Nancy Rommelmann

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By June 1976, after two years spent playing hooky, I was finally “asked to leave” my progressive private school. The euphemism might have been employed for two reasons: having committed to me, a then-ninth grader, at age five, any failure might have reflected poorly on the school’s initial judgment. I think there was also the genuine (if sorely-stretched) affection of the headmaster, who did not want to bruise my budding psyche with any “kicking out.” And so instead there was the paragraph (sent on the familiar heavy stock stationary I’d for weeks checked the mailbox for, then intercepted) that explained my “unique needs” might be better served elsewhere.

Why my dismissal had taken so long had little to do with forged notes and sweet-talking the math teacher who called me Legs, and almost everything to do with the authority given students, who were touted (we read about ourselves in the newspapers) as gifted enough to choose whether or not we felt like attending class. That most did choose to attend I found (and still find) phenomenal and praiseworthy, justifying the school’s faith in the student body’s ability and desire to lead round intellectual lives—at lunch, thirteen-year-olds in ratty jeans read Sartre in French between games of Ultimate Frisbee—as well as its policy to weed out those of us whose most pressing concern was where to score a nickel bag.

If I’d set a fire or slit my wrists, the process might have been clearer for the adults involved. A female teacher might have pleaded my potential; I can easily imagine her standing by at dawn on a Sunday, offering support as my parents trundled me into a car bound for a sanitarium in New Jersey. But there was no female teacher, only an administration alarmed at having a garden-variety bad girl on the roster; someone who did not show up for school for no good reason; whose anecdotal reports from fifth grade on included some version of, “If she’d only apply herself...”

Though my parents had been separated for three years, they stood together at my mother’s kitchen table, reading the letter, looking at me in astonishment, without idea one as to where the remedy lay. First choice: enrollment at the other local private school. (To this day I have no idea why this school accepted me, perhaps a point of pride, thinking their strict Quaker methodology might straighten out the wild girl from the loosey-goosey fancy-pants school up the street.) I lasted eight days at what was, from the little I saw, an excellent school. Then I left my parents a note on the kitchen table, explaining that I didn’t know why I couldn’t be in school but I couldn’t; that it wasn’t their fault, and that they should just leave me alone. I think they knew this was the loudest plea they were going to get, and they let me be.

Being a 13-year old with free time in New York City was not a hardship. We—my best friend Sarah, who’d had to leave school for financial reasons; a few other girls who, like me, would be asked to leave the following spring—rode the trains, wound up in Central Park or Washington Square, where we dropped acid and watched the sixties’ protracted death rattle. We went to Bloomingdale’s, where we stole panties and lip gloss, and, one time, a pair of sunglasses, which I have perched on my head in the mug shot they took of me after we were caught swapping bags on the down escalator. “Whose are these?” the female security guard asked after finding my mom’s charge plates in my pocket. That we had been stealing for sport struck the guard as stupid and spoiled, and, judging by the look on her face, she let us go out of plain disgust. We went to clubs, first Ice Palace 57, a gay disco in midtown, then Hurrah, where they had live bands; where some old guy was sure to offer you a Quaalude; where, because I one night wore black sunglasses, I was called “Jackie O,” and where we could dance until three in the morning. Or we’d go to the midnight show of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when it was at the Waverly and before it became a participatory affair; if we had any acid, we’d drop it an hour beforehand. Sarah and I each had our favorite parts: respectively, when Dr. Frankenfurter descends in the elevator and kicks out “Sweet Transvestite,” and when Meatloaf roars into the lab on his Harley singing “Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?”

But most of the time we just hung out, in front of the newly opened Baskin-Robbins, on the corner of Montague and Henry Streets. This corner was the epicenter of Brooklyn Heights, a community unaccustomed to seeing its daughters straddling mailboxes and flicking cigarette butts into the street. Nor were we used to fielding the looks we began to get: wary, unhappy, every father coming home from Wall Street and every mother on her way to Key Food shooting us stern, silent reprimands. It made me squirm, but it also pissed me off: What was I doing that was so horrible? And if they had something to say, why didn’t they say it? While our little petri dish of a neighborhood evidently considered hanging out anathema, I was on the fence; my dad had grown up in Greenwich Village, an Italian kid playing stickball and rolling tires in the Hudson River. Isn’t this what teenagers did?

Let’s backtrack a minute: There had been catalysts getting us out of school and on the streets. Sarah’s, I believe, had to do with her iron will continuously ramming against her father’s gargantuan, brilliant and merciless personality. Mine were about elitism. By 13, I’d had it with the tennis-club bullshit, the moralizing Old Guard of the neighborhood who’d been there forever and made sure you knew it. They smiled icily when my dad, who’d hoisted his way into what he assumed was the comfort zone, tried to be friendly. My dad, 6’ 5” and ready to give you the shirt off his back, who out of insecurity pretended not to notice his social crucifixion, and later, and worst of all, colluded in it.

“You know, that Mr. X is a really good guy,” he said one time.

“Mr. X is an asshole!” I was crying when I said it, because I knew Mr. X had thrown his daughter (my friend) against a wall when he couldn’t “contain her”; that Mrs. Q (who’d cornered my mother in the market and told her I was “ruining the neighborhood”) had a husband who drank himself into a stupor every night. I am sure, now, that these people, these parents, were desperate, or in the throes of their own addictions. Back then, their indictment of me and mine while cloaking their own bad behavior filled me with hate, and a roiling sense of injustice that manifested itself physically: at tennis lessons, with eight other little girls in whites, I wondered whether my head was going to explode or if I was going to bash in my teacher’s brains with my racket. Had I known about punk rock, I might have joined with a group of kids kicking the stuffing out of the moldy old elite, but I didn’t know about it, and in any case, I wasn’t looking for a movement. I just wanted out.

