Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

Hemingway novel The Old Man and the Sea. I guess she didn’t want to throw me back in the water once she saw how that book caught my interest and how I understood the metaphors that she loved so much.
    But in the end I wasn’t a nonachieving genius—I was just a nonachiever. And that’s how I entered the Richmond Hill High School annex as a freshman again. My sister, Elen, was a senior there and I was always welcome at her lunch table, and there I didn’t feel so left back. And when Elen graduated, I stayed on with younger friends and did half the freshman year again. I got very depressed, though. I just failed and failed. I started to feel like I was in a recurring bad dream and that somewhere there had to be a different reality.
    For me, the little pleasantries, like the sunset or sunrise, or when the trees bloomed, or birds sang, or I saw the flowers in my grandmother’s garden, were the only distractions I could find to keep myself going. I never felt inside that I fit into this world. I always had one foot where I stood and one foot somewhere else. They used to say I was just a daydreamer. I did daydream, but I used to write a lot of poetry, too, and draw whatever I could.
    The few friends I had after Elen left school declared themselves gay, and when they came out, I thought, “Ooh, I’m gay because they’re gay.” So I tried. One of my close friends said she was in love with me. Well, I didn’t want to lose my friend, so we held hands, and then we would kiss, but it wasn’t how I was feeling. I even read The Fox by D. H. Lawrence, but no matter how I tried, I just wasn’t feeling what she felt. I loved her, but not like that. I had to tell her the truth: I wasn’t really a lesbian. I had to come out as a heterosexual.
    As graduation kept slipping a year ahead of me, and my extra time in high school started to feel like serving a double term in misery, I quit. I was washed up. I was seventeen. After I left, I had a few friends who helped me forget my predicament. One was a girl from the neighborhood, Susan Monteleone. She lived around the corner and across the street from me. She even had an older sister the same age as my sister. And best of all, she played guitar like us. She was always a better guitar player than me. (I’m grateful to just be able to play at all. I find it soothing, even though now I usually just play dulcimer and only use guitar for writing. I even tune my guitar in fifths, like a dulcimer.)
    Susan also turned me on to the women’s movement. We went to a demonstration for women’s rights together at the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. First we met some women Susan knew at a hotel. They seemed a little angry and some looked like hard-core lesbians. Once I heard some older men from my neighborhood refer to the women’s movement as “a bunch of angry lesbians.” I guessed at the time that what they meant was that a woman just needed to get laid, and then she would go back to the old boys’ system quick enough. But when I listened to these women talk, it seemed they had a lot to be angry about. They were talking about civil rights for all women, theirs and mine too. This was beyond all stereotypes—this was revolutionary. Susan was talking to a woman she knew, and then when everyone started to leave for the park, somebody said we could go with them in their limo.
    There was a lot of hubbub and excitement in the car. Susan and I had been practicing what we would say and what we would burn for a couple of weeks. Susan was burning the hard plastic rollers she slept on for years to make her hair look good. That, I understood. How long can you put up with that before throwing the damn things out? That was thrilling, as thrilling as riding in the big long limo with allof those different types of women, whose mere chatter was the most inspirational information I had heard in a long time.
    I understood everything they were talking about in that limo and for the most part agreed.