Family

Ferry Princess

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. Unless you are five years old and miss having your daddy around to jump in the ocean or shoot water pistols with. Well, today I got a splash of cold water in my face. My whole life I thought that my first visit to New York City was on a school field trip in 1970, when I was a junior in high school. I discovered evidence to the contrary—an old box of slides taken by my paternal grandfather includes one with me on what appears to be a Circle Line ferry with my “Mammaw.”

Yep, that’s me—pixie cut and plaid dirndl skirt. Why do I have no memories of this? Didn’t I know right then and there that NYC was my destiny?

Mammaw and me NYC

*****

Circle Line schedule copy

 

Meanwhile, I had discovered something of interest right on the boat: a dazzling specimen of a human, Che Guevara only sweeter, with high cheekbones and windswept hair that lifted off and touched down on lithe shoulders enveloped in a dramatic Peruvian-looking cape. Tessa also got wise to his aura, and we nudged each other, giggling. The Brooklyn Bridge, the United Nations, Tudor City, Hell’s Gate, Harlem—all became a backdrop eclipsed by this alluring stranger as we tried to guess who or what he might be—surely a poet!

Or—maybe a drug dealer? Every once in a while, an imposing black man with a bald head and draped in a white shearling maxi-coat strode over and exchanged a few words with him. When the tour ended, the mysterious couple left the boat separately and then met up on the West Side Highway. Like two Nancy Drews, we followed them east. By the third corner, while waiting for the green light, the Isaac Hayes character arranged the cape around Mr. Exotica’s neck and shoulders a little snugger, nuzzling him with an air of possessive intimacy. Tessa and I looked at each other and groaned.

“Oh no! He’s gay!”
The nature of the relationship, previously in our collective hormonal blind spot, was now more obvious, cutting through all the intrigue. What a waste of male beauty was the provincial thought bubble that popped into my growing worldly consciousness.

We stopped in Smiler’s Deli to assuage our sorrows with Drake’s Cakes, and retreated with our bounty to our room at the Y.

Nov. 71
Dear D____ ,
It seems really weird hearing you talk about frats, etc. It’s so far away from my life up here. Tessa & I took a Circle Line Tour of Manhattan 2 Sundays ago. We discovered a beautiful, exotic-looking guy about half way around—dark, long hair, in a long cape, & alone. We physically were in no condition to attract his attention [referring to our fat shame, not our gender] , but we decided to keep our eyes on him. And we saw our first transvestite. He-she was definitely a male in face—complete with wig, make up, mini-skirt, nylons, boots, & pocketbook. Kind of a pity if you’re a “woman” trapped in a man’s body. —Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

More from the Circle Line Tour chapter

March Madness

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

The term refers to college basketball, but I’m going to play it fast and loose here. I have snow in my driveway that tops my mukluks, dumped by a lion of a nor’easter that had the nerve to roar in after Daylight Savings Time arrived. Ignoring that, I plow through scrapbook memorabilia on my dining room table, as I add visuals to my memoir (after all, it is being labeled as a scrapbook-memoir).

I am hoping for solar power to kick in outdoors, as cabin fever propels this project forward.

scrapbook

When I was in high school I had virtually no interest in sports. I got laid up with a bout of mononucleosis in 1970 and ended up on the sofa, becoming mesmerized by  “Pistol” Pete Maravich.

My sister wrote me a letter after I moved to New York that I saved in my scrapbook. Pete had gone professional, my interest had faded, but seeing this made me recall that moment where basketball, and not fashion (or cold water flats), claimed all of my attention:

Dianne letter

26 Jan 72
Dear Mom,
The heat & hot water came back yesterday . . . And our rug is finally drying. There’s still one more little leak . . .We don’t have an ironing board yet—not too much to iron but we do it on the living room rug.

me & pipe copy

After five months of broken faucets, flooding pipes, and stints of no heat or hot water in the dead of winter, Tessa and I were no longer so enamored of the Lower East Side. And those were just the plumbing issues. Another indoor assault—cockroaches! Having never seen one until I arrived, the little antennae poking out of a hole in the wall one day were kind of cute—who could this be? Apparently a scout, who then deemed our humble abode to be ripe for pillaging. The toxic spray and boric acid we bought in the local hardware store were no match for these seasoned veterans. When the apocalypse comes, both water and cockroaches will prevail.

Outside was a more dangerous war zone. It started with a quality of life issue—within a week, our newly installed downstairs buzzer had its wires clipped and the buzzer stolen. Then an upstairs neighbor was robbed, and we were informed by a septuagenarian Slavic tenant that he shooed away someone trying to break into our apartment through the front door. We had witnessed a mugging on the street, and on Avenue B, two police officers were gunned down by a splinter group of the Black Panthers. Hopefully not Ace.