A metaphorical way out presented had itself a year earlier, in the form of boys from across the cultural divide, i.e., the south side of Atlantic Avenue, starting when three I’d never seen in our neighborhood whistled at a school friend and me. We were 12, barely kissed, interested in if unaccustomed to male attention. A little dance ensued: We allowed the boys to approach; they introduced themselves as Tiger, Roach and Junior. They asked for our phone numbers, something no boy had ever done. I was flattered, and there on my friend’s stoop wrote my number three times on three scraps of paper, giddy if a little worried at how easy the transaction was.

Talking on the phone to Junior was thrilling; he had a light Spanish accent and, at 14, whispered sweet words a 12-year old girl liked to hear, things that made my chest fill with what felt like warm water. I started bringing him into my bedroom after school. He was small and not intimidating, with soft dark hair on his upper lip and thick black glasses he placed on my bedside table when we kissed. I’d read in my mother’s copy of “The Sensuous Woman” that touching the back of a man’s neck was arousing, so one afternoon, four days into our marathon make-out sessions, I touched his neck. Junior sat up fast and grabbed for his glasses. He stayed on the edge of my bed, not looking at me. I asked him what was the matter.

“Don’t do that,” he said, reaching for his Cons.

What results! I thought, from one little touch on the neck. Yet the larger result was that he didn’t trust himself to just kiss me anymore. He stopped calling.

This was okay, because Roach started calling, and Tiger, too. I didn’t have time to get together with either of them before the phone began ringing during dinner, a girl on the other end screaming in my mother’s ear, “Ya dawta’s a hoo-wa!” After three nights of calls, my mother asked my father to come over and deal with it. While defending my honor, he managed to get the caller’s name: Laurie Bonnadonna. I had no idea who she was, but suspected her fury had something to do with my new boyfriends. But a whore? All I’d done was kiss one boy. And who’d given her my phone number, anyway?

As quickly as they’d made my temperature spike, I forgot about Roach and Tiger and Junior. My eyes opened to a world of boys. I saw them everywhere, living nearby and not so near, all of them happy to hang out with cute white girls cutting school. We sat on the Promenade, listening to the boys snap on one another, and to music—Brothers Johnson, Otis Redding, Earth, Wind & Fire—on the boom-box someone inevitably carried on his shoulder.

Sarah and I considered ourselves bad enough to hang with these boys. We were smart, we didn’t take shit; when people got in our faces, we came right back at them. In our Pro-Keds and cut-offs, it never occurred to us to act like the girly-girls we occasionally saw the boys hanging with, girls they’d grown-up with, girls with big tits and winged hairdos, girls who whispered “cunt” when we walked past. I didn’t distinguish these girls from one another until an afternoon at the Baskin-Robbins, where I’d hang with the scoopers, sometimes Spike Lee, who had a big ‘fro back then, and whose late mom had been a beloved teacher at my former school, but mostly Ronnie. I was leaning on the counter when I saw two-dozen girls marching toward the store, holding their platform shoes by the ankle straps and taking out their earrings. They pushed through the glass double-doors, filling the store with a tremendous roar. Who were they? Ronnie asked; I didn’t know, though I had a feeling the one in front, the one bulging out of a tight green v-neck sweater and shouting “hoo-wa!” was Laurie Bonnadonna. On either side of her, girls were shaking their shoes overhead and shouting they were going to kick my ass. Crowded into a corner by a water fountain, I was more shocked than frightened by the scene, part of me saw it as ludicrous, some sort of high drama where nothing bad would actually happen, because nothing bad ever did happen to me.

As I contemplated my good fortune, the crowd shimmied and parted; whoever was doing the parting was inspiring the girls to yell, “Pinky! Pinky!” Pinky? Then she was right in front of me, a black-haired girl as intense and pent-up as a bull, her nostrils flaring, her biceps cut; she had a strikingly beautiful face and black eyes so liquid, so alert, they looked as though they were going to squirt on me, and she was screaming for me to get outside because she was going to kick my ass. She shoved me in the chest and the girls cheered. Now I was scared. Ronnie was yelling for everyone to get out of the store; the girls were yelling at him to shut the fuck up. Pinky and I were toe to toe, and though she was a shade shorter than me, our heads shared a small space. I quietly asked her why she was doing this; told her I didn’t even know these girls and really didn’t know why they wanted to beat me up. She listened, seemed to weigh the statement, then looked at me as if to say, Your word against twenty. It occurred to me that I was going to be dragged out onto the corner of Montague and Henry and have my head bashed in. As my body tensed in preparation for being beaten, the crowd parted again, and a broad-shouldered kid I’d met maybe twice pushed his way toward me. His name was Steve, and he was an Eskimo, or his mother was. Steve stood in front of me—was he here to beat me up, as well?—then turned his body so it shielded mine. The girls flailed their arms and cursed Steve, but he ignored them and, speaking in a low voice directly to Pinky, told her I hadn’t done anything, that she knew that, and why was she trusting those crazy Italian bitches in the first place? Pinky’s eyes became still. She looked from Steve to me, and, after several beats, asked for her sneakers, which she held overhead as she walked out of the Baskin Robbins. Shooting me spiteful glances, the girls followed, and the store was suddenly still and quiet. Ronnie wiped his brow; Spike gave me a look that said, What the fuck? I asked Steve how he’d known I was there; that I’d needed help; if he knew Pinky and that’s why she’d listened to him; if they were perhaps related. He wouldn’t answer any question directly, just said he’d walk me (all of one block) home to make sure I got there safely.

Did this episode make me realize the streets could be a dangerous place? Are you kidding? We were just getting started, and for our 13th year, Sarah and I basically lived two lives: We baby-sat and went to art events in Soho with her parents, dropped in at school and went to camp in the summer. The rest of the time we spent hanging out. We didn’t see any reason to sacrifice one life for the other. If anything, our dual lives inflated our estimations of ourselves. We were fine; we had our pick of guys, when we broke up with one there were six waiting to take his place. We were happy to rumble with the boys, especially Sarah, whose every-second-of-every-day steeliness got her the nickname “Muscles McGurk.” We felt like the queens of Montague Street, and as such, had thrones: two mailboxes on the corner in front of the Baskin Robbins; if someone was up there when we showed up, we just told them to get off.

