The Eyes of Yoko Are Upon Us

I had not been in New York very long. I had already been ejected from two living spaces (or ejected from one and on the way out from another) in less than two weeks. It was lunacy to have come up here. Perhaps I was under the impression that being born in Poughkeepsie made me a native of some kind; something other than an Upstate Hick. Our family had lived all up and down the eastern U.S. and the last place we had settled was South Carolina. I had left a small town where I knew everyone’s face (names will always escape me), and taken the train to Manhattan.

A friend was waiting for me there, and I spent some time in her hotel for Middle Class Women. Hmmm. They had a funny idea of what constituted “middle class.” I was appalled by the conditions and the rent. Renee told me I could only stay so long and then I would have to find another place. I had no idea how to go about it. Renee even had to tell me how to use public transportation.

“Take these quarters and put them in your glove,” she said. It was February and quite cold. The New Yorker in me rejoiced at the “briskness” of the air. The South Carolinian was freezing. “Put them in the change slot and ask the driver for a transfer.” Renee was talking to me as if I were a kindergartner. “He will tear off a transfer and hand it to you. Keep that with you to give to the driver of the next bus.” Looking back at this now, I am amazed by how naïve I was. Naïve enough to not know how to use a bus. Naïve enough to think I could just take the train to New York City and find a place to stay and work. Naïve enough to try to go to auditions. You would have thought I was eighteen. In fact, I was twenty-eight. I was a late bloomer.

I moved into the YWCA on Lexington Avenue, which I was later convinced to be run by Nazis. I only had so much money on me and the manager wanted me to cough it all up to hold the room for another two weeks. The room was tiny and infested with roaches. They weren’t the giant, glossy palmetto bugs of coastal South Carolina, but tiny German cockroaches that ignored you because they knew they would be around long after humankind died out. They crawled all over the tiny sink in the room.

I have a problem making decisions. Once the decision is made, I can follow it through, but I will walk up and down the street until I am utterly exhausted before I will be able to choose a place to eat. I was there with limited money. I had $8,000 in the bank, had budgeted $2,000 to set myself up in New York in 1982, but was only carrying a few hundred. There was no use telling the manager of the Y that if I gave her the money she wanted, I would have nothing to eat on for the remaining two weeks. That was my lookout. I told her anyway. There were plenty of women clamoring to pay $20 a day to stay in that miserable cockroach spa, she told me. Pay up ahead or leave.

I opted to leave … at the end of the week. Then I went searching for something to eat. Up and down Lexington Avenue I went, marveling at the Citicorp building, looking like a modern mucilage bottle. I looked in the face of everyone in the street because knowing each and every one of them was a stranger was liberating. I had moved from a place where all faces were familiar. It never kept me from doing stupid things, but it was stultifying. All new faces were so refreshing! They were inspiration! Well, they were at first. Then I got hungry. Up and down I walked, looking for something affordable and reasonably nutritious. This let out all cozily standardized fast food outlets. I could get a Whopper for ninety-nine cents, but I’d also get heartburn.

If I tell you that in the end I bought a container of unsalted freshly-ground peanut butter at a health food store and some Stoned Wheat Thins, you would not appreciate the chasm of indecision I inhabited for some hours. Up and down, across and around, “No, not there, or there, or there, but what about, no – no – no.” Back and through, pacing, pacing, then plodding, and then staggering. Up, down, back, plod, stagger, stagger. It reminded me of all the dates I spent with men waiting for me to make up my mind about where we should have dinner. One of them drove around a traffic circle waiting for me to decide. “I’m going to drive around this traffic circle until you decide,” he said. Then he got mad at me when that ploy didn’t help me come to a conclusion. It did not and still really does not matter to me where I eat. If he’s paying for it, he should eat where he would find something he’d enjoy. Round and round and round … and in the end the place I chose gave me food poisoning. Back and forth, counting my cash in my head. What makes the most sense? Down and up, and you get the point, but I’m still not making up my mind. I wondered if I would starve to death first.

And in the end, I should have gotten the salted.

New York City had only started on me. I walked back to the Y one evening, and had begun another unpleasant conversation with the Kommandant when another woman threw herself through the door breathlessly. “I’ve been mugged!” she cried. “When? Where?” we asked her. “Just now, just down the street!” She had been following me when a man stepped out from the shadows and demanded her purse. I had not heard anything. I had not been mugged. I decided not to report this to my parents. I did, however, call my friend Temple in Cambridge, Massachusetts and tell him.

Temple had been very encouraging. He had accidentally ended up at Harvard Law School when a film director apprenticeship had gone sour on him. He had taken some test to get into this program. He had wanted to practice for it, but his parents refused to pay for that. They would, however, pay for him to take the LSATs. He considered that the LSATs would be good practice for the film director test. He returned to Kentucky complaining that people in Hollywood never answered their phones. “They just sit in the Jacuzzi and drink martinis,” he said bitterly. His parents, he said, would pay for him to go to law school. “I think Harvard,” he said. “All the great theatre people have moved from Yale to Harvard. I can keep up with theatre there.” “What makes you think you’ll get into Harvard Law School?” I scoffed. “Oh, when I took the LSATs, I checked the boxes for Harvard and Yale and some others to have the scores sent to,” he said blithely. I still didn’t believe he would go to Harvard. “Ask me what my percentile ranking was on the LSATs,” he continued in the same blasé voice. “What was your percentile ranking?” I sneered. “Are you sitting down?” he asked. Yes, I was sitting down, silly ass. “Ninety-eight point six,” he enunciated. I blanched. “Sounds normal to me,” I sniffed finally.

Okay, it may have been another number, but it was in the high nineties. I’m not very good with numbers. Case in point: Just before I left for New York, I received a letter from Temple. There was a check in it. It was yellow, I remember that much. I was touched almost to tears. I read the letter through the moisture in my eyes. He knew that New York would be expensive and he’d enclosed a little something to help. I glanced at the check, verklempt. I looked at it again. Now, Temple and I have a dispute going on this. He claims it was only for four hundred million dollars. I say it was for six hundred million. Whichever it was, it made me laugh. I showed it to my mother. She shook her head … and then she laughed.

As New York worked its alienation magic on me, I grew closer to despair. I was eating a meal every day that I could barely swallow. I needed milk badly. I needed a real place to stay and a job. I needed a plan.

Instead, I wandered around the area aimlessly. I wandered into Bloomingdale’s. All around me people, mostly women, bustled around. It was worse than the sidewalks outside. Inside Bloomingdale’s you had to dodge the perfume testers as well. I had no idea where I was going. I was stuck in the cosmetic section and I had no interest in cosmetics. Overly made-up women and supercilious men waylaid customers as they tried to pass, hawking expensive and pointless (in my eyes) wares. I had no words for my feelings. Empty? Alone? Ummmmm, nope, no words, no thesaurus. Suddenly I noticed that there was no longer anyone in the aisle where I was. I looked around a bit. There was not a soul in any part of the cosmetic area. What had happened?

Slowly I turned around. Coming up behind me was an enormous man, thick and centered like a wrestler. I almost did not notice the tiny woman slightly ahead of him and to the right. I stared. Her form finally took shape and separated her from the bulk of her companion. I looked straight into the sunglass-clad eyes of John Lennon’s widow of only a little more than a year. Behind Yoko’s shades, I saw the feelings for which I had no words reflected in the dark of her eyes. I turned and fled.

That night (well, maybe it was; that would make this story much tidier), I had arranged with Temple to move into his dormitory room at Harvard. I took the train the next morning.

And thereby hangs another tale.