Neon Angel

  When we emerged from the bathroom, the attendant’s eyes nearly popped right out of his head. We dumped the key back on the counter with a smirk. We left him staring, his mouth flapping open, as we ran on unsteady heels back to Paul’s car.

  “Hot!” he exclaimed as we jumped into the car. “Love the eyes!” Then with a squeal of rubber on asphalt, we were off into the night again.

  But not for long! At Lankershim Boulevard we came to a dead stop—there was a sea of chrome, stretching off into the distance. The night air was alive with the sound of horns honking and the screams and laughter as an impromptu party started spontaneously taking place in this insane traffic jam. Lights flashed hypnotically, shining up into the night sky with a steady rhythm; people stood up in their convertibles dancing to music that we couldn’t hear. As we crept forward, you could feel the electricity growing in the air like the prelude to a thunderstorm.

  “There must be a million people coming to this concert!” I breathed in wonder. I had never seen such a mass of humanity before. I could barely believe that I was about to see David Bowie in the flesh. It seemed almost too good to be true.

  “It’s the last concert in town,” Paul said. “Half these people probably don’t even have tickets. They think they’re going to be able to get some from scalpers. This is chaos . . .”

  I breathed in, and let the excitement fill all of the empty places inside of me as we pulled into the parking lot. I could not remember ever having felt this excited before—my first rock concert! Tonight was all about David Bowie, my beautiful, wonderful David.

  “You know what Derek said to me?” Marie said, suddenly breaking the spell. I shot her my dirtiest dirty look and snapped, “I don’t want to know.” Instead, I turned the stereo up, and David Bowie’s voice began to shake the interior of the car, filling me up again with good feelings . . . I can’t quite put it into words what exactly David Bowie meant to me back then. Over the past few years, Bowie had filled all of those empty spaces inside of me, spaces that began to appear, like wormy wood holes in old furniture, since the day my dad upped and left.

  That day was still a fresh wound. I’d often run it through in my head, wondering if I could have done something, said something, that would have made it end differently.

  I was twelve years old. I woke up first that morning, chilled to the bone by the air-conditioning, my stomach churning with fear and excitement. Today was a special day . . . today was the day that Dad was coming home!

  I peered out from under the covers and surveyed the bedroom. Clothes lay in piles on the floor, records covered every available surface. The room was so bad that Mom wouldn’t even come into it anymore. Maybe she was afraid that the mess would eat her alive. Across the room, Marie was still asleep, dead to world. She always sleeps silently, no snorting or sleep-talking, just like a little princess. Everything Marie does is just so. She sleeps daintily, she eats daintily. She’s so perfect. I’m sure that when I sleep I snore, or talk or do something else that is awful and embarrassing. Despite the fact that everyone says that we’re identical, we’re not really . . . Marie’s face is fuller than mine; prettier, too. I wish that my face looked like hers. People get us mixed up all of the time, but I can’t understand how. I feel like the ugly stepsister, the twisted mirror image of the perfect little girl that is my twin.

  Marie blinked awake and noticed me staring at her. This didn’t faze her anymore; she was well used to waking up to find me looking at her with a weird mix of envy and adoration. She just stared back without saying anything. Then, noticing the air-conditioning, she said, “I feel like a polar bear,” and we both laughed.

  Mom was in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Outside, the heat was stifling already. We lived in Encino back then, which is to say the Valley. The Valley is always at least ten degrees hotter than the rest of Los Angeles. I looked at Mom and wondered if she was thinking about Dad, too. I wondered what she’d say when he walked through the door. I wondered what she’d say to him when they made up.

  I got myself a glass of orange juice and sat watching my mother reading the paper. She pulled a face every time she read about something horrendous. It was nine-thirty in the morning, and her platinum hair was already perfectly coiffed, her makeup impeccable. Back then, my mom was the most glamorous person I had ever known. She reminded me of Marilyn Monroe with a little Lucille Ball mixed in.

