So many stories in this photo! My freshly bleached blond hair (and eyebrows!) that matched the dog’s coat. My dad’s girlfriend’s dog is humping me and I’m genuinely laughing (a rare look for me at age 15.) My 80’s “New Wave” explosion style: Keith Haring print leggings, oversized men’s dress shirt, black-on-black Swatch watch, big spiky hair, huge earrings, fedora, winged eyeliner with iridescent white lipstick (I was trying to emulate Eddie Sedgwick’s makeup, another style icon I loved.) And you get a glimpse of the infamous stained beige couch and the TV we worshipped (it seemed so much bigger in my memory!
(this is part two of Raised By Wolves)
When I was in the tenth grade I was still painfully shy, scarred from being bullied when I started as a new student in junior high and only made one or two friends. The few friends I made there had scattered to the wind to find their own collective girl tribes when we landed in high school. I searched too, but I was a square peg trying so hard to fit into a round hole- either no one would let me in or it was just an uncomfortable fit. I tried the preppy look (Navy blue Izod shirts, khakis and Topsiders but they were just so boring and worn by rich snobs.) Then I joined the jocks (I made the track team just so I could wear the school’s official purple team jacket to get noticed and accepted by the popular jock kids.) I felt repressed in those groups so I went in the opposite direction: I teased my hair several inches high, going through a can of Aqua Net a week (apologies for wrecking the ozone layer and creating global warming in the wake of ‘80s ridiculous hairdos.) I pierced a few more holes in my ears hanging several earrings with crosses and daggers like ornaments adorning a Christmas tree. Distressed all my denim with splashes of bleach and a cheese grater. Listened to every Judas Priest, Pink Floyd and Zeppelin album, started smoking pot and doing acid to fit in with the ‘metal’ kids (also known as the ‘dirtbags’ druggies’ and ‘burnouts’ in my school.) They generally reeked of cigarette smoke and/or weed as they gathered daily like an informal club at “Smoker’s Alley” behind the building. While I liked dressing more creatively and also found some allies in the group, most of them weren’t terribly intelligent, ambitious or nerdy like I was. They embraced mainstream hard rock and metal which I also loved but they thought the punk/goth scene was totally weird and they certainly didn’t like New Wave or “College radio”. Sometimes I would catch a rare sighting of a few punk rock kids at the mall and I would stare in envy and in awe of their bravery to be fully self-expressed and also make themselves a target. Their hair shaved into multicolored ‘mohawk’ styles that looked like a Cockatoo’s crest, leather motorcycle jackets with obscure bands names hand painted on the back and Doc Martens boots (worn by punk rockers and ‘Rude Boys’ in the Ska scene starting in the late ‘70s before they got popular in the US in the mid 1990s.)
Since cool and edgy didn’t exist in the suburbs and there was no internet (gasp!), I was lucky to have cable TV and MTV was the closest thing to taking off in a rocket ship to find my leaders of confidence, sex and style: Madonna, Debbie Harry, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, The Cure and all the “Metal Hair” bands for hair and makeup inspiration from the pretty boys in Poison and Motley Crue. {History lesson for my readers under 40: MTV was short for Music Television. Back in those days its programming was 95% music videos and it was the only way you could learn about “alternative” bands and watch subversive British TV shows that weren’t part of mainstream radio and TV.}
When most of my classmates would go to keg parties with their friends on the weekends, I would be on the commuter rail traveling sixty miles west to visit my mom and wander around the East Village taking in the homemade artsy clothes I saw walking past me in the streets. Big purple hair. The independent record stores, new sounds, Silence Equals Death pink triangles spray painted on sidewalks and buildings (I was totally clueless about the AIDS crisis but I liked the subversive graffiti.) NYC buzzed with a frequency I loved and also intimidated me after the earlier trauma I experienced living there with my absentee mother. I felt kind of snobbish around most of my classmates who seemed uncultured and over protected, some confessed they had never been to Brooklyn or Manhattan despite being only a two-hour train ride away. It would take me another year to feel courageous enough to express my inner art school rocker chick and embrace what the other kids spat in my face:
“Hey Weirdo.”
