Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Read online

  All of the club owners always had a problem with me, because I couldn’t stay on my feet when I danced. They would ask, “Why can’t she just stand there and sing?” I used to fall a lot because I’d be wearing high heels, or big platforms, and the lead singer would bend down and help me up, and then he’d fall and Dale would try and help us up and then we’d all be on the ground. That’s how I learned to talk onstage—because you gotta say something.

  We would drive to gigs in an old van and once we got in an accident. I think we were on the Southern State Parkway, way out east on Long Island, by exit 60, and we were all piled in with the equipment. There were no seat belts then and the guy driving the van had a blowout, and it turned over, but the skillful way the guy was driving, the way he could maneuver, actually saved our lives. I remember I was pulling at people flying out the window, and then finally I was flying, too, but I wasn’t alone. I was flying with an angel above me, and I passed these dead musicians who were on the side of the road just watching—Duane Allman, Berry Oakley. Then the angel said, “That’s a good place for you to land,” and it was a bush. That’s where I landed. I just ended up with a scar on my leg.

  Singing in Long Island clubs and dives wasn’t easy on my voice. These were places like the Glendale Lounge, where Fat Jack used to walk through our setup with a pizza, because the kitchen was right behind us. A lot of times, the guitar players would have two-hundred-watt Marshall amplifiers, which were very popular then, with Gibson Les Paul Goldtop guitars—those are loud, sustained guitars. So in order to be heard, I had to get a fifty-watt amplifier for my voice and I only had a little fart box to hear what I sounded like. But after a while, I would still be hoarse. I’d start out singing with a full range and end up with nothing when I finished, and then I’d go to sleep and try and regain my voice.

  While we were doing shows, a manager came to see us a couple of times. He said to us, “I’m not going to manage you unless you make the girl in the back who sings good, and falls all the time, sing lead. Let the guy in the front who dances good but sings a little off be a background singer with the other girl—let’s see how that works.” So we did it, but of course the band kind of hated me for that. And the club owners always had a problem with me because they said I looked like a boy and danced like a boy.

  This manager, Phil, was a little screwy. In my opinion, he was a sexist, manipulative asshole. He came in one time at a place we were playing called the Three Ships, which had a huge bar with a stage and served five-cent drinks (so kids would get really plastered and have car accidents on the highway on the way home). I was singing Janis Joplin covers, and after one set, he pulled me aside. I had makeup on, like I usually did, and he made me take it all off and go onstage without a drop of it, because he said Joplin never wore makeup. Which is not fucking true—sometimes she didn’t, sometimes she did. You know how embarrassing it was to go in front of all those people with the bright lights and not a stitch of makeup?

  And there was tension in the band because they were a little mad at me. One night, some of us were at one of the band member’s house. He was a little nutty and very provocative—the sort of guy who talked about sex and what he did with his girlfriend all the time and thought it was funny to pee into his beer. For some reason he and his girlfriend had a whole box of dildos at his house. And they said to me, “Go ahead—pick one up.” I thought it was funny, we were all laughing about it, so I picked one of them up, looked at it, and then put it back down. His girlfriend’s sister was also there and it was all fun and games until all of a sudden it was like the atmosphere in the room changed. He grabbed it, and then two other people grabbed me. I ran away from them, but they caught me and pulled my pants off. And that guy took the dildo, and he used it on me.

  The gay guy in the band was there and he started freaking out. He was yelling, “Oh my God, oh my God, don’t hurt her!” I couldn’t believe it was happening. I tried so hard to break loose and I couldn’t, because I was being held down by his girlfriend and her sister—and she was a big girl. I was stunned, in shock.

  I finally broke away and grabbed the dildo, and I was going to shove it up his ass, and they were like, “Yeah, yeah, go, go!” But I dropped it. I was nauseated and in disbelief that it wasn’t just men—it was a guy and two women. I just could not understand why. While it was all happening, I saw somebody sitting on the bed looking at me and crying and I thought, “It’s either me, or an angel crying.” The girlfriend went into the bathroom, and I went in, too. I still wasn’t dressed. And I said to her, “Why? Why did you do this to me?” And she told me it was because she loved the guy and wanted to make him happy.