  My mom came out to Hollywood from Illinois when she was just eighteen years old to be an actress. With her parents’ permission, she and a girlfriend got a ride to California and rented a tiny one-room apartment in Hollywood with a Murphy bed for thirty-seven bucks a month. She found work as a Burger Shack carhop, bringing trays loaded with burgers, french fries, and chocolate malts to the customers parked in Ford Model A’s and Chryslers parked outside. All the time she was waiting for her big break. My mom was blond, beautiful, and determined: she eventually paid her way through acting school by working nights as a cigarette girl at a Hollywood after-hours club. I remember her telling me that Orson Welles once tipped her ten dollars for a pack of Camels. My mom’s looks and grit eventually landed her movie roles. She was under contract with Republic Pictures and starred alongside the likes of Roy Rogers and the Andrews Sisters. She found that she was particularly adept at playing the ditsy blonde. That was a long time ago. Mom doesn’t act anymore, but every morning she still dresses as if she were auditioning for a role.

  “When is Dad gonna be here?” I asked.

  She took a sip of her coffee and sighed. “He didn’t say, really. It could be anytime. You know your father . . .”

  That is all I could get out of her. Mom hadn’t said much about our dad since they announced that they were separating. The months leading up to the separation were unbearable. Their fights—which we had never been used to—were intense and heartbreaking. I remember watching my father holding my mother’s wrists as they fought on the front porch, in a desperate attempt to stop her from hitting him. And my mother’s sobbing phone calls would echo down the halls. “I found him there! In the hotel . . . with . . . with that floozy!”

  Mom’s first husband was an abusive drunk named Bill. They had a daughter together, my older sister, Sandie. Mom told us that Bill had once chased her around the bedroom during a drunken rampage and put a lit cigarette out on her forehead. All this with my mom still clutching Sandie in fear. After that, Mom left him for good and returned to Illinois for a while, before returning to her career in Hollywood. She met my father at the Cock and Bull Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, which was quite a celebrity hot spot in those days. My future dad, Don Currie, was working as a bartender there and Mom would often tell us the story of the first time they met. Mom was all dressed up, having come back from an interview, and she was sitting at the bar with friends. One of the other bartenders nudged my father and nodded toward Joan Crawford, who had just walked into the place, commenting, “Now, there is a beautiful woman!” My father fixed my mother in his deep blue gaze and said, “I think the prettiest lady is right here in front of me . . .” It was love at first sight, my mom said. There’s no doubt about it, my mom really loved my dad and he loved her, too. This is what made their separation so hard on everybody.

  “What does separate mean?” asked my little brother, Donnie, after Mom and Dad made the announcement. Marie scowled at him and said, “It means they’re getting a divorce, Dumbo!” Dumbo is the name we called Donnie whenever we’d get mad at him, on account of his ears, which stuck right out from his head. He blushed when Marie said this. After all, what kid wouldn’t be self-conscious about his ears when his big sisters call him “Dumbo” and his mom makes him sleep with a weird turban-thing wrapped around his head in an effort to get them to lie flat?

  Marie and I never had much patience for Donnie back then, although he was really okay for a kid brother. He looked up at her with big uncomprehending eyes. With a curse, Marie stormed out of the room. He looked at me for an answer, but I didn’t have one.

  And th
en, Dad was gone. Off to live with Grandma and Aunt Evie, ten miles away in Reseda. At first, I pretended that he was on a trip, but as the weeks dragged on, his absence started to hurt me, as painfully as if I had physically lost a piece of myself. Mom refused to even mention Dad’s name after he left, but all Marie and I could talk about was how much we missed him. Mom just carried on like he had never been there in the first place. We all cried about it, late at night in bed, where mom couldn’t hear, but it didn’t help. The tears just made me feel emptier and lonelier than before.

  In our family, my mother was the disciplinarian. Or as my father used to say, “She likes to wear the pants in the family.” Of course, my dad never liked that, and I was secretly convinced that this was a huge contributing factor to their split.