“Hey Fag.”
Maybe those words actually described me and they weren’t really insults. I knew deep down I was not meant to shut up, blend in with the cheerleaders, date a football jock and marry him after graduation (as so many of my classmates would go on to do.) In 11th grade I bleached my long brunette hair platinum blonde and cut it short and spiky with my own shears. I emulated Madonna’s cool sexy look- I wore a lot of black against bright colorful prints, oversized men’s suit jackets, black velvet hats and lots of jangly jewelry. Once I even wore to school extra large men’s boxer underwear (which I bought used at a vintage store on Canal Street) over my tights because Madonna did it and she was my fearless Goddess of Style. I never did find my pack of weirdos but I did experiment with looks that expressed the authentic me: art, vintage clothes, New Wave/punk aesthetics, playing with gender. But mostly my style just told my classmates and beige Long Island to fuck off and die.
After my serious blonde transformation, it felt like overnight I went from being bullied all my life to being feared and viewed in awe. As I roamed the hallways the other kids whispered and pointed at me but they stopped saying things to my face; I looked too intimidating to be bullied. It was a rush of power and ego trip I had never felt before. But like always, I sat alone at lunchtime.
In the middle of the school year we had an exchange program with students from England and I couldn’t have been more excited: a crop of new kids with sexy accents, cooler hair, modern edgy clothes and sophisticated musical tastes would be landing in our dull suburb to wake up the rest of my conservative-minded bumpkin classmates. I was an Anglophile obsessed with New Wave Alternative music (“alternative” meant “not the same top 40 mainstream American hit songs played on the same five top radio stations ad nauseam.) European culture was decades ahead of our dumb and tacky mall culture. Then I got a brilliant idea: What if I became an exchange student host? I begged my dad, said she could stay in my bedroom and I could sleep on the couch (as we didn’t have a guest room). It was only for a month. He reluctantly agreed and I imagined him thinking at the time why would you want to show outsiders our dark and depressing wolf den? The civilized world doesn’t understand our kind of weird home life. I saw this as an opportunity to fit in with the non-canine normal kids at school- everyone would want to socialize with new and the exotic Brit kids. I imaged having an exchange student staying with us would be like walking a cute puppy down the street and everyone passing by would stop to pet, which would lead to a fun conversation which might lead to gaining a new friend. This could be my ticket to the popular girls seeing me as one of them! Brilliant! Splendid! I thought to myself, imagining those words in an English accent (I heard those descriptors a lot in the British shows I watched.)
The school put up the bios and photos of the exchange students on a board and I picked Claire, an attractive girl who wore blue eyeliner, shoulder length blonde hair flipped to one side and the other side cut short and spikey (Ooh, she’s a cool New Wave Brit and that hair is kind of edgy like mine! I’m sure we will have so much in common and will become great friends!)
Claire’s arrived in afternoon and I knew she must have been jet lagged from the long journey, so we offered her dinner early and I showed her around the house. I cooked up some canned soup in a pot and offered her water else we had on hand- cheese and crackers, canned tuna fish, yogurt, some apples. It never even occurred to us to order pizza or attempt to make fish and chips. We just grazed on whatever we had on hand, this how my wolf family ate meals. Claire said she had already eaten at the airport and was pretty tired so she headed for bed. In the morning, we discussed the important differences between the US and UK- I learned the band Wham UK was just knows as Wham there, which made sense but it still blew my mind that the same band would have to have two different names. The US has a numerical grade system and in the UK they have exams called O and A levels. I asked her about bands like The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen and the Cure which were part of our underground New Wave music scene but were totally mainstream and played on the radio across the pond (so envious!) I told her about some of my favorite “underground” shows on MTV like 120 Minutes Into the Future, The Cutting Edge and The Young Ones that came on at like, 2am Sunday night but it was worth being dead tired Monday morning to be able to watch subversive British comedies and hear European alternative bands that were never played on our local radio stations or even MTV during regular hours. (there were no “replays” to watch at a later time— even if you owned a VCR you needed to be awake at that time to record anything.) For me, it was a secret universe that required a little suffering to experience a glimpse. I fantasized about moving to London and living full-time in this futuristic cool world.