The kids we’d grown up had noticed our new personae, and while we didn’t often see them in school, we were still invited to their parties. One night, at the brownstone of my seventh-grade boyfriend Ben, I was told there was someone outside who wanted to speak to me.

“She says her name is Pinky,” Ben said. Ever gallant, he asked if he should accompany me outside. I told him I was okay.

Pinky was at the bottom of the stoop, in cut-offs and a tight T-shirt that showed how developed she was. She didn’t look as though she wanted to hit me, but who knew? She waited until I got to the bottom before saying anything.

“I wanted to say… about the other day.” She stared at the ground as she spoke. “I found out those girls was lying about what they said about you, so, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I said, relieved and completely surprised. Why had she sought me out and apologized? I was no threat to her, would never be as beautiful as her, or as tough. And yet, here she was; pinions began to click in my head, paradigms to rearrange. Pinky and I slapped palms to seal the apology, then stood there bullshitting and laughing, snapping on Laurie and her crew. After ten minutes, she said she had to go. I asked her if she wanted to come inside. She looked at me, then down the street.

“I gotta watch my little brother,” she said. I would have been thrilled to ditch what I was doing and baby-sit with her, or whatever, but didn’t have the nerve to ask if I could come along.

I watched Pinky walk off. To me, she was the epitome of cool, but now she was also real; she had a real life and I wanted to be part of it. My reverie was cut short by a bunch of kids banging from inside the parlor floor window: they’d been watching me. When I went inside, a dozen partygoers began hammering me with questions: Who was she? Was I scared? I started telling them the back-story, then realized I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to objectify Pinky or, worse, use her luster for any reflective shine. I knew any explanations I gave would themselves require explanations, that my meeting with Pinky would be categorized as some sort of “event.” This is when I realized I knew things the kids I’d grown up with did not (which is not to say I was so damn smart: while I was on the street, they were studying); that I no longer felt scared in the ways they felt scared; that I’d taken discernible steps out of one world and into another.

As in any journey, it was not possible to stand still. At 14, Sarah and I made the decision as to which way we’d go: further, a decision undoubtedly helped along by a pair of brothers, Benny and Dave. At 15, Benny was a year older than his brother, with straight golden-brown hair and a mirthful, feline face. Dave was dark and rangy, prototypically Latin, and, I thought, the most handsome boy I’d ever seen. Benny was a superstar: he drew beautifully, was polite to our parents; was clever and inventive and sharp in every way. He became Sarah’s boyfriend. Dave, while not as swift, was sexy as hell; kissing him was like falling backwards into a canyon of mouth. They lived in Flatbush, but hung out in the Heights because their grandmother, Ma, ran a boarding house on Hicks Street, six floors of single rooms. In April 1975, Dave and I lost our virginities in one of these narrow rooms, on an iron bed facing the fire escape.

A crew started to form. There was another set of brothers, Nicky and Arnie, who lived in a basement apartment on Montague. The place was managed by their Cuban father, Papì; with a yellowing wife-beater stretched over his big gut, he’d order around whichever of his six teenage children happened to around. Drunk most nights by six, Papì would bellow in a graveled voice for Sarah or me to keep him company on the cot he slept on in a steamy alcove off the kitchen. There was Ronnie, a loud-mouthed, lisping Italian who lived right on Montague and who was sure to always be hanging out. There was Craig, a sly, adorable, fast-talking kid who lived with his mother and beautiful sister in a high-rise by the Brooklyn Bridge, and with whom I sang duets on the Promenade, memorably “Love Will Keep Us Together.” There was Steve the Eskimo, quiet until he became violent, smart with no outlet for his intelligence, often in charge of his two-year old brother. (Rumors swirled around that his mom was a prostitute. I don’t know about that, but I do know she dealt pot, because one time I helped her roll joints from a kilo of Panama Red so sticky, my fingers were stained rust for days.) There was Nicky and Arnie’s little sister Titi, skinny and hyperactive, who taught Sarah how to Hustle and both of us the 16-Steps, and Lorraine, who Sarah and I met while she was working as a night-cashier at the King George coffeehouse, on another corner of Montague and Henry. Lorraine was exactly our age, with a cap of auburn curls that made her look like the Little Prince, a cover-girl-perfect smile, and a full face of make-up: base, powder, rouge, lipstick. She lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on Montague with her younger sister and her mother, who was from Italy and who dressed at all times as though she were in a Luciano Visconti film: ‘40s suits, heels, stockings, hat, accessories. Her name was Mirta, and every afternoon after work (curating the art gallery in the Hyatt in midtown Manhattan) she sat at a café table outside a hamburger joint on Montague, took off her heels and rubbed her bunions. Sipping scotch on the rocks, she’d tell us what a terrible place America was, the worst slum in Italy would be preferable, and nag Lorraine that she did not take enough care with the way she dressed. Tugging on her daughter’s shirt, pinching the fabric of her skirt, Mirta would look at Sarah and me and say, “Ma-donna, she look like scarafaggio (cockroach).” Other days, she’d smile at all of us, trail her fingers over our budding bodies, tell us how beautiful we were and assure us we were “good girls, no ‘ores.”