  I just got dressed and left. I was kind of stunned for a long time. I thought that when you’re in a band, you’re family. Because you’re the same. I always felt a kinship with musicians. I was always so glad to know that there were people in the world who felt just like I did before I found them. Like, “What the fuck am I here for? I’m a nothing. What can I do? I can’t do anything. I can’t keep a job.” I thought there was an honor among thieves.

  And then afterward, I realized that maybe it was because this guy had started the band, and then the power slipped away from him, and it had come to me. So this act was like a very animal instinct to dominate. I told him that I would tell the others what happened and he said, “Go ahead, tell them—they won’t believe it.” Sure enough, I told the other guys in the band and they didn’t believe me. And after that, if you can believe it, I still stayed with the band because I refused to let them break me.

  The only reason I never talked about this publicly before now was that I didn’t want to give that guy any power. But here’s what God did. In 1989, after my first two albums had come out, I was shopping for Christmas presents in New York. I had this wonderful car service—really great guys who would take me around shopping. It was snowing, and I was standing in front of Bloomingdale’s. This guy came over and said, “Cyn, how are you? Look at you: You really made it. I’m so proud of you.” It was him. I asked how he was, and he said he was working in a deli or something. I asked him, “How’s your girlfriend?” and he said, “Oh, that ended years ago.”

  At the end of our conversation, I didn’t say anything to him about the whole incident. I didn’t have to. You know when you get the grander picture? I just went back in my car and continued on. I thought, “You know what, pal? As you treat others, at one point in your life, whether it’s now or later, you’re going to get it back.”

  Everything in my life has been a lesson like that. Every freakin’ thing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I DIDN’ T LEAVE THAT band, but they fired me, anyway. I don’t know why and I don’t care—I was not happy; I wasn’t listening to them anymore. But ultimately it was good, because I started another band called Flyer. At that time, a lot of bands had come to see me and I became friendly with other musicians, so with Flyer, we had a really good group. There was a guitar player named Jimmy, Richie on rhythm guitar, Eddie on bass (who still emails me), and Charlie on drums. We were going to be rockers. In my last band I was doing Janis Joplin covers, but in this one, our sound was more like Rod Stewart.

  I ended up falling in love with Richie. He was my first real love. He was funny and bright, had a BA in English, and could play a wicked lead. He had a lot of promise, but he was haunted. I’ve found that most musicians are haunted by something or some idea that they are always at odds with. He had nightmares about his late father, who passed away when he was maybe around twelve. In his dream, his dad, who was an alcoholic most of his life, would be sitting in his kitchen, laughing at him.

  Richie lived with his mom not too far away from me in Richmond Hill, Queens. She hadn’t had it easy with his dad and was a little bitter about the turn of her life (who wouldn’t be, I guess). But she also was never too supportive of Richie’s choice to play in a band. He could have been a teacher. He used to talk about Shakespeare, and I told him I had been seeing Shakespeare since I was small
and went to Central Park’s outdoor Delacorte Theater with my mother. Once when I was watching a performance on channel 13, Richie said, “Cyn, you don’t even know what they’re saying.” I said, “Yeah, I do. Basically, he said that guy’s a fuckin’ asshole.” He didn’t understand that you could understand Shakespeare without translating it the way you are taught in school. There are many ways to see it.

  He taught me a lot about what made performances great—how if you always sing a high note in every verse, it takes away from its being special (which I guess I was doing at the time). On our long trips back and forth to Long Island clubs in his little Volkswagen Karmann Ghia car, we’d listen to David Bowie’s Heroes album. We listened to a lot of Clapton, too. Richie adored him. Clapton was a god to any guitar player coming up then, but especially to Richie. He also loved the Kinks and Elvis Costello, which I did too, as well as Joni Mitchell’s Miles of Aisles. She was a successful woman who wrote, produced, art-directed, and did her own clothes. What was not to love?