As I was brushing my teeth when we were getting ready for the school in the morning, I saw her on the porch smoking a cigarette. My dad and I gave each other a look. I knew the culture in Europe was more open about smoking but it was still very strange to see a 14 year-old openly smoke (there were kids in my class who smoked but did it secretly behind the high school as they would get detention if caught.) I offered her a few different kind of cereals for breakfast but she declined and said she would get something in the cafeteria.
We lived about a mile from the high school so I suggested we walk instead of waiting for the bus, but my secret motive was to know each other one-on-one before all the other kids at school disrupted us. I walked beside her in the chilly spring air, admiring her suede ankle elf boots, the scent of some kind of perfume that smelled like vanilla cookies that covered up the cigarette smoke, pink lip gloss, quaffed hair that flipped short on one side and her jangly earrings. I would ask her questions and all the words that fell out of her mouth sounded like music with her elegant sing-songy accent. She spoke very quietly which made me feel all the more like an obnoxiously loud-and-crude American I probably was. She had sort of a working-class accent, losing the T in some words (‘Bee’ools’ instead of ‘Beatles’) and pronouncing TH with an F (‘Earf’ instead of ‘Earth’) but all accents from across the pond were just better in every way than ours. The complete opposite of the New Yawwk LawwwnGuyland accent (crude, whiney and ignorant to my ears.) I loved asking way too many questions like an excited child: Is London amazing? I’ve never been but I’m going to visit next year with my art class and I can’t wait! Is it like New York? Is The Tube like our Subway? Is it safe? Why is it called “the tube”? Pound vs US Dollar, do things cost more or less for you here? Punk Rock vs New Wave vs American Pop. Do you prefer Prince over Depeche Mode? Is Virgin Records as amazing as I’ve heard? Can you really buy condoms there? Is it bigger than Tower Records? It’s funny to us that it’s called Virgin Records- does ‘Virgin” mean something different in England? Is the legal drinking age really sixteen? Why do you drive on the left side of the road? Are The Young Ones and Monty Python played on regular time slots on your TV stations? Do you have cable TV there? I love dry British humor! It seems like the English and Europeans in general are more accepting of punk/goth girls. Smarties vs M&M’s, are they the same candies with different names? Aluminum vs al-u-mini-um, which pronunciation is right? Everyone on Long Island is lame and stupid. I can’t wait to graduate and move to London with you.
When we arrived at school I made stupid made jokes about the cliques (the Jocks, Preps, Cheerleaders, Dirtbags, Nerds…) I told her wasn’t part of any group, I just got along with everyone (which of course the complete opposite was true.) Over the next few days, Claire didn’t laugh at my jokes or say much, she just got stiffer and wasn’t really warming up to me. I’ve heard this is how most English people are. Just very reserved and not showing much emotion. She’ll warm up to me as we get to know one another.
We didn’t have any classes together so I caught up with her at lunchtime. She found a table of girls she was happily chatting with and I felt awkward tension when I approached the table.
“Oh, you guys met Claire! She’s our exchange student. Staying at our house in my room. She just arrived this week,” I proudly announced. The other girls gave each other a look as I knew I was a lowly peasant in their eyes, but I would never have another excuse to talk to them other than being connected to the new girl. The group at the lunch table was mostly the Cheerleader Preppie clique but there were also a few Burnout bullies as there was some overlap with the Popular kids so they could sit any any lunch table they wanted. Back in junior high one those of the girls siting at the table had pushed me into a locker and always called me “faggot” in gym class (which didn’t mean “gay” necessarily. Fag was used as a general insult for lowly unpopular kids like me.) If they like Claire and Claire is part of our host family, maybe they’ll look past my weirdness and assume I’m from a nice normal family and that I’m just as cute and fun to play with as exotic Claire. They will take me in, let me sit with them at lunch and be part of their pack. Claire looked away at the other girls and I felt my awkward presence. I was hoping that my proximity connection would get me in but it seemed to have failed.
From that day on, Claire became a little more cold and distant so I stopped asking her questions and hoped she would open up to me and my dad when we had dinner together.