  We never had what you would call a traditional mother-daughter relationship. I never went to the movies with my mom, or did any of those mother-daughter things that other kids in my school seemed to do with their moms. My mom worked all of the time, so us three kids tended to all hang out by ourselves. I never told my mom about my first period, or discussed any of the embarrassing, strange things that puberty does to a young girl. Sandie was the one who helped us with all of that. My mom was too busy working to put food on the table. Anyway, my mom was uncomfortable talking about “things like that,” and I always felt too embarrassed to bring them up. As a result, despite the fact that I grew up in her house, I don’t think my mother and I really got to know each other. At least not until much later, when we could relate to each other as grown women. As an adolescent, I was a mystery to my mother. My mom was totally absorbed in her work: running a successful dress shop called the Donna-Rie Shop. After Dad moved out, my mom had to support three kids and she became even more short-tempered and distant than before. Now I can understand why she acted this way, but at the time it filled me with confusion and resentment. All I ever wanted was to make my mom proud, I just never felt like I added up or was good enough. I guess most kids feel that way, at one time or another. When my dad moved out of the house, my world literally crumbled. My father was the protector, the one who slept with a gun under the mattress, the one who would always ensure that we never came to any harm. With Dad gone, we felt scared, as if there was no one to protect us. The family just came apart at the seams.

  But then, one day, in answer to my prayers came the news that Dad was coming back, to talk. I decided that this could only mean one thing: they had come to their senses, and they were getting back together.

  I sipped my orange juice, and looked at my mother for clues. But she was inscrutable, absorbed by the latest urban horrors served up by the newspaper. I looked out of the window instead, and noticed that the sky was blue—perfect, cloudless, endless blue. So I knew everything was going to be all right.

  After all, I figured, bad things can’t happen on a hot, cloudless, sunny day like today.

  “Dav-id! Dav-id! Dav-id! Dav-id!”

  Inside the Universal Amphitheater, the crowd was getting restless, and the fans were chanting louder, louder, cries and whistles and screams building in one section of the hall before fading out, the noise rising up somewhere else. The air was wet, hot, intoxicating. The pungent, sweet smell of marijuana hung in the sticky air. . .

  “Dav-id! Dav-id! Dav-id!”

  The excitement was almost too much. I could feel my heart pounding against my rib cage, and I got the idea that it might burst open altogether. I could not wipe the big, stupid grin off of my face. Then the lights went down, and the roar of the audience was deafening . . . In the dark, I could see a sea of faces, lights bouncing off the sea of glitter like some kind of woozy kaleidoscope. Next to me was some crazy guy in a silver space suit, the full-on Ziggy Stardust outfit, with crazy boots that had live goldfish swimming around in the glass platform soles. Onstage it looked as though there was some kind of strange, futuristic city with blood dripping down from the top of the buildings. My eyes were just about to pop out of my head: I had never seen anything like this before! The set was amazing, heavy with smoke, and there were dark figures doing spidery dance movements in the shadows. The band was somewhere onstage; I could hear them pick up their instruments, indistinct, shadowy figures. I scanned the stage for David Bowie, but he was nowhere to be seen. I was screaming, almost without realizing it. Then, as the lights dimmed, the chiming of bells began . . . I knew this music intimately already, having played the LP almost until the grooves had worn away . . . It was “1984”! All around, sweaty, twisting figures were pushing up against me, dancing, screaming, cheering . . .

  Then a silhouette appeared behind the sheer curtain and everybody went insane because we knew that it was Bowie. He struck a pose, and the audience lost their minds. He spread his legs, crouching down . . . and then, as my mouth hung open, the curtains burst apart and David Bowie hopped onto the stage.

  I was shocked—so shocked I stopped screaming for a moment. This wasn’t the David Bowie from the cover of Diamond Dogs! This wasn’t Ziggy Stardust, or Aladdin Sane . . . this was an altogether different David Bowie. . . . He was dressed in a beige zoot suit, with suspenders, and his fire-engine-red hair was slicked back. It was a far cry from the silver bodysuit and platforms that I had imagined. Even the band was different—the Spiders from Mars replaced by some kind of mutant space-age soul outfit. It looked like Soul Train, as re-imagined by cross-dressing Martians. Of course he isn’t what I expected, I realized. He would NEVER be what anybody expected!