  Richie’s Karmann Ghia had a two-inch hole in the floor on my side, where he told me once he put a hibachi in just to keep the car warm. In the winter, he’d use a blanket to block the wind. The wind off of the Long Island Expressway really blew hard, especially when trucks went by. I tried to put my foot there once to block the wind but I could see the road so clearly that I just kept my feet away because I was so afraid they would somehow fall through. (One time a guy yelled as he passed, “Why don’t you get a bike?”) And in this little warrior chariot we’d talk about sex, life, or the last gig. Or we’d talk about how we could learn from the rock gods whose altars we knelt at every time we’d hit a stage singing one of their songs again.

  We also talked a lot about what it was that made David Bowie and Elvis Costello such great poets. Especially Elvis Costello. Richie would play his music and explain, with his English BA, the literary references that Elvis used. And although in my heart I knew I would never write like Elvis Costello or even be as great as David Bowie, it didn’t stop me from trying every night to find something, some escape note or move that would help me step off the platform into my own fantastic elastic interior world where I could be Bowie or Elvis for an instant. And that was enough for me to keep going, because in my heart I felt that maybe all those little great moments would add up one day. There was never a doubt in my mind I would sing for a living. I would keep trying to learn as best I could, as much as I could, about my craft. I didn’t care what anyone thought of me because onstage, in that state of mind, I could be anyone I wanted to be and because I was on a stage, it would be accepted.

  One time when Flyer did a show, my mother came to see us. The gig was at the church where I went to school until the third grade—where I was baptized, and had the Holy Communion, and all that nonsense. In those days the church would host dances, so we played a high school dance. Afterward my mother said, “You know, Cyn, I think you’re really good. You’ve really got something.” I always knew I could sing. No one had to tell me. No one had to teach me. When I was little, the nuns at my convent school were out of their minds and wanted me to be an opera singer. They used to tell my mother I should be trained for it. Then my mother had this idea that she would put me up for adoption to rich people so that they could train my voice. (I guess that’s why I never really liked rich people.) I was like, “Ma, I don’t care about this. Hello, let’s not get crazy.” My mother always dragged me to everything she could—ballet lessons, tap lessons where I was gangly and danced like a scarecrow.

  There were people who would come up to me and say I sang like a rat. I didn’t care, because there were other moments where it was really great, and I could see how I had the power to get a reaction out of people. I would go out into the crowd and make them nuts. I would climb on somebody’s back and sing at the same time.

  We had to do covers, covers, and more covers, like “Born to Run” (in that case I really did sound like a rat because it was never in my key). I often got in trouble because I drew too many people away from the bars in the club. They were supposed to be drinking and instead of doing that, they would come in the front and just watch—and that was a big no-no. You’re supposed to say things like, “Hey, drinks for twenty-five cents at the bar!” But I wouldn’t promote the alcohol, because when Richie and I drove home at night after a gig, I would see the car accidents.

  Obviously, that wasn’t the right gig for me. I really felt like a failure, although Deborah Harry told me once that if I had stayed, I would have been up to doing cruise ships in my career by now. (Which is really horrific for me, because I can’t swim. I mean, I saw The Poseidon Adventure with Shelley Winters and she just didn’t look good in the water.)

  We couldn’t win. We played at a beach club in the Hamptons, but it was the middle of the winter and fourteen people showed up. We had our first NYC gig at the famous music club Trude Heller’s. I don’t know whether they paid us or not and I didn’t care, because it was the first time that people sat and listened to us because they wanted to. A lot of places in New York City didn’t pay, like the Bottom Line. (Later when they asked me to help them, I was like, “How about when you could have helped some young artists but instead you just fuckin’ wouldn’t pay them?”) Even at CBGB, the owner, Hilly Kristal, wasn’t like a sweet pussycat type of guy. He didn’t pay anybody either. Cheap bastard. They were all cheap—they squeaked when they walked. They weren’t very nice.