Sarah and I shared everything with Lorraine: drugs (mostly pot, which we smoked every day; we also occasionally took acid, pills, and one time opium, which smelled like violets and gave the most languid high, and which we smoked with some guys we’d never met after midnight in the little park I’d played in as a child), mailboxes, boyfriends: Sarah broke up with Benny, and Lorraine took him; Sarah started seeing Nicky (whom Papì called only Boy, and which prompted inebriated late-night calls to Sarah’s mother: “My Boy, he going marry your Saraahhhh…”); Dave broke my heart and I saw Arnie. By the time we were 15, we’d pretty much played every combination. When we weren’t having middling sex and loitering on street corners, we roamed around other neighborhoods, Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill and Fort Greene, where Latin music floated through open windows, and kids shouted in the street, and men sat on milk crates playing cards, and somebody’s aunt was always asking if you wanted to eat or play the numbers. It was all new to us, nobody knew us, and if we took a little flak for being white, it was tame stuff—a suspicious look from a protective mother, something lewd said in Spanish. We were outside all the time, enjoying freedom in its simplest form.

In the summertime, it was great. Winter was harder. Hanging out when its five degrees gets old fast, and I remember the hell of walking three miles in the wind tunnel that Atlantic Avenue becomes in January, simply so we could find an empty house to hang in. There were mild discomforts, like opening someone’s fridge and watching the roaches run when the light came on, or having to sleep on the floor with a towel for a blanket. But these weren’t really big deals, as we rarely stayed away from the comforts of home for more than a weekend.

Still, things weren’t exactly cozy at home. There had always been new boys coming into the Heights, and that was cool, but the latest crews weren’t really boys, more on the verge of being men. Unlike the kids we’d been hanging with for a year, we didn’t have history with these guys; we didn’t really trust them, didn’t want to be rude but didn’t really want them in our houses. This became hard to keep under control, as members of the home crew vouched for the new guys, and all of a sudden, there are people you’ve never seen in the living-room, rummaging through the liquor cabinets, some big, stoned, zombie-looking dude is in the kitchen, and the next day, you can’t find the paring knife. There was Chavo, a scrawny cat with pointy teeth who was reputed to do heroin; the first time I saw a gun, it was sitting on the cardboard box he used for a table in the room he rented half a block from my mom’s house. Dave borrowed my bicycle one afternoon, and later told me that Chavo had been riding it and had been hit by a bus; that the bike was totaled. I was 15, and didn’t want to think a guy I still pined for had let a junkie sell my bike. I started seeing E., who fell into days-long silent funks and flew into rages and who, one sunny afternoon, kicked me in the face and gave me two black eyes.

It occurs to me that a few words about the parents are in order: my mom, always devoted to me, had gone back to school when she split with my dad, was away most weekends at her country-home, and was beginning a relationship with the man who became my stepfather. In other words, she was around but she wasn’t. She knew that I was “going through the baddies,” as she now calls that time, but did not know to what extent. My father simply could not deal with me; he told my mom seeing me hurt too much. We didn’t speak for eight months. One afternoon, I saw him walking down Montague, carrying his briefcase, coming home from the stock exchange. We stared, and then passed each other without saying anything. It was odd, but easier. Later that year, I started spending weekends with him again; he didn’t like how I was living, but understood that no amount of moralizing from him was going to get me to change. I remember him exercising Herculean restraint when he saw my black eyes. I told him the metal door of the Promenade Restaurant, which was on a wicked hinge, had sprung back and hit the bridge of my nose. He looked at me across the breakfast table for about fifteen seconds, then gave one stiff nod. Had I given the flimsiest sign I needed help, he’d have found E., broken off his leg, and hit him over the head with it. Instead, his silent message to me was: you got into this under your own steam, sister, you’ll get yourself out the same way.

At 15, Sarah started to pull back: she stopped smoking pot, stopped hanging out. I tried to cajole her back onto the streets, but she blew me off; she enrolled in a series of schools in the city, and a few months later left for boarding school in Massachusetts. I felt abandoned. I was also envious, as hanging out all day was getting boring. I wanted a change, any change. Sometimes I’d accompany Lorraine to Art & Design High School, where she’d been given an ultimatum: one more missed day and she was out. She missed the day. She started working the afternoon shift at a new Italian café on Montague Street reportedly owned by the mob, and hanging out with one of the backers, a fat, balding, sweaty Italian named Umberto. He was almost a caricature of a low-level Mafioso, with open-collar nylon shirts, gold chains and a red Cadillac; in the afternoons, he’d drive us to Bay Ridge for no reason, and on the way dole out tiny silver spoonfuls of coke from a screw-cap bottle. A few evenings he took us to a restaurant in Little Italy called Luna, where he’d converse in Italian with a table of men. It was clear Umberto hoped a pair of pretty 15-year olds in halter-tops would impress these men. While they were never disrespectful to us—they’d smile, shove over in the booth and order us some calamari—we could see they did not respect Umberto; we didn’t respect him, either, but we liked his coke (which he was stingy with) and we didn’t have anything else to do.

Lorraine by this time had hooked up John Curley, an Irish guy, maybe 19, with red hair like steel wool and a leathery, freckled, bull-dog face so ugly, you couldn’t help but think when you saw him, man, that guy is ugly. John Curley’s way of handling his lack of looks was to be a violent moron every waking second of every day. And yet Lorraine liked him, maybe because he had car, in which she took daily rides away from the neighborhood. I got in that car, an Impala, only once. Typically, John Curley would not tell us where we were going; he got a hard-on making us nervous. As we drove through a burnt-out section of Red Hook, I started to feel afraid, and told him to turn around; he told me to shut up, then started saying snide things, hoping to provoke a fight. Lorraine sat between us on the front seat, trying to placate John Curley without setting him off. As I watched her attempt the impossible—to soothe someone who does not want to be soothed—I was seeing, for the first time, how a cruel and stupid man can make a woman feel as though his bad behavior is hers to fix. In that moment I hated John Curley, and told him in a loud voice to turn the car the fuck around right fucking now. He did, speeding, sometimes on the wrong side of the street, back to the Heights, where, because he needed to humiliate her, he kicked Lorraine in the ass as we climbed out of the car. Later that week, Arnie and I came up on John Curley trying to shove Lorraine into his car on front of the courthouse on Monroe. I ran up to them and tried to wrench his arm off her, but he punched me in the chest and I went down. Seeing me on the ground, Lorraine seemed to make the decision that it would be easier all around if she just got in the car. I grabbed at the door handle it but couldn’t hold it as John Curley sped off.

