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FRESH
YARN PRESENTS:
West
Side Story
By
Claudia Lonow
 There
are times when two completely different parts of one's life come
together in unexpected ways, causing chaos and destruction. This
happened to me in junior high, when the show business world I'd
grown up in collided with my membership in a gang.
I spent ages three to eleven in an artsy-fartsy Greenwich Village
cocoon. My parents were struggling actors who struggled more often
than they acted. Their friends were a ragtag bunch of misfits whose
ill-advised efforts at artistic immortality were comically futile,
and, the fact that they didn't know that only made them sadder…yet
funnier, too. For instance, my mother's best friend and fellow Improv
troupe member constantly changed her name, going from Eva to Kay
to Tanya to Joyce, in the hopes that just the right moniker would
stand out and lead to her big break. These changes would be announced
as if they were important decisions that would alter her destiny.
Her destiny of nameless obscurity, it turned out.
My stepfather's best friend was Paul Crossgroven. Although Paul
looked like a young Carol O'Connor, he never achieved the slightest
amount of success. And the most striking thing I can say about him,
besides the fact that his son tried to molest me, is he had once
tasted his own shit. Or so my mother claimed, one windy day as we
walked down Houston Street. I asked her why he did that, and she
replied that he'd been overcome by curiosity. Not knowing what to
make of such overwhelming inquisitiveness, I hugged myself in my
uncomfortable snowsuit and thought, "How dark and glamorous."
I loved my showbiz childhood, surrounded by out-of-work thespians
practicing their improv skits in my living room, asking me to call
out suggestions of professions and locations. "Two plumbers
on the Autobahn!" I'd shout out, as I cooked up a can of macaroni
and cheese for my supper. My parents' life was a whirl of singing
lessons, diction practice, method acting, primal scream exercises,
and braless girls who didn't shave their armpits crying over their
latest boyfriend problems in our teeny weeny kitchen.
But that all changed when I turned twelve and had to go to junior
high school. See, the junior high in our district, IS 70, was not
in Greenwich Village. It was, instead, in a bad neighborhood on
17th street in between 8th and 9th Avenues. I knew it was bad because
in the winter the tenants of the decrepit brownstones across the
street from the school put their milk on their fire escapes to keep
it cold because they couldn't afford refrigerators. I don't know
what they did in the summer. Drink their milk faster perhaps? The
point is, the liberal, middle class Jewesses I'd grown up with and
I were suddenly surrounded by black girls who, for whatever reason,
hated us, and voiced their collective desire to kick our asses quite
frequently.
I first realized these girls detested me, and had the skills to
let me know it, after an altercation I got into with a black girl
who was named Linda Dykke. I don't know if Linda was a dyke, but
she did have quite the unflattering hairstyle and a not-great complexion.
This isn't to say that all African-American lesbians have bad hair
and skin, but Linda did and it wasn't my fault.
One day, I was in P.E., which I had already dubbed the bane of my
existence…even though I hadn't existed that long and had so
many more existential banes ahead of me. The Physical Education
program at I.S. 70 was so effective at bringing about the greatest
possible humiliation to a girl going through puberty, it's hard
to believe it wasn't designed for that purpose. The ill-fitting
uniforms, the unflattering fluorescent lighting of the gymnasium,
the full-length funhouse-like mirrors in the locker rooms. Not to
mention the expectation that we, a bunch of twelve-year-old girls
who didn't know each other, would take off our clothes and shower
together when pubic hair, breasts and blood could shoot out of us,
Carrie-like, at any time.
It was during P.E. that I happened to walk by Linda Dykke. Previous
to the incident, I'd been under the impression that Linda Dykke
and I were friends, if your definition of friend is that she never
threatened to beat me up, or even call me "Honky" except
for once and that was only in play. In any case as I walked past
her, I said, "Hi Linda," and waved. Linda immediately
got upset. "You put your hand too close to my face," she
said. I don't remember what I said next because she did one of those
black girl high school pushing you things. "You put yo' hand
too close to my face, bitch." Needless to say, things went
downhill from there.
continued...
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