“We have pasta cooking right now if you want some”, I called to Claire from the kitchen as I stirred the spaghetti in the pot, heated up a jar of sauce in another pan and toasted some bread. She obliged and we gave her a bowl to serve herself and I offered her the best seat in the house in the living room in front of the TV. “You call it a Telly, right? I heard you have to pay a council tax for just owning a TV over there”, which I learned from an episode of The Young Ones. It didn’t occur to me for all of us to gather in the dining room at the table like civilized families do. There were those the piles of newspapers and magazines on the floor and chairs my dad collected in the dining room that I tried to neaten up, but it still looked like a dirty college dorm apartment. At mealtimes my dad and I just took our food from the kitchen, put it in a bowl and plopped on the couch in front of our favorite relaxing happy place, the TV. Claire said her mom stayed home to care of her younger siblings. She also made them hot breakfasts in the morning and cooked the family dinner every night. I imagined a very proper looking English family like Princess Di and the Royals eating at large long table with matching dishware having some sort of bland meal with cold ham or blood sausage. I hoped she didn’t fault my dad and I for being vegetarians and also living like uncivilized savages.
The next morning we both got up early to get ready for school, and like every morning at 6:15 I saw her silhouette in a golden backlit cloud of smoke on the front porch, shivering and pacing as she took drags on her cigarette. I quickly ate my bowl of Wheat Chex and as always, declined any breakfast. I came out of the house as she was putting out the butt of her cigarette and asked me if we had an ashtray. Every interaction I had with her was more awkward as I was trying so hard to please her and it felt so obvious I was failing.
“I won’t be walking with you to school today,” she said quietly. “I met another girl who’s mum lives nearby. She drives her kids to school and she’s picking me up in the next few minutes.”
It shocked me to hear the news, like if your lover left you for another woman and she happened to be from a much, much better family than yours. Logically I saw we weren’t a good fit and she probably loathed having to hear me ask a million excited questions on the way to school every day. I wanted to imitate everything she said in her cool British accent while we stood on the porch the the cold morning air, but I knew she was done with this excited little puppy that followed her around waiting for her to engage with me. I wanted to tell her that my dad and I could just drive her to school but I knew it wasn’t about getting a lift, it was about getting away from me. I didn’t want to make it more awkward so I just told her I would see her around school and then we said our goodbyes. It wasn’t surprising when I did run into her in the cafeteria with the Popular clique and she pulled me aside to let me know she found another host family she wanted to stay with. She would be picking up her suitcase and things from my house that afternoon.
A few people in my art class heard that Claire left my house after a week and went to stay with one of the girls family from the popular clique. It felt as if I was admitting I wasn’t cut out for that league and they were probably right to leave. A few days later in gym class, one of the Populars approached me and said she heard my exchange student left after a few days and went to stay with another host family.
“Why do you think she left?” she asked looking concerned.
“I…I don’t know. I guess we didn’t connect. Honestly, she was kind of cold towards me so it was probably for the best for both of us.”
She smiled and folded her arms. “Really? I know why she left.”
She leaned into me and lowered her voice. “She said you starved her to death.”
My whole body felt a shock of heat rise like a wave towards my head. It was the first time I learned what shame really felt and it flooded my body and made me shrink in size. I felt as if I was standing naked in the middle of the school gymnasium with everyone pointing and laughing. Laughing at both me and my dad, the pack of feral animals in the crumbling college dorm house who ate whatever took less than five minutes to prepare, put it in a trough and stuffed it down in front of the television in our wolf den. And we also tied up visitors and starved them to death so we could eat them later for low-fat jerky snacks! Like in The Adams Family and The Munsters, people from well-adjusted families ran away screaming when they stayed for too long in our home. Now the whole school knew our secret- Melissa was not only a weirdo, she was born and was raised by weirdos.
I'm so happy being born a weirdo kept me from becoming prom queen, going to raging keggers on the weekends, marrying the winning quarterback, staying in the same small town I've lived in my whole life, voting Republican, having regrets, becoming a stay at home, bored-as-fuck mom after having kids. And those kids would attend the same schools we did and go on to bully the weirdos.