“Why didn’t you do something?!” I screamed at Arnie, who for two years had been a close and reliable friend. He said something along the lines of, “You shouldn’t get in between a man and his woman.” I understood this to mean he’d seen this kind of thing before, though he also did not seem to feel too good about it. That night, I got a call from Mirta: John Curley had kidnapped Lorraine. Lorraine called me the following afternoon from Coney Island, where John Curley had abandoned her. When the cops asked if she wanted to press charges, she declined.

I was having my own troubles. I’d turned 16, and there seemed an ever-widening gulf of hostility and mistrust going on with a lot of the new crew in the Heights. Things began to disappear from my mom’s house; the Lucite-and-gold heart my stepfather had designed for my mom was stolen, and when she accused my friends, I didn’t have the energy to defend them. And E. was still skulking around, alternately threatening me and pleading for my affection. I came home one afternoon and found the living room rug charred; it wasn’t clear whether the burn had self-extinguished or whether whoever had lit it had panicked and stomped it out. Either way, I knew who did it, and was just about to go outside and find E. when there was a knock on my door.

“Now I’m really going to give you a beating,” E. said. I ran down the hallway, through a bathroom, and onto the fire escape, where I screamed. Within minutes, two cops stood on the threshold of my door, holding E. by the arms.

“What do you want us to do with him?” they asked. E. looked at me, his eyes trying to transmit the message, Bitch, you wouldn’t dare. I nodded at the cops to take him.

While I still hung with the core crew, Benny and Dave, Arnie and Nicky, I started getting that pressure in my head again, everything was making me angry, and this time I had only myself to blame, as the way I was living had been imposed on me by no one; I’d created it. I started staying home at night, something I hadn’t done in two years. On my way home from the deli one evening, a younger kid ran up to me and said, “Dave and them” (though not Benny) were “on the Promenade, beating up fags.” I told the kid he must have it wrong, they were probably rumbling. But part of me must have believed what the kid said, because I sat down on a stoop to eat my sandwich and wait. Ten minutes later, I saw the guys walking up from the Promenade, and heard a light if unmistakably victorious ring in their voices. They saw me on the stoop and stopped. I asked what they’d been doing. They didn’t say anything. I eyed their messed-up clothes. Had they been fighting? They stared at their feet, looked into space, started to speak then stopped. They were 16 and knew right and wrong, they had some hope that they were not going to end up like their absent dads or their brothers on smack; that they might, like the girls they’d been fucking for two years, have the opportunity to go to art school, or college. I asked them straight out: Had they been beating up fags? They stopped fidgeting and looked at me. They had a new adversary. No, they said, they hadn’t been. The denial seemed to get them back on track, they revved up and were feeling righteous, if not about what they’d been doing, then about coming together against some chick acting all Mother Conscience. While the lines of communication had been fraying, this was the night we forgot each other’s language. As they went off to buy beer, I went up to my mom’s. A little later I heard police sirens, then squad car doors slamming on Montague Street. From the window of my mother’s seventh floor apartment, I could see the lights of the Verrazano Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, but I could not see around the corner, where the action was taking place. I did not go down to check it out.

Whereas for several years I’d looked out that window to make sure people were hanging out, now, before I went anywhere, I made sure no one was. My vigilance was in vain; they found me, making eerie cawing sounds from blocks away, as though they were crows about to attack. I came home one afternoon to find the apartment building’s elevator graffitted: a drawing of a guy with bulging eyeballs and his tongue hanging out, saying, “Nancy’s pussy tastes good!” Not exactly the thing you want your mother to see. I’d hear guys screaming my name and obscenities late at night, the silence of the residential streets split by the word, “Whore!” I thought maybe they felt left behind, as I had when Sarah split. I also knew, if not when or how, that I’d be going on from Montague Street, too.

In the spring of 1977, I enrolled at City-As-School. CAS was run out of a basement, by a bunch of men who looked like Jim Croce, idealists in their twenties who believed they could make a difference in the lives of wayward teens by placing them in work-study environments. I loved looking through the “job” listings in the heavy binders, choosing from postings as varied as apprenticing under a costume designer to helping at the Bronx Zoo. CAS had no academic requirements (though they’d tutor you if you needed it), asking only that you show up for the jobs you chose and be responsible. It was like starting from scratch, which I found immensely appealing. I worked as an assistant kindergarten teacher in Far Rockaway. I loved the early morning elevated train commute, loved working with the little kids, got a healthy charge out of the fact the teachers I worked under trusted me. Life felt like a new piece of paper. I liked my next job, at Superior Court near City Hall, where I spent the days filing the cases of juvenile offenders. I thought this pleasantly ironic, wondered but did not worry whether I’d run across my own name. I focused, kept to a schedule, and within two days had the revelation that I was excited by structure. I’d eat my lunch on the courthouse steps, watching the lawyers confer on their way up the long granite staircase, and feel proud to be playing a little part in all this; I spent the afternoons working alone in an enormous room with a cathedral ceiling, rays of green light beaming through the dust-encrusted, hundred-year old windows, warming the shelves and summoning the dry smell of old documents. I felt as if I were exactly where I was meant to be, and grown-up in a way I have rarely felt since. It was as though the world was telling me, we consider you capable and trustworthy, and I became those things.

But the CAS jobs were by design temporary (I asked for but was not granted a longer stint at the courthouse), and after a month, I had to go somewhere else. The job listings in the CAS books now looked flimsy; I wanted a pursuit I could sink my teeth into, a place I could apply myself. My god, I wanted to go back to regular school. My CAS counselor told me the only place they funneled kids was an “alternative school” in the Wall Street area.

