Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [51]
From my uncomfortable spot on the sidelines at eighth-grade make-out parties, where I stood cracking jokes by the refreshment table, trying not to eat too many chips while watching with envy as the other girls disappeared into dark corners or back rooms with the boys I liked, I could see no evidence of the thing my mother called “dating.” The way she’d explained it, “dating” was something that happened when large groups of neatly dressed, benignly chuckling teens, wholly uninterested in the notion of two genders, gathered in brightly lit community rec rooms to enjoy soft drinks and pound cake—although, even in this cake-filled scenario, one had to be constantly on guard to keep from getting hijacked into a world of fallopian tubes, sperm, and the horrors of pregnancy. I was never clear on whether the pound cake she promised was served before the pregnancy stuff or after.
By high school, in the late sixties, my family had moved three thousand miles, from North Miami to a hilly, tree-lined suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula, where I quickly learned, like every transfer student trying to assimilate into a brand-new high school social order, that status and group membership had been decided long before I’d arrived. The “in” crowd had apparently stopped taking applications somewhere around third grade. But since the “weird arty kids” were still accepting new members, I took a deep breath, stopped setting my hair, and started wearing dark eyeliner.
Yet, even out here on the West Coast, happily surrounded by my brand-new circle of baby artists, I was still unable to catch a glimpse of that brightly lit dating scenario my mother was selling. On the other hand, little by little I was getting a tantalizing glimpse of a truly compelling erotic subculture full of music and sexual innuendo erupting in all the dark corners around me.
In addition to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Zombies, and the Yardbirds—with whom I’d had many hours’ worth of deep, meaningful imaginary liaisons—there were suddenly all kinds of seductive-looking, long-haired local San Francisco bands with cryptic, inscrutable names that I could ogle in person. All I needed to do was get permission to take the bus into the city and I could immerse myself in crowds of oddly dressed young people who were smoking, tripping, and passing around enormous bottles of wine. Not only was no one checking IDs, but as long as I changed into the wide-brimmed hat and magenta midcalf-length suede coat I’d bought at the Salvation Army sometime before the bus ride was over, I could transform myself from a bland high school sophomore into someone mysterious who seemed to fit right in.
No, I wasn’t welcomed back into the home of my tidy, shiny parents dressed in that outfit. My dad, in his jaunty Arnold Palmer golf hats and pressed shirts and slacks, commented more than once, as I became increasingly whimsical with all my clothing choices, that he thought I looked like a circus clown. Oddly enough, that was not the look he had in mind for his daughter. It was also not the look I felt I’d achieved. He would have died if he’d ever heard about the afternoon when a woman who was wearing three overcoats and a pair of tennis shoes so threadbare they were held together by rubber bands came up to me as I was walking toward the San Francisco bus depot, made an empathetic face, and pressed a Hershey bar with almonds into my hands.
“Because I understand,” she’d said as she smiled sweetly and walked away.
When I opened the outer wrapper, I saw that she had hidden a five-dollar bill inside. Naturally, I was a little alarmed to learn that I looked like a worst-case scenario to an actual homeless person.
Nevertheless, every weekend I could get away with it, I would go into San Francisco with any of my new friends who were available and spend long, satisfying days being jostled at street fairs, poked and prodded