  Along with trying to preserve my voice, I started feeling ill, just out-of-my-mind sick with stomach pains. I was throwing up all the time and finally I went to a doctor. I couldn’t afford medical help at the time so I was always going to a clinic, where they’d have a student examine me with the doctor behind him. I couldn’t have been more surprised when the doctor said, “Listen. You’re pregnant.” Richie was the father. I had always been told that I couldn’t get pregnant because my cervix was tilted.

  The doctor told me that if he gave me medicine to make my illness better, then I couldn’t have the baby. He said, “Think about what you want to do.” And I remember saying, “Just give me the medicine.” You have to understand: at the time, I was so fucking sick. But then afterward, when I started to get better, I wanted this kid. All of a sudden, I wanted this kid a lot.

  When I told Richie that I was pregnant, I didn’t tell him about the medicine, just to see his reaction. He said, “You know, we can get an abortion. I’ll be there with you.” And even though I had already taken the medicine, it just broke my heart that there wasn’t even a thought to keep the baby. But I still loved Richie. Poor guy. He drank too much, smoked too many cigarettes, and in the end he worked at the part of the airport that was very toxic, near the fuel tanks, but they paid you a lot of money to work there. He got sick and later died of some kind of cancer.

  So I got the abortion. Afterward I bled a lot, and cried a lot, because I couldn’t believe what happened. The kid was almost twelve weeks—that’s a lot. And I wanted it, even though with the medicine I had taken, the baby might have been deformed. I just wish I was smarter then, but I wasn’t. My mother wanted me not to have the kid too. She thought it would mess up my chances in my career, because I was twenty-three. But other people have had kids and still managed to have a chance. I don’t know. I used to cry for a long, long time, onto a pillow that became tear-stained—like that Little Anthony and the Imperials song from the 1950s, remember it? “Tears on my pillow, pain in my heart.” Even when I was famous, I felt the need to hold on to that pillow, so I had it stuffed into another pillow.

  When I was bleeding so much after the abortion, I decided to go to another clinic. In those clinics, there was so much sexism and bullshit and arrogance. While the student was examining me, I told them that it hurt, and the doctor said, “Well, why didn’t you just keep your legs closed in the first place?” I realized that if you didn’t come from a rich family with a parent there to protect you, you were at the mercy of the clinic and a bunch of powerful men who put themselves in charge
. In college, though, I used to go to Planned Parenthood, and they were always kind and generous to me even though I didn’t have a pot to piss in, so when I did have money later, I gave to them.

  Later, I was so happy when my son, Declyn, was born in 1997. I wanted another baby after him, but it just wasn’t in the cards, and I cried all over again when I saw all my friends who had been pregnant alongside of me knocked up again while I was going back to work. For a long time, I dreamed that there was another kid, a little girl in a car seat behind Declyn saying, “Yay, Declyn.” Listen, you can’t have regrets, because everything is supposed to happen the way it’s supposed to happen.

  After the abortion, I had to get back to work. As usual, I had bills to pay, and I needed to get a PA, which is a speaker that the band goes through and a monitor system that you can hear yourself through when you sing. It would make things easier on my voice, which I couldn’t lose again. One of the guys in the band said to me, “Not everyone has a rich uncle, so a lot of people get a job as a go-go dancer. They make a lot of money, and then you can pay for your PA.”

  It sounded like a good idea. Why not? I’d worked at every other kind of job. So I became a topless dancer. There were lots of topless places in midtown Manhattan, but new girls were usually sent out of town, so I started at a place upstate in Nyack, New York. Then I worked in a place called Gracie’s Lounge, in the industrial part of Queens. It was kind of like we were pole dancers, only without the pole. My stage name was Carrot, because I had red hair, and my performances were free-form dance and pretty creative. Instead of just shaking my tail feather, I would make believe I was with someone, or I would make shapes. I used to put myself in a world and tell a story through my dance. (And as long as it had sex in it, the people watching didn’t care.)