  I watched this impossibly thin, pale, alien prince singing to me. Not on vinyl, but right there . . . right in front of my face, this beautiful, hypnotic, strange man was singing to me, and although I could not quite put it into words, I instinctively knew that what I was experiencing was something religious, something profound. The crowd seemed to move as one being, pushing toward the front, a tidal wave of teenage energy, and although I had heard the words coming out of David’s mouth a million times, it felt as if I were hearing the words for the first time, each line reaching across the massive amphitheater and falling around me like a meteor shower.

  The heat and the frustration, the alienation and the loneliness, the lust and the anxiety and the joy that seemed like it had been building inside of me for years, were suddenly unbearable, like the pressure was too much and I felt like a bomb primed to explode, and only David Bowie knew how I felt. His words explained what was deep down inside of me better than I ever could. The unbearable adolescent energy simmering inside of me was suddenly ignited. I imagined that I might erupt, go off like old footage they’d show on TV of the A-bomb, just explode! Take this whole concert out with me in an eruption of glitter and fury . . .

  All around me were Bowie’s kids . . . Ziggy Stardust’s bastard children, the kids who knew that David Bowie was the most beautiful, plastic-profound creature on the planet. Not the dumb kids at school who’d sneer that Bowie was a “fag” or too “weird” . . . The place was filled instead with the kids who felt just like me, who felt like we’d fallen to earth, too. We were screaming for him . . . screaming, and singing and dancing out all of our rage, frustrations, and joys.

  When the song ended, the lights went out. And for a fraction of a second, before the place erupted into hysteria, it seemed like there was a moment of shocked silence.

  For that moment, I was somewhere else. Somewhere profound. What I was witnessing tonight was nothing short of a revelation.

  I was back in my home and my sister and I were watching Donnie cannonball into the swimming pool, when the doorbell rang and everybody looked up. Could that be Dad? I was standing on the very edge of the diving board, about to jump in, but suddenly I couldn’t move. The doorbell rang again. He had a key, didn’t he? If it was Dad, why was he ringing the bell? Then the thought hit me: he’s ringing the bell because he’s holding his suitcases and needs our help. Dad is really coming home!

  My dad was the most beautiful, handsome man I had ever known. Before he met my mother, he was a Marine paratrooper, a gunnery serge
ant. He was heavily decorated for his service in some of the most treacherous Japanese campaigns of World War II. Don Currie was a slim, handsome man with a smooth, Dean Martin–esque singing voice. His voice was so good that Larry Crosby had wanted him to cut a record, although my father never pursued it. Dad was a sweet, fun-loving guy, and was great with us kids. He was also a hit with the ladies. My mom used to tell us that when they were dating, she would dock him five hundred dollars every time she caught him dating another woman. When they married, they had enough saved from Dad’s indiscretions to fully furnish their first apartment.

  There was a dark side to my father, too. His experiences during the war had left a huge impression on my dad, and I remember sometimes, when he’d tell us his war stories, his eyes would seem to get bluer, with a faraway look that would almost take you there. I remember him telling us about an old buddy of his who had contracted syphilis during the war, and had become severely depressed. Depressed enough that the others in the unit had taken away his gun, and hid their own weapons, fearing what he might do. One morning my father woke up to find his gun missing. He immediately feared the worst, and ran through the barracks looking for his friend. He found him in the latrine, standing very still, with my father’s gun at his side. When Dad would recount this story, he’d pause, reaching out for his glass of watery bourbon and ice, and take a smooth long gulp. He was strangely at ease when he talked about the war, wrapped up in those memories like they were a comfortable old coat. He told us that the last thing he said to his friend as the man raised the gun to his head was “Don’t do it, baby!” And then, in a flash of cordite, my father’s friend blew his own head clean off.