Satellite Academy was on Chambers Street, above a discount drug store. This was the cheap end of Wall Street, east of Broadway, with narrow, asymmetrical streets teeming with big-haired secretaries from Staten Island, clerks jawing about last night’s Rangers game, mildly retarded messengers clutching battered vinyl briefcases, and wiry delivery guys puffing joints held in cupped hands. Chambers Street was in constant motion, horns honking and men yelling, a bazaar of trucks and taxis and a million people a day.

I stood outside the school holding a binder. I was nervous. I was embarking on something I had failed at before, and had no reason to believe I wouldn’t fail at again. Every time, starting over. Shit. I pushed open the door and went up the stairs.

The first thing I saw was a hallway, institutional beige and empty. I didn’t know where to go, couldn’t find an office, was contemplating ditching the whole idea when a bell rang, and kids began pouring into the narrow hall. Though I understood these people were my new peers, there was no way to tell they were high school kids. From a door on the left came a six-foot tall, heavily made up transvestite who looked exactly, and I mean exactly, like Dr. Frankenfurter. He stopped, gave me a once-over that was a stunning combination of cattiness and Latin lust, and lisped, “Look at mami.” Trailing him were four or five shorter TVs, who nodded and purred and, as they passed, ran index fingers across my bare torso. On the other side of me was a line of pale Puerto Rican boys wearing identical white T-shirts, dark workman trousers, and black hair greased into ducktails. They were small and compact and gave the impression of stillness, and as I stared at their uniformity my heart quickened to realize they were girls. Eyes on the floor, shoulders hunched, they filed past, except for one, who pushed her hands into her pockets and gave me a look I had no way of categorizing, other than to know it made me jumpy and breathless. Other kids filed past, small Caribbean boys with pressed pants and conservative haircuts; a group of fat black girls laughing loudly and talking shit; several tiny ashen girls of indeterminate ethnic origin, who walked huddled together, their books hugged to their chests.

The hall was empty again, and I still didn’t know where to go. I heard the sound of someone dragging their feet, and saw coming down the hall an extremely tall, extremely thin girl, wearing platform shoes with fraying rope soles, no doubt because she did not lift her feet when she walked. Everything about her was drooping: her long, lank, ‘70s girl hair, the way she barely held her books, her Miles Davis eyelids. I asked her where the office was.

“I’ll show you,” she said, and slunk past me. Her speech was not so much slurred as slow, as though the effort to push the air through her diaphragm and up cost too much. She took me down an L in the hall, and stopped before an office door. I introduced myself. It took her a few seconds to pivot her head and locate my hand, and then she extended the lightest, limpest fingers I’d ever felt, so absent that, shaking her hand, I felt as though she was about to float away.

“I’m Dawn,” she said, and scratched her nose, and said she was going outside to get high in a way I understood meant I was invited.

Before I ever entered a classroom at Satellite, I was getting high, in an alley off Chambers Street, in a 12x12 foot shaft that led to a service elevator. This was 1977, when the media was crowing about how dangerous angel dust was, that it was horse tranquilizer, how it ate holes in your brain. I’d never tried the stuff, but was fascinated watching Dawn smoke a pin-joint of dust. Her facial muscles went slack; she slumped against the wall, and carried on conversations wherein she contributed three words a minute.

As they did every lunch hour, there were other kids getting high, twenty of us crowded in smoking until it was time to go to class. I stood with my back to the elevator (which rarely opened, and when it did, the operators didn’t care we were there, they’d hang out and blow a joint with us), and watched the other kids. The loudest was a clot of Puerto Rican guys led by a guy I’ll call Chico, a wiry, hyper, ultra-sensitive kid who wore a bandoleer of bullets across his chest, and whose overblown tales of gangbanging no one believed.

I hadn’t known it when I transferred, but Satellite was the last stop for truants, miscreants, freaks and any other kid who couldn’t cut it in regular school, but for personal or court-ordered reasons did not drop out. Being at Satellite was essentially like being spun off from the mother ship, a place where we were freed from whatever former complications and/or requirements we hadn’t been able/hadn’t wanted to deal with; consequently, anyone who wanted to shone like crazy. Always happy to hog the spotlight, Satellite gave it to me just for showing up: as the school’s only white girl besides Dawn (whose pervasive nodding placed her in her own category), I went from neighborhood bad girl to school goody-goody, fly girl without a clue. I didn’t mind.

I got Lorraine to enroll. (She didn’t have to worry about John Curley, who’d been put in prison; years later, Sarah and I alternately heard that he’d shot off his own leg/been murdered while inside.) We hooked up with the only white guy at the school, a tall, lanky kid named Mike, who was into New Wave but dressed like what he was, a blue collar kid from Hell’s Kitchen. Now we had a crew. While it was true all the kids broke off into sets, each set was really tiny, maybe three or four kids per, ergo there was no hierarchy; the stoners had no more or less power than the lesbians, or the eggheads, or the transvestites. This is not to say everyone liked each other or got along, there were no posters encouraging brotherhood, it was simply that, with one hundred students launched from one hundred set of circumstances, there was no system for us to break down one another, no way to classify better from worse. Brains didn’t count; no one appeared to have any money; whatever caste system applied at home was invalid here. Race, sexual preference, religion, nothing was any more or less accepted than another thing. If you didn’t like the way the girl next to you did her hair, you shut up about it, because here, hair meant nothing, hair carried no inherent value. You wanted to argue about hair, you did it back in your own ‘hood.

With no ruling class, there was nothing to fight against, not even the administration, which I recall as a vague presence interacting with students as little as possible. The only requirement outside of classes was that we meet once a week with a counselor, who was mostly concerned whether we were staying out of trouble on the outside. As this wasn’t my particular problem, my meetings, with some lady, never lasted more than two minutes.

Most of the kids were in trouble all the time, or claimed to be. In the shaft, they told aggrandizing stories, and almost everyone carried drugs. After I’d been at Satellite about six weeks, I saw a TV program about the dangers of angel dust. They’d set up hidden cameras and caught shadowy shots of kids smoking and, in one iridescent-green night-scope image, a tall, skinny girl whose knees buckled, causing her to pitch face-first into a parked car and slump into the street.

