Cameron tells me that thanks to my January birthday I’m passing through a dark time, this past year or so, in which Pluto is blocking my Capricorn sun. In the myth of Persephone, Pluto drags his kidnapped bride to the underworld by her feet and ankles, preventing her from reaching the light aboveground. Grabbing her feet and ankles. As narratives go, I’ll take it, because the narrative in which I work very hard to prevent a recurrence of cancer and am instead felled by another broken bone is one that really needs some better structure to make goddamn sense.
This week has been hard, in other words, but it has allowed for down time to go digging in the digital vault and excavate pieces like this, which I wrote as part of Ariel Gore’s “Experiments in Memoir” workshop a few years ago. It’s completely not holiday-appropriate, but among the many things I am thankful for, I am always grateful to have had the good fortune to be a teenager in Seattle in the 80s. It was actual magic.
*
When I was in ninth grade I would come home after school and, sloughing off my self-imposed uniform of corduroy and despair, try on a new personality for the afternoon. At my private school on the far end of town I was alienated and glum, the inexplicable locus for some mean girl social drama. I ate alone at lunch, picking at my salad, my five croutons, my teaspoon of dressing. Sometimes I’d just go eat in my adviser’s office, behind the drama department stage. I was getting straight-As but I wanted to disappear.
On those afternoons when I didn’t have too much homework though, when the sky wasn’t drizzling Seattle gray, I’d find the pink denim jacket I bought at Esprit, and the dangly gold earrings my father had given me, a hand-me-down from a client. I’d put on some raccoon eyeliner, sometimes—though that was harder to get away with—and I’d go for a walk. I’d walk down the hill from our house and then a few blocks west along the canal road until I got to the University Bridge. It was called that because it went to the University of Washington, around which hovered the U-District, which really was just a ten-block stretch of University Avenue.
I’d walk across the bridge, and cut under past the law school, and the dorm named Terry Hall. Later, after I changed schools, my new friends and I joked about coincidence of the UW having a dorm named after the lead singer of the Specials. My new best friend, then, wore a long, black thrifted trench with a stencil of a porkpie-hatted figure skanking on the back. We stashed the deep pockets of her trench with a fifth of vodka and a bottle of orange juice to go to the Metropolis, the first of several short-lived all-ages clubs later understood to be ground zero of the Seattle scene, and mix screwdrivers in the alley. But before all that I cruised the Ave.
Up one side of the street, past the Army-Navy store and the headshop, past the clog store that sold itchy wool hats. Past the arcade (too many boys) and past the used bookstore. Eventually I worked up the nerve to go inside, and I’d spend hours sifting through dusty paperbacks of writers I didn’t fully understand. Once I’d mastered the books, I’d stop at the newsstand-slash-espresso bar and read copies of Interview and British fashion magazines, maybe get a latte. And then finally, thus fortified, I would cross the threshold of the record store, and brave the judgement of the clerks. I’d thumb through albums -- XTC, the Jam, the Smiths -- and pretend I was allowed to be there. And then I’d walk past the bank. There, the skate punks practiced grinding on the railing of the ramp, while girls with crimped hair and leather jackets smoked djarums and stared into the middle distance.
I’d walk by in my pink jacket and gaudy earrings, and then I’d loop back to the other side of the street and stroll by again, never looking anyone in the kohl-lined eye, before, dinner on the horizon, I had to stop for the day and speed walk back across the bridge.
*
My mother grew up on the campus of my private school, then a boys boarding school, the treasured only child of the Latin teacher. When she was a teenager, the boys in the dorm pooled their money and drew straws to see who would take Mac’s daughter out on her first date. A few years later, as a college student, she met my father there, when he was living with his older brothers in the attic wing of the headmaster’s house, their parents having taken their two younger siblings and moved to London. My father, the middle child of the five, and his brothers drove the school buses in the morning and then the three of them carpooled down to the University of Washington campus with my mother in tow.
