Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Page 10

  I try to be the second type of person but at that time I was pretty down. I went to Katie Agresta’s studio and told her that I couldn’t figure out how I was going to make it work. She started giving me food, because she thought I couldn’t sing properly if I was hungry all the time. That’s why I love her. She believed in me. One time we were working together I was feeling really dejected about the whole business—this was before Blue Angel—and I told her that one of these days, they were going to see my name, and they were going to remember me. We both stopped dead. We felt a chill, and it wasn’t the flu.

  But unfortunately, I got really sick—again. And lost my voice—again. I was so depressed. I had an inverted cyst on my vocal cord, which the doctor said was from incorrect singing but it really wasn’t. I finally found a doctor, a saint named Dr. Eberly, who operated on my throat. And Katie helped me back. It was hard and took a long time, but when I could sing again, I was really careful when we were playing live.

  I also knew I wanted to get out of our record contract and get away from our manager who, for a lot of reasons, was not working out for us. I went to him and said, “Listen, we would like to break from you completely, or we would like to continue, get another record deal, and then pay you off.” He said, “No. You’re not going anywhere without me.” And then it became a fight.

  And I always needed money. I was talking about it with Blue Angel’s accountant and he said, “Why don’t you get a job at a clothing store that you like? You go to Screaming Mimi’s all the time—ask them if they would want to hire you.” So I did, and I was hired as a salesgirl. I ended up staying for a couple of years because I loved it so much. It was like a giant toy store for me, as you can imagine. I was constantly buying clothes, and they made me stop because what I was buying cost more than I would sell. They couldn’t put stuff out because it was on layaway for me. People would come in and I’d help style them, which was so much fun. One time Lene Lovich came in, who I adored, and was looking at shoes. I just circled her, though—I didn’t even say anything to her because I didn’t want to bother her while she was browsing.

  So at least I could pay the bills, but we were still trying to get out of the contract. My lawyer said, “Cyndi, now the whole industry is saying that when you get tired of dragging that little red wagon around with you, they’ll talk to you.” He meant the band. So then, of course, the band hated me.

  This was the end of 1981, and I remember around Christmastime, my bass player, Jim Gregory, had a little party. There were other singers and bands around, and I was sitting with my friend Debbie. She was a studio singer who had worked with John Turi and Jim Gregory, and who also sang background with Billy Hocker, a guy with a kind of bruised voice who sang white soul. He really influenced me—he told me I should listen to Otis Redding and open my ear and voice. Anyway, I was sitting with Debbie, and I saw this guy with yellow corduroy bell-bottoms. You have to remember, at that time, everybody wore tight black jeans—it was just a uniform. It was how you knew the cool people from the not-so-cool people. He was dressed like . . . ay yi yi. Along with those yellow pants, he had on white sneakers, a beat-up sweater, a peacoat, a beard, and long hair like Jesus Christ. I’m looking at him going, “Oh my God, what a mess.” It was kind of a seventies thing he was doing, and at that point I didn’t see any merit in that.

  It was Dave Wolff.

  So we were all drinking, and Dave Wolff hit on one of the girls from the punk band the Sic F*cks. She ditched him to go to the bathroom, and then all of a sudden, he looked at me and I’m like, “Oh, come on.” But he sat down next to me, and I said, “You gotta be kidding me. Now you’re hitting on me? You didn’t get anywhere with her, and I look like the number that’s gonna put out for ya?” But everything he said was so funny and wacko, and I just started laughing because he was a character.

  So we started talking and I found out he was from Connecticut. So that’s two drawbacks right there—flares and Connecticut. But he wasn’t WASP-y, like I thought at first—he was Jewish—and when we got to talking about rock pygmies that live underground and come up for wampanini juice, I thought, “This guy’s pretty entertaining.” And he had all these different jobs like I had. He had been an exterminator and a messenger. And like a lot of people at that party, he was in a band.

