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My life began in New York, but I was quickly relocated, because according to my mother, New York is no place to raise a child. Children grow up too fast in the city. They grow up learning how to buy things and they learn about sex. My mother only believed this because she heard it in a song. She insisted that life’s best lessons came from songs, and not just any songs — non-conformist songs made by real artists. Real artists were the kind that played music for music’s sake and only drank their coffee black and never went to Starbucks. My mother never drank Starbucks or ate fast food. She never ate anything with a face, except when she was really craving a burger, then it was fine because that was her body telling her that it needed certain nutrients and it was okay to eat meat when her body craved it. I never really cared one way or the other. It was easy to sneak the food I wanted, that and the fact my mother decided that at age four I was an independent, sentient being and who was she to make my decisions for me? So I cut off my hair in haphazard lengths and wore only galoshes and lime green. I always, always carried glitter and a teddy whose name was Mr. Pollack. I only ate corndogs and pancakes and I only drank orange juice, until the pediatrician told my mother that so much acid wasn’t good for my stomach, and then I only drank apple juice.
Children learn to shun the abnormal if pressured enough, and once I started school I knew all too soon that my mother’s messy black hair and too big sunglasses were not the status quo. I no longer wanted to sit in her lap and stick my fingers through the stretched holes in her ears like I had done when I was small, or inspect her inked sleeves, patterned from shoulder to wrist – and when she dyed her blonde roots black, I didn’t watch in rapt attention from the edge of the bathtub. I took to extracurricular activities — I list them all so loosely because I left nothing out; I did anything as long as I was as far away from my mother as possible. She’d done nothing to merit my contempt, but when the kid I liked told me that ordering sprouts on a sandwich was lame, I quit ordering sprouts on sandwiches. I quit asking for water at lunch; I got cokes instead. I didn’t tell them that my mother thought French fries were a product of corporate America because what teen really understands what corporate America is? I never understood, I just conformed and went on. I didn’t bring home dates in high school because my mother was now thirty something and dressing in tights and mini-dresses and big white snow boots. She was convinced that I hated her just like she hated her own parents and so she let me do anything, to free my ‘creative temperament.’ So I became a journalist for Rolling Stone. My mother was pleased, until I wouldn’t write about The Slips. She wanted to hate me, but she couldn’t, just like I’d never hate her for being a scenester and having a baby at twenty. Even scenesters eat, shit and die. They get sick, and when they lie in a hospital bed dying at a too young age you forget everything except icing down their dry lips and touching up their blond roots and holding their hands and counting down their breaths.
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