Boarding school, Latin teacher, headmasters’ homes: all these details conspire to paint a clear picture of privilege. And yet, at that private school we were not rich. My mother’s parents were teachers, and lived almost their entire lives in housing provided by the school; during that lonely ninth grade year I would sometimes slip across the street from campus for a hug from my grandma. My father’s parents lived off the beneficence of the church. In their heyday they led a posh life, I hear, but it did not trickle down through the generations, or even last much after my grandfather, the Very Right Reverend, died at the young age of 66.
At that private school I was surrounded by children of politicians and industry, recognizable names in 80s Seattle, their homes new mansions on the lake, six-bedroom colonials with pools, brick Tudors in exclusive gated communities. We lived in the starter home my parents bought in 1968 and in which they stayed until 2013. The cognitive dissonance would have been deafening if I’d been able to put a name to it back then. Instead, though, I just drifted, unsure why I didn’t fit in, why I couldn’t eat, why I felt so alone.
*
“Hey new girl. Do ya drink?”
Did I? Maybe?
“I … have?”
“Come over to Tammy’s at 8 on Friday. Bring five bucks for booze. We’ll go to a party.”
I show up at the appointed time. My mom dropped me off. I didn’t tell her about the five bucks in my pocket. I wore my pink jacket, but as I walked in the door, I realized it was going to have to go.
Seven tenth graders were crammed into Tammy’s bedroom in an explosion of steam and trenchcoats, girls resplendent in ankle-tight Levis and Converse, scuffed men’s brogues and pilled thrift store cardigans. Tammy and Krista and Melissa wore matching jackets with silkscreened plackets on the back: Fearsome Threesome, they read, in spiky gothic script. Tammy’s sister returned from the store and produced the promised alcohol. On the way to the party we stopped at the 7-11 and loaded up on Big Gulps of Coke and Sprite. By the time we got to the cemetery we had sucked down enough of the soda to top them back up again with 151.
It was October in Seattle and the treetops shimmered in the dusk. I had only started in on my Big Gulp but the damp ground shifted, undulated, as I trailed my new friends into the gloaming. On the grass near the grave of Bruce Lee dozens of kids pulsed and glowed, music from the boom box bouncing off the headstones. Parliament. Newkleus. Africa Bambaataa. Talking Heads. An invisible hand, firm on the small of my back, pushed me toward the thrum, boys and girls indistinguishable, ecstatic, vibrating. I felt myself lifted up, outside of myself. And yet, not. I was here. I had always been here? The glow surged from gold to amber. The music washed through us and under us and through the liquid tangerine haze I saw we were children, in sneakers and braces, but we were also the most important people in the world.
It was dark and cold. Somehow I was sitting on a log, my head between my thighs. Somehow Melissa grabbed my face, told me I was fine. It was gonna all be fine. They were going to take care of me. And then they did.
*
When I wasn’t walking the Ave that sad ninth grade year, I often stayed home and baked. I baked loaves of inedibly dense bread from the Tassajara Bread Book. I baked scones pelted with currants and hippie muffins heavy with zucchini and oil. I baked cheese sticks, braided and loaded with Parm. I baked gingerbread and Toll House cookies and I baked buche de Noel, buttercream-frosted logs of cake decorated with fondant lichen and flowers, dusted with chocolate “soil.” They were my crowning achievement.
Pour the batter for the sponge into a shallow pan and bake for 20 minutes.
Slip the sponge out of the pan onto a piece of waxed paper. Frost the top side with buttercream.
Starting at one end, roll the cake into a log, taking care not to break the crumb.
Once rolled, frost the whole thing. Don’t stint. Make it drip with frosting; you’ll never have to eat it yourself.
Add decorative elements: make a twig out of a leftover scrap of cake; add a “mushroom” made from a blob of fondant that fell on the floor. On the end, sit a girl in a pink jacket clutching a Big Gulp, looking up at the wavering canopy, the unfolding future, in awe.
I can’t get enough of your writing. Splendid.
This piece rakes me back, but not to Seattle of the long-ago, pre- the "Before Times", as I never made it out here from the East Coast until I had aged out of teenage-hood. But the experience of being a lonely private school 9th-grader misfit in Philadelphia was much like the one you describe for yourself. Minus the pink denim jacket.