“I saw you on TV last night,” I told Dawn.

“Yeah?” she said, pulling on a pin-joint, smiling like a cat; she looked like an elongated Michelle Phillips. I asked her if dust always made you pass out. Not always, she said, and handed me a joint she said was pot laced with dust. It tasted like toothpaste. I didn’t like the high, it made me irritable and feeling as though I wanted to sleep, which I did, at a nearby Blimpies, my cheek stuck to the plastic table.

The thing I remember least about Satellite Academy is attending class. This is not to say I did not go to class; we all did, we had to, if you cut school and you had prior trouble with the law, your counselor told your probation officer. Everyone had the same schedule: classes from 9 – 11:45, an hour for lunch, more classes until 2:45. But the classes themselves made little impact. Sarah (who’d attended Satellite for a few months before shipping out to Northfield Mount Herman) best remembers classrooms with playpens full of the students’ squalling babies. I remember the layout of each room: thirty or so wooden desk forming a big square with a lacuna in the center, so the teachers could keep an eye on everyone. The windows were covered in heavy green-black felt, so that the room had the boggy stasis of a holding area, which in a sense it was: we were marking time until diplomas were handed out, and the teachers knew it; most of them did little more than try to keep control, which wasn’t easy. With most kids wanting attention in the worst way, classes usually went like this: the first ten minutes, kids noisily filed in, rolling their eyes when the teacher asked them to settle down, then talking anyway. When there was enough quiet for the lesson to begin, a wave of tardy kids came in, offering long, complicated apologies more for the entertainment of the students than for the teacher. Chico was the king of this. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe it, homes,” he’d say, trying to act out the whole story before the teacher verbally wrestled him into his seat. After a few kids like this, class would begin, so to speak: The teacher would talk, the students would either ignore him or do their best to disrupt him: they’d joke with their neighbors, pretend to fall asleep and “snore” loudly, ask inane questions in order to engage in distracting repartee. It was comical, but also boring; even for someone who’d early on become expert at appearing to pay attention without in fact learning anything, the routine made me itchy, and I felt sorry for the teachers. They didn’t have a chance with this crowd. Like my counselors at CAS, they were earnest, the men mostly white and the women mostly black. The women taught English and Home Economics, which I did not take, the men taught History and Shop, which I did. Shop was a stab at being tough and capable, two things I knew how to affect but in reality knew little about. We learned to cut a pipe and solder it back together, to wear protective goggles. It was a fun and, for me, utterly useless course; while I could picture myself winning an Academy Award, I knew I was not going to be a welder.

Lorrie, the boy-girl who’d given me the eye, didn’t take Shop, but a few of her crew did. They’d cruise me when they came to class, sassier now that I was the object of an official crush.

“Lorrie wondered where you was yesterday,” one would say, “she missed seeing yo’ pretty face.” Their attention fairly paralyzed me; I never had a good retort. What they were doing (and what I, by my silence, was encouraging them to do) was spinning a web between me and Lorrie, who I regularly flirted with in the halls, me the coquette, she the aggressor. Flirting with a girl was not something I’d done before. It’s not that I wanted her sexually—that I wasn’t sure about. What I wanted was her attention, to be pulled into her world, as I’d wanted to be pulled into every new world I’d come across for the past three years. Lorrie pulled gently.

Others yanked, no one more than the Dr. Frankenfurter look-alike, whose name was Rosa, and who’d become a girlfriend of sorts, talking to me about the gifts “mens” gave her and the clubs she’d been to the night before, and scolding me for not wearing more make-up. She and the other TVs would literally back me into a wall and run their hands over my cheekbones; I liked the attention and let them. One day at the end of English class (we were reading aloud Of Mice and Men, which I’d read in the fifth grade; Sarah remembers being assigned The Lonely Lady, by Harold Robbins), Rosa raised her hand, and suggested that instead of having regular class the next day, she and her friends do a full makeover on me. The teacher agreed, telling students that, if they didn’t want to watch the makeover, they could read in the lunchroom. The next day, I sat on a stool facing Mike, Lorraine and a few girls; the teacher hadn’t bothered to show up, nor had most of the students. I think Rosa, wearing a Diane Von Furstenberg wrap-dress, was a little disappointed (I was, too), but with a dismissive “what do they know?” wave of her nails, she explained she was going to make me gorgeous. Out of her pocketbook came foundation and rouge and powder, liners and shadows and mascara, sponges and cotton pads. Explaining what she did each step of the way, and with the help of two assistants, she made me up. Midway through, I noticed Lorrie and her crew, watching from the doorway.

“Don’t be moving so much, mija,” Rosa said, turning my face back to her while hissing for Lorrie to scram. Rosa went back to staring at my face, squinting, deciding. I liked feeling her hands on me, liked seeing her this close. There was no question she’d made the correct choice, to not be a guy; what she’d done with herself was intensely right.

Thirty minutes later, Rosa stood back, surveyed her work, and almost burst into tears telling me how beautiful I was; her assistants nodded vigorously. I looked at Lorraine and Mike, whose open-mouthed expressions were poised between horror and cracking up. I asked to see myself. Rosa only had a tiny compact, so I scooted down the hall to the bathroom, checking to see if any of the kids looked at me differently. No one reacted in any special way.

The light in public bathrooms is never particularly flattering, but what I saw in the mirror was shocking: I looked exactly like Rosa. Which is to say, like Dr. Frankenfurter: brown triangles of shading beneath my cheekbones and slimming my nose, an expanse of white around my eyes, which were rimmed with half-inch of liner, the lids six arcs of color, my lips lined in black and slicked in gooey black-plum. I was unrecognizable, or rather, I could vaguely find myself, a prisoner inside the look. I felt as though I was suffocating, and started a panic sweat though the heavy pancake.