  I found out later that he was a road manager for Vicki Sue Robinson, but he had a record deal, too. He’d done a rap record as Captain Chameleon and did rock music as the Human Fly. See, he happened to make a deal with this French-Canadian acrobat called the Human Fly who stood on airplanes while they took off, and stayed on while they flew and landed. So somehow Dave, who could talk anybody into anything and loved to mix rock and roll with other kinds of performance, made a deal with him. Dave would dress up as him and represent him as the Human Fly, and make believe that the Fly had a side gig in a rock band—even though the real Fly didn’t have a band. Are you following me so far?

  So Dave would be in a rock band dressed as the Human Fly, with a red skintight outfit and a cape, with a mask and boots, and he’d have a French-Canadian accent. But then he also was Dave Wolff, the Human Fly’s manager, so if there were press guys, he’d be Dave and say, “I’m going to send the Human Fly out for you.” Then he’d quickly get dressed as the Human Fly and come out and talk with a French-Canadian accent in the whole getup, which was one of the most hilarious things I had ever seen.

  That night he just kept making me laugh, telling me all these stories, and despite the flares, he was cute and sexy. And I was very single at that point. A while back I was dating this bisexual guy, and my friend Gregory sat me down and said, “Listen, Cyn, you can’t win with a bisexual guy, because you can never fulfill what they want. You’ll always be on the wrong side of it. What do you want that kind of relationship for? Plus, you buy his coffee, too, don’t you?” Which I did. He was a starving artist like me and was the kind of guy that—like most guys I knew, especially if they were artists—would find a girl and mooch off of her. There was something different about Dave. He was trying to help me.

  So Dave and I kept talking, and the end of the night came, and I realized I didn’t have any bus fare to get home. I said to him, “Listen, you’ve got a car. Can you just drive me back to my apartment?” Big mistake.

  Remember how guys used to come to my apartment, and it was always like they wouldn’t leave? I’d tell myself that I might as well have sex with them so that they’d leave me alone and I could lock the door? So that’s kind of what started happening with Dave: I felt like he was never going to leave. I was thinking, “Here we go again. I want you out of here, and this has happened to me all my life so let me just sleep with you, and you’ll leave.”

  But the funny thing was, he stayed. He kept saying, “You know, I really like you.”

  He was very sweet, and we became boyfriend and girlfriend. He’d walk with me and I’d talk to him about things that I’d see. I’ve always had this imagination that is so overboard, it could kill you. Like, if I saw gum on the street when I was out walking, it would gross me out because I would imagine what it was like to lick it up off of the ground. Maybe I was a dog in a past life. I have no idea. But he always understood that my imagination was maybe a little different from everybody else’s. He was also a little bit of a lost soul. We both nurtured each other.

  As we got closer, I was still looking for a manager, and Dave would tell me the things to ask. I’d meet with all these people, but the weirdest thing is that when I came home I kept having dreams about the scenarios with my new manager, and none of them were right. In the interim, with money being tight, as usual, I had to become a maid again. (I had been a maid already in Vermont.) I made twenty dollars a job, which was a lot for a day. I started with my friend Dan and I remember being somewhere with him and a girl said, “Look—there’s Cinderella.” I was so embarrassed.

  I remember when I was in Vermont, I answered ads in the paper for cleaning ladies and I called up one guy who told me, “Well, part
of your job will be you’ll have to give my wife a bath and then dress her.” I said, “Is she an invalid?” He said, “No. And I will watch.” I told him I didn’t think I was interested and hung up.

  I worked as a maid for this other woman in Vermont that I’ll never forget as long as I live: Mrs. Butterfly. She was almost ninety and lived in a big Victorian house, and she would rent out the rooms. She needed a cleaning lady, and then I had to sit and eat lunch with her. She said that cleaning people had to eat lunch, too. It was the sweetest thing, and I think she knew that I was always hungry. She would talk a lot, and had all these pictures of dead people she had outlived, and she would tell me stories about this one and that one. She had pictures of Jesus all over, too, and I remember talking to him and saying, “Jesus, you’ve gotta help her. She can’t just sit around and talk to dead people.” It was not good, her just waiting to die. Even though you’re old, there have got to be other things. That’s why when I later married my husband, and my grandmother was ninety-one and started to get depressed, I was like, “Why don’t you be my maid of honor?” Nothing like a new dress and a party! She had a nice wool dress with rhinestones and looked so pretty.