Our only new friend was our downstairs neighbor. A recent Baltimore transplant and Dylan fanatic, Jim had hair past his shoulders and managed to be more of a movie nut than I was. He had seen Midnight Cowboy sixteen times to my three, and conversed in exclamation points:

“Watts!! You gotta see the John Ford triple bill playing at the St. Marks! Red River! Best film ever made! John Wayne and Montgomery Clift!”

Soon he would almost convince me that a macrobiotic diet was the way to go, and lent me his bible: You Are All Sanpaku by George Ohsawa, who introduced the west to eating according to yin and yang. And what is “sanpaku”?

Jim was only too happy to explain. “It’s when the whites of the eye can be seen below the iris! Look at our unhealthy western diet—all that over-processed white flour and white sugar! Look at JFK—he had sanpaku really bad!”

According to my new friend, this condition had something to do with the demise of the president, and so for weeks I couldn’t help but stare into the mirror to see if my irises were floating up into my head, precipitating some horrible lurking fate.

Bypassing the brown rice and broccoli for our last supper in our first apartment, we invited Jim and our old HoJo’s pal Julio to a tuna noodle casserole followed by my latest food obsession, Häagen-Dazs rum raisin. —Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

“You Can’t Go Home Again” . . . (but we always try)

~ DIRNDL SKIRT

The holiday season is upon us. My knee jerk reaction to the first jarring jangle of a Christmas carol is always a groan, usually while running an errand in a dollar store, buying toilet paper or hydrogen peroxide.

I know I’ll eventually get with the program, even though I’ve strayed from my suburban shopping roots. I just like to keep things simple, stay out of malls, and no, I do not need to make a trek to Rockefeller Plaza to see the tree. (But I might, if the spirit moves me.)

I have no childhood memory of Black Friday, now with all its stampeding, guns-in-Walmart-parking-lots notoriety that we’ve come to expect. We bought Christmas gifts, but it wasn’t out of control. ( I feel every tipping point has been reached in my lifetime, for the worse, and so I’ve become more of a Gregorian chanting grinch this time of year. And I like it.)

So I look back on my first holiday after moving to New York City, in 1971. And I wish I could beam myself back there. One whiff of Lebanon “baloney” would do just that, but you can’t find Seltzers outside Pennsylvania, and ordering it online would defeat the purpose. Besides, by now I am nearly vegan.

mammaw-at-the-stove
Mammaw Watts at her stove top

The Thomas Wolfe quote “You can’t go home again” was starting to resonate when I returned to my hometown. It was the holiday season, and I brought exotic treats back for my family and friends to taste, wanting to share my world that had expanded beyond Sunbeam Bread and Lebanon “baloney,” Charles Chips and sticky buns.

I opened the fresh halvah divided into chunks—plain, with pistachios, and chocolate-covered—bought from the international food market vendor on Ninth Avenue. (“How much you want?” he asked with a vague accent. I held up my thumb and index finger to indicate how thick to slice, and savored a free sample melting on my tongue while my purchase was wrapped in opaque waxed paper.)

Eagerly awaiting their swoons, I received instead: “What exactly is it? It tastes like cold potatoes.” Middle Eastern candy made from sesame seeds? Our family tree didn’t extend to that neck of the woods; its taste buds apparently were quite comfortable squatting where they had been for several centuries, adjacent to Pennsylvania Dutch farmland and connected at the hip to the home of Hershey’s chocolate.

I pulled a chair up to my grandparents’ Formica table. Before me was a smorgasbord of beets and pickled eggs, coleslaw, apple butter, bread, lunch meat, sliced American cheese, and Pappaw’s homemade condiments: mayonnaise and ketchup. This was the part that I always could go home to again. Or so it felt.

Nov. 3rd, 1971
Dear Sharon,
You must be very busy with your work, keep it up. We are so glad you like it there, it’s a busy town. The goodies you were telling me about sound great.
We had a nice time on Sunday, I had your Mom and Dianne down for dinner. I had smoked pork chops, baked potatoes, aramatic vegetables, Jello that I made with the orange juice and pineapple juice, and one tablespoon of plain jelletin. I make my own that way there is nothing but the plain fruit juice, I also put carrots and pineapple in it.
I just made myself some Honey Tea, a tsp. of Honey and a cup of hot water. It’s good for your kidney’s.
I will write soon, be careful.
LOVE
Mammaw & Pappaw

—Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

This memoir is finished. I will still post here while I work on a query letter and try to find an agent in 2017. The scrap-booking aspect continues, and that is the fun part for me. The writing was all cathartic, as well as my sincere effort to share New York City at a particular time. Meanwhile, I am entering a free memoir contest here: http://tinyurl.com/j4d3kqz, with Jennifer Wills of the Seymour Agency as judge. Wish me luck!