I walked to the classroom with my face down. Rosa was at the front of the room, tossing her black curls like Rita Hayworth and dishing in Puerto Rican street-boy vernacular. I was envious: she was funny, she could snap, and she was so fine. I wanted to be as certain of myself, to leave as large an impression. But without the make-up, which I was already pawing at.

“Sto-op,” Rosa said, smoothing something on my jaw-line, “you gonna messit up.” She looked at my eyes, and saw I couldn’t handle it. I distinctly remember the room getting dimmer, and Rosa sort of sneering/smiling at me. Though we looked identical at that moment, we were pulling away from each other, until we were two objects: A drag queen and a white girl who’d decided to play together, and now playtime was over. I felt bad, as though I was betraying her, but she was a lot sturdier than that: When one of her crew came into the room burbling about some event going down that night, Rosa got very excited, tossed all the stuff in her purse and left letting out screams of laughter and looking at me only once more, to make sure I was looking at her.

I went back to the bathroom to see if I could wash off some of the crap. It wasn’t easy; everything was greasy and the mascara left long black streaks. I’d done the best job I could when the bathroom door opened.

“Why’d you take it off?” Lorrie asked, closing the door and leaning against it. “It looked good.”

I told her I didn’t really like it, that it wasn’t me.

“Yeah, you don’t need it,” she said, moving her hands around in her pockets. “You pretty enough as it is. Beautiful, actually.”

This was the moment we’d been leading up to, the moment when I’d have to know what I wanted. Lorrie came toward me. I pressed my back against the wall.

“What would you do if I kissed you?” she asked. She placed her hands on the tile, on either side of my waist, and began moving her face near mine. I’d been shyly looking at her for two months, imagining, thinking, maybe. Now, in so close, I saw that beneath the butch clothes she was a girl, with soft cheeks and eyes that were not forceful, but wary, like a doe. The fabric of her T-shirt was an inch from mine, creating a hot pocket, a swirling confluence of hormones and heat, rapidly deciding what will be. The body has this moment to become pliant, to say yes. Mine didn’t. Lorrie sensed it, and what felt like a wet rag fell between us. If she’d leaned in and kissed me, I probably would have let her, but she didn’t, she saw what we’d been doing would not progress past delicious flirting, and like that, the web broke.

It was December, I’d been at Satellite close to three months, and academically I’d learned next to nothing. The only class I was actually interested in was American history. It was stuff I’d been taught many times—slavery, the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty—but this time it engaged me and stuck. I’d stay after class to speak to the teacher, Mr. Hansen. Everybody liked Mr. Hansen, who reminded me of the teachers I’d had back in Brooklyn: young, corduroy blazers, mustache, probably listened to the Allman Brothers. He was tall, with a bearish build and a deep voice, and he didn’t take a lot of shit from the kids. About a week before Christmas break, he gave a pop quiz. The groans were murderous as he passed out the papers. It was basic stuff, I didn’t have a problem with it.

Two days later, Hansen asked me to stay after class. The only reason I could think for being asked was I’d screwed up the test. He pulled two chairs together, and sat with his hands on his knees, facing me. He didn’t say anything. I thought for a second he was going to proposition me.

“Have you ever thought you might be in the wrong school?” he asked. He handed me my test; I’d gotten 100. A flare went up in my chest. I couldn’t remember ever doing well in school, and though I suspected it was because I never tried, I’d also assumed it was too late to try. Hansen was saying it was not. “You might want to look into transferring, because I don’t know what else you’ll get here.”

I don’t know if I mentioned this to Mike and Lorraine, as we stood in the elevator shaft getting high. It was a cold day, and people were quieter than usual, trying to stoke up quick and get back to someplace warm. Ten minutes before class, Chico came in looking very freaked out. He walked right up to me.

“I need to talk to you,” he said. This was not usual; I don’t think I’d ever had more than a one-minute conversation with the guy. He backed me into the corner of the shaft and started speaking in an uncharacteristically serious if intense voice.

“Me and my homes, we was up in the Bronx, and we offed these two guys.” He took out a cigarette; his hands were shaking. “We did, man. I don’t know what to do. What should I do?” He looked at me, his eyes huge and jumpy with fright. Here was a guy who daily regaled people with his misadventures, the boy who cried wolf.

As people came around, asking, “What’d you say?” Chico kept looking at me, whispering, “What should I do? What should I do?” I didn’t know why he’d chosen me to confess to, maybe I looked less freaky than the other kids, or more serious, or because I was a girl, or because I was white. When the kids started saying, “Yeah, right, you killed some guys,” and taking off for class, I figured Chico picked me because he thought I might believe him. I did believe him. I stayed in the shaft with him after everyone but his two homeboys had left. Chico squatted and shook his head, saying, “Man… oh, man.” He looked scared out of his mind. I didn’t know what to say. I asked if what he was telling me was true; he said it was. I asked if he thought he was going to be caught, and he said yeah, he did. I told him I couldn’t tell him what to do, but that if he thought he was going to be caught, maybe he should talk to Mr. Hansen, that I thought he was a good guy and might help Chico through it. Chico nodded. He was crying at this point. His two homeboys stood off to the side, mumbling, “It’s all right, brother, it’s gonna be all right.”

The cover of the late edition of the Daily News had a photo of Chico in custody, his face wild-eyed, his bandoleer across his chest. The story said he’d shot the owner of a bodega uptown. I don’t know how they caught him so fast; I doubt he had time to talk to Hansen. Seeing his picture made me convulsively sad. He was a kid who acted tough and wise and as though he didn’t give a fuck about anything in order to get attention. In the course of affecting these things, he slipped, he played too hard, and like that he was caught. No more chances.

When Satellite let out for winter break a week later, I went home and sat at the kitchen table for a while. When my mom came home, I asked if she thought I might, in January, go back to my old school. She and my dad talked about it, made a phone call, and it was done. For me, it was that easy.

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