  Back in New York, I told my friend Lisa about the whole Cinderella incident. And she said, “Why are you cleaning houses? You don’t have to do that. I can get you a job as a hostess at a Japanese piano bar and you can make a ton of money with tips. And nobody knows these places exist!” There was a whole bunch of these piano bars in the eighties in the midtown area of the city, near all of the office buildings. They were kind of like discos, and your job was to dance with the Japanese businessmen and pour drinks and light cigarettes and just be a party girl. Lisa told me about this great family-run place called Mama’s, but unfortunately they didn’t have any openings. They recommended another club to me, which was more of a nightclub. I started working there and I used to come home with the most terrible head and neck aches. I remember I was dancing with this one girl to the Olivia Newton-John song, “Physical,” and one of the customers gave me the old fish eye. I’m like, “Hey, I don’t do that.” I kind of felt like I was falling down, like with the go-go dancing gig I had. It was so against who I was. I just couldn’t do it and I left.

  But then Lisa was able to get Mama’s to hire me. The girls working there didn’t have to put out, ever. You didn’t have to “get physical” with anyone. A woman called Mama-San, who was a great patron of the arts, ran the place, and she loved having someone with notoriety there, because as it happened I had just gotten into an issue of Life magazine that had Elizabeth Taylor on the cover. The magazine featured me in a “Girl Rockers” piece that also had bands like the Go-Go’s and the Pretenders. I wore my red pedal pushers, red stilettos with bobby socks, and a little sleeveless shirt that said JOHNNY ANGEL on it. I was in a beauty parlor, and I had orange and pink foam rollers in my hair and I was reading Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self. Mama-San loved that.

  She loved the singing, and it was a great place for me to learn how to deal with businessmen on a more personal level. They were nice; they had their bottles, and they just wanted to have a drink. I really loved it there. Afterward the sushi chefs would come sit at the bar. Usually those chefs gave me twenty-dollar tips, too, which was a really big deal. And Peter, the guitar player, would teach me Japanese phonetically.

  My big number was “Wasureaniwa,” which was translated as “I Will Never Forget You.” I was accompanied by Peter and a woman piano player, and after every phrase she’d end with a little “da da da” flourish on the piano. The guitarist told me I sounded just like Brenda Lee. I became fascinated with these people, and I loved them, and I have very comforting memories of the place, of people who were very kind. I tried really hard to be a good hostess and to make people laugh.

  At that point, I was going to a therapist too because I was trying to not come off as angry. When people said something to me, I would tell them what I thought, and they saw that as anger, as opposed to the fact that I didn’t have a filter. Since then, I’ve grown a little bit of a filter—not a big one, but a little one. So I started going to therapy because it was a place where I could just be angry and complain and not have anybody tell me, “Oh, God, you’re always complaining.” And it helped teach me to have boundaries. We grew up kind of rough as kids, feeling that what we had to say was very important because my mother always let us say what we wanted. But sometimes you have to think before you speak and that wasn’t a big thing of mine.

  So after I met Dave Wolff at the Christmas party, he came to see me at this New Year’s Eve gig Blue Angel was doing. It was 1981 going into 1982, and it wasn’t one of the most prestigious New Year’s gigs. We were playing a small dive in Passaic, New Jersey. It was called Hitsville, but I called it Shitsville, because that’s what it felt like. Our bass player at the time was Slim Jim Gregory, who drove our rent-a-wreck out of Manhattan from Seventy-sixth Street over the George Washington Bridge, and it was raining, and we couldn’t find the fuckin’ thing. I remember that night so clearly because it was so definitive of the time, because we were in a struggle with our old management and it seemed like we were going nowhere—literally and figuratively.

  We played in a back room that they told us was a dressing room. It was typically dumpy and dirty and had graffiti all over the walls. There was this one grafitti tag that, after everything we had been through, was so profound to me, and no matter how many times I tried not to look it screamed at me from off the wall. The words were in black Magic Marker against a dirty white wall: “Are we not signed? We are demo.” Like the Devo line “Are we not men? We are Devo.” Which was my life: doing demos that didn’t go anywhere.

