’s me.

A Tangential Encounter with Beauty

The other girls, dancers and barmaids, are mostly friendly, mostly glamorous.

Lisa used to be a Rockette, she has one famous boob—it made the cover of High Times, covered in chocolate syrup, her nipple the cherry on top. She ran in waving a copy over her head the day it hit the newsstands. Lisa could dance standing on her head; I’ll never get that trick, but she is teaching me how to suck a long neck Budweiser off and make it come. Guys loved that trick.

Guys are idiots.

An older barmaid, thirty (?), with black-black hair and a Tweety tattoo on her ass, kind of adopted me. Raven’s teaching me to mix drinks and says to start thinking about a name. You have to have at least two names. One for work, another for life. You use your own name, anyone can find you out there in the world.

The world. Out there.
There was here, there was out there. Us and Them. Tangential circles intersecting at the single point of double glass doors.

The men

The men are okay, mostly my father’s age. Most of them white guys in white short-sleeved button down shirts and two-dollar ties. Two-Dollar Tie guys, drinking their lunch, their paychecks. Rye & Ginger. Seven & Seven. Scotch & Soda.

The brothers, most of them—pimps, sit with me or Raven, other girls don’t want them. Pimps want fancy, colorful drinks to match their outfits, drinks that require cocktail shakers and milk, like Grasshoppers. I don’t mind, they tip better and they’re friendly. Real friendly.

There’s one in particular, Jasus. Jasus J. Huntsberry. Everyone calls him JJ.

JJ was there from the beginning. Sleepy gray eyes behind delicate gold wire-rimmed glasses and a voice, so soft it had the power to make you lean in to him. Skin like dusty pecans. Dark blue suits, tailored. Handmade leather shoes. JJ Huntsberry is a suggestion, a mood. A stillness in stark contrast to the flash moves and harsh peacock colors of other pimps. When he’s here, I feel cared for, looked after. Special. Safe from the reaches of other pimps and street daddies looking to turn out a new fish.

That’s me. New Fish.
Not invisible.

2025

Frankie was dead. I was unemployed. Then I walked into the Mardi Gras tough enough to control anything that came my way. Maybe I’d recreate myself as a real-life version of Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny, maybe I’d find my way to be a kept woman, a mobster’s girlfriend, or a call girl. If you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, those were my top three choices. The world was full of possibilities. That’s what I thought.

You’re thinking, “Jeez, but you were a real idiot,” and that’s fair.

Maybe you don’t have any idea how intoxicating attention is. Attention is…sunlight. It’s air. It’s warm sands and a breeze off the ocean. It’s that first taste of heroin that takes you back to the womb, dark, warm, safe, unbroken—all is right with the world, anything is possible, and you never want to come out of wherever it took you.

You get a hit like that, you’ll chase it for the rest of your life.

Maybe you came from a place where you felt loved, warm and wanted all the time. Maybe you even were.

But, have you never felt broken? Irreparable? That the rest of the world feels things you can’t, has things, inside, you’ll never be able to have? Maybe you’re here to enjoy the voyeuristic pleasure that comes from watching hard and dirty things from a safe distance, feeling superior, watching someone fail or struggle or stumble blindly.

Maybe that’s who you are.

I had invincibility of youth, the comforting knowledge I’d be dead by twenty-three. I wouldn’t have to worry about anything after that. I’d be free.

I didn’t have to plan a life, a family, a future. A whole lifetime needed to be crammed into a few years.

Having subsisted on emotional breadcrumbs, even a glance, a beat too long, in my direction and I got weak at the knees. A full meal was overwhelming, painful. But a tidbit, tossed in my direction, I’d scramble for more, following the trail, gathering up the scraps, combing through the dregs.

Things like love and loneliness can used to cut you if you weren’t taught what to do with them. Maybe you develop an armor, like armadillos and pangolins do, because if they find your soft spot, the soft underbelly of your vulnerability...so curl up, let the world throw anything at you. You have your armor, your scales and scutes.

Newsflash! I was wrong about dying young. I was wrong about being able to control everything. I was wrong about a lot of things.

But I was right about one thing.

When I stepped behind the bar and felt the attention of those men—looking at me, holding me close with their eyes, trying to get my attention—I knew I’d stepped through the looking glass and found a world where I might be pretty. And if not lovable, at the very least, I could feel desirable.