Goodness = Reward [both earthly and personal]2 Believing in Yourself = Reward (both earthly and personal]
3 True Love = Possible for Everyone [via perseverance]
4 Proof of True Love = Personal Sacrifice
5 Want-Something-Badly-Enough = You Can Get It [via perseverance]
6 Rich People = Bad [until they learn the Valuable Lesson; see #9]
7 Poor People = Noble [unless tempted to become rich; see #9]
8 Hard Work = Golden Ticket to Fame and Reward [see #1, #2]
9 Money = Not Everything
10 Good-looking = Good
11 Too Good-looking = Bad
12 Too Good-looking + Rich = Outright Evil
13 Quitters = The Worst
Can we say this logic has not affected our lives? Can any of us say we have not been brainwashed to believe that if we adequately perform the prescribed mambo steps laid out on the Hollywood life-template floor mat, we will earn our heavenly reward on earth?)
Though Peppy could not articulate it, Fame (a Coming-of-Age film, but also the Ur-text of several 1980s “Victory Through Uninhibited Dance and/or Music” gems of the screen) represented a world in which talent obliterated every other worldly inconvenience: genetics, poverty, race, even New York traffic. If you were a dancer, why, you tour jeté'ed out the door and pirouetted down the street to the mailbox, and traffic halted to admire you. Musicians spontaneously played the violin while eating chili in the lunch room. Drama kids expressed unctuously tender Personal Truths without fear of ridicule, singing the Body Electric with gusto and pride. Talent was its own planet, free of barriers, free of shame, where there was no color, no language, only oversexed teenagers in thin body stockings, frayed leg warmers, and shredded toe-shoes, dry-humping to joyous disco music on the roofs of taxicabs: the molten core of life. The truth of it bashed Peppy like a gong: each talented child held a thunderbolt which (s)he could hurl at the world and make it fucking pay attention.
As the movie ended, Ned and Liza stared at their tear-drenched mother.
“Mom?” Ned asked cautiously, touching her knee. “Mom? Are you OK?”
Peppy didn’t seem to hear him; she was fixated on the rolling credits, trembling.
“Mom?” asked Liza, trying to look into Peppy’s eyes. “Is something wrong?”
“Nope,” Peppy said, snapping out of her trance. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just happy, because I know what I have to do now.”
Ned and Liza shot each other looks of dread. Peppy gave them a desperately hopeful smile.
“You kids are going to go to the High School of Performing Arts in New York City,” Peppy sobbed happily, her eyes as loose, intense, and toxically shiny as balls of mercury.
This mania did not abate as the children thought it would in the days that followed, when a film usually loses its grip on the viewer. Noreen assumed it was merely an improper pill combination or a hormonal power surge that set Peppy reeling about Fame, but it didn’t go away. Gerald the psychologist regarded the movie as a breakthrough for Peppy; he told her that in her lost, unhappy, and bewildered state of mind, Fame acted as a mythological Golden Stag that would lead her out of the forest of doubt and misery.
“Golden what?” snarled Peppy, lighting another long brown cigarette.
“Stag. Like a buck. A male deer. The Golden Stag appears to the lost hunter and guides him to safety. It appears in quite a few European and Asiatic mythologies; it’s a symbol of regeneration and virility, knowledge, life beginning anew. Its antlers grow back when they’re broken.” Gerald smiled his smug hippie smile. “Maybe your antlers are growing back.”
The only buck Peppy noticed in the film was Leroy, the hot black dancer guy, who certainly was an inspiration but not of the beacon-in-the-dark-night-of-the-soul variety, per se. Still, Fame definitely suggested a new path, toward art and freedom. Peppy went around for weeks announcing to people,” Fame is my Golden Stag.” But nobody had any idea what she was talking about.
(Curious Reader: The Romanian version of the Golden Stag fable bears an uncanny resemblance to Hansel and Gretel: small children are purposefully abandoned in the woods by weak and selfish parents. The young boy transmogrifies into a Golden Stag and carries his sister to safety.
Coincidentally, Babes in the Woods —the poster in Noreen’s sewing room—was also a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. There is something pan-continentally compelling about the image of little children, abandoned by their parents to the hostile elements in the dark woods. Who hasn’t, at some point in the forced march of life, felt as helpless, and deserving of unqualified sympathy?)
First Peppy put the Reno house on the market, where it quickly sold. With the proceeds, she purchased a yellow Honda Civic station wagon and a commemorative tattoo—her personal “Feelin’ Groovy” homage to the thing that crushed her. Rejecting Yosemite Sam and the bucking bull (“not ladylike,”) she opted for a horseshoe over her left breast, signifying three important life-things:
1 How Johnny stomped on her heart.
2 How she will nonetheless remain emotionally available “to whoever the shoe fits.”
3 How her botched suicide proved to herself she was both lucky and indestructible as pig iron.
During their final session, Gerald the Therapist told Peppy he liked the tattoo a whole lot. Peppy blushed with pride.
Peppy embarked on several car trips along the coast of California, intending to move the kids closer to Hollywood, as a baby step toward New York. She got as far as Fairfax, a town on the outskirts of Marin County, near San Francisco, for it was there that she took a pit stop at the Lady Tamalpais Café/Bar and befriended a gay couple in their late thirties, Mike LoBato and Ike Nixon.
Mike had been a pot-smoking Santa Cruz surfer until the Ziggy Stardust album came out and he was cupid-struck by a love of Glam Rock. When he paddled out into the lineup at Steamer Lane early one morning with high orange hair, silver eyeshadow, and a lightning bolt stenciled on his wetsuit, Mike got the shit beat out of him, which prompted him to hitchhike to San Francisco, where he enjoyed all the wild high life of the gay San Francisco 1970s, eventually working backstage for rock-show impresario Bill Graham.
Soft-spoken, compassionate Ike, who had grown up in a farming community in Sebastopol, had been on the fast track to Franciscan priesthood when he met Mike at the Mill Valley lumberyard. Mike was instantly attracted to Ike’s kind, subtle demeanor and gravitas, while Mike’s black-Irish coloring, swimmer’s body, and leather pants put a halt to Ike’s religious ambitions altogether. Ike left the seminary to help Mike carry speakers for the last leg of Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies Tour, and the two were inseparable thereafter.
Finally exhausted by the all-night, rock ‘n’ roll party lifestyle, Mike and Ike were now freelance handymen, comfortably settled down into a quiet, happy suburban degeneracy.
The