  So we kept trying, but it just didn’t seem to be happening. Dave hadn’t seen me perform before, and I was very worried about that, because every boyfriend I ever had was fine until they saw me perform, and then they freaked out.

  When men see women singing so powerfully like that, it can scare the shit out of them. If a man is singing, girls swoon, but if a woman is singing, it’s like, “Ay yi yi.” Maybe they’re wondering, “How will I be manly enough?” Who knows. So I was very worried, because I really liked him, and I was thinking, “Well, here goes another one to the shit heap.” I had already realized that although male singers always had these cute people waiting for them, I always had the sad sacks, the ones who needed help. Which I didn’t mind, but it was never going to be like how it was for the men. So I just figured, “Here we go—goodbye, Dave Wolff.”

  I had sprayed my hair blue with some spray paint, and I was onstage singing “Blue Christmas.” And because I was upset, I drank. And drank. And I ain’t a big drinker, having one good kidney and one kidney that doesn’t work so good. I gotta be careful—I’m a lightweight. And I remember a girl in the audience going, “She’s drunk.” I thought, “Yeah, I’m drunk, all right! I’m heading toward thirty, I felt like I could have been a contender, but instead I’m here in Shitsville with you on New Year’s Eve and reading in the back room how I’m still demo, d-e-m-o.” Which of course I wouldn’t say, because she’d be terribly hurt after she wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with me. But believe me, I thought it.

  I did the gig and came offstage and was standing by the bar, and Dave had a funny look on his face so I figured, “Okay, here goes. He’s going to say how great I was, but it’s going to get weird from now on.” But he didn’t say anything. Instead, after the van dropped us off at my place, he helped me carry all my shit up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. So as he was helping me carry all this shit up, I was waiting for him to complain about that. But instead he said, “How do I love thee? Let me count the steps.” I started laughing and thought, “Oh my God—this guy is a riot.”

  Here’s the thing with guys: After seeing you onstage, a lot of them have to take you back home to bed and kind of own you, you know what I mean? But I always had to go back and take the makeup off, steam my throat, do vocal exercises, and by the time that’s ov
er, they were usually like, “What the heck?” Devotion to a craft is not what people equate with rock and roll music, but for me, because I lost my voice so early on, I was obsessed with not losing my voice again. Because when I lost my voice, I didn’t think, “How will I make a living?” I thought, “How will I live? How can I breathe anymore?” It was not an option. There’s a movie called The Red Shoes and in it, Vicky, the ballerina, wanted to dance. And when she met Boris, the head of the Lermontov ballet, he asked her, “Why do you want to dance?” And she said, “Why do you want to live?” He says something like, “Well, I don’t know exactly why, but . . . I must.” I was thinking, “Yeah, that’s why I do it.” Why do you eat? Why do you breathe? That’s why I sing.

  So after the gig, I was unpacking, I had to do my hair, and I was tired and cleaning the tub. And while I was cleaning the tub, Dave started combing my hair out. It was such a sweet gesture, and I thought, “Oh my God, this guy, he understands.” Soon after that, he started moving in. He broke my alarm clock, a Betty Boop clock that I loved, so he brought a clock from his mother’s house that was so loud I had to put it in the bathroom and close the door and you could still hear it. And one day he went out and bought a television set for us (I didn’t have one) and carried it up the five flights of stairs. He got a hernia from it. But I liked him—I really did.

  In the meantime I still needed a manager. I met with a bunch of people, including Tommy Mottola. The thing with Tommy is, he made you feel like he was going to take care of you, and it’s a very seductive feeling because you feel like it’s all going to be okay, he’ll make it work out. I had known Tommy for a while just from being in the business. In his office there were all these hunting trophies. There was even a scorpion frozen in plastic. After I met him, I had a dream that night that he also had a singer’s soul in the drawer. He collected things and I didn’t want to be part of his collection.