ESSAYS
What I Did In My RoomLOS ANGELES 14 September 2009 |
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My first boom box was pale pink. It had a tape player and two speakers and an AM/FM radio. I never understood how to work the radio, but I did understand the tape player. This is what I used.
The boom box came in a package wrapped and tagged “To Lenore, From Nana.” Mind you, my grandmother had nothing to do with this gift. My parents just put her name on the tag, in order to both lighten the gift-shopping load on my mean-ass grandmother and to fool me into believing that the old bitch loved me at least a little. I wasn’t fooled, though. She’d revealed her true nature the Christmas before, when my parents wrote her name on the tag for the Pound Puppies I so desperately wanted. Upon enthusiastically thanking her for buying me what I desired most in the world, she disowned any involvement in the gifting. “I don’t even know what those things are,” she said to me, looking at my new Pound Puppies with irrational hatred.
I knew she had nothing to do with my pink boom box. Like I cared, though. I had a new boom box, and that meant that my parents would be taking me on shopping trips to Coconuts Records to buy tapes. After all, what good is a boom box if you haven’t got any music to play in it?
My mom and I walked up and down the aisles of Coconuts. She pulled out a Beatles tape, and told me she thought it would be a good first choice.
“I don’t like the Beatles,” I said to her.
“No, honey. You like the Beatles. You don’t like the Monkees,” she said.
Actually, I didn’t know of a single song by the Monkees, but I’d heard my parents discussing how awful they were when a neighbor bought his daughter one of their albums. “It’s not the kind of music you want your kid to like,” I remember my father saying.
Monkees = parental rejection. Understood. I did not like the Monkees.
But I damn well liked the Beatles. Liking the Beatles made me a good girl.
I also liked Joni Mitchell. I still like Joni Mitchell. That woman crawled into my heart and never left, let me tell you.
At the time, I must have listened to my Joni Mitchell tape, “Blue,” at least once a day. But I was young. I was very young. My attention span wasn’t strong enough to last through the length of an entire album, so I routinely listened to the first six songs, skipping over the fifth song on the album, “Blue,” because it was too slow and too sad, and the lyrics told me that “Everybody’s saying that Hell’s the hippest way to go.” Even though immediately after Joni sang this, she made it clear that she disagreed (“Well I don’t think so”) I wasn’t sure that I agreed with her, and this gave me an unpleasant feeling for which I was unprepared at that stage in life. So I fast-forwarded through that song and went straight from “Carey” to “California.”
If I stood on my bed, I could see my entire body in the round mirror hanging over my desk. The mirror’s frame was pink, like my boom box, and my big sister made fun of me for being so “girly.” I loved it, though, and she and I were raised with different priorities. She was the first born, and therefore the weight of success was much heavier on her back than it was on mine. Successful people had no time to be girly, was the assumption. By the time I came around, I was expected to succeed, but it was okay for me to pause and be cute for a while instead of spending every moment of every day proving my aptitude for complex mathematics.
So I spent quite a lot of time being girly, and looking at my body in my pink mirror, singing along to Joni Mitchell’s voice coming through my pink boom box. I did this so often that, I swear to you, when I listen to “California” now, the voice I sing along with is not my voice now – it’s the voice of me when I was seven. It’s unintentional, but I sound…cute.
Sometimes I wonder if it was strange for my parents to be sitting in another room, reading the paper or a book, hearing the sound of Joni Mitchell coming from my bedroom. Is it strange for parents when their young children begin to meet their own needs? I’d be there, alone in my room, and decide that I wanted to hear music. I didn’t need their help anymore, not even in deciding what I’d listen to. Instead, I’d locate my Joni Mitchell tape, put it in, and press play. They’d hear me singing along, dancing on my squeaky bed.
This seems extremely bizarre to me. That they’d be able to just stay put and not come watch as I entertained myself and self-soothed. Did they wonder what was going through my head as I sang in the mirror, staring at my body? If they ever snuck a peek, and I don’t know that they did, they would have seen me awkwardly attempting to dance seductively.
To Joni fucking Mitchell.
If I were a parent, that would blow my mind. That must be one of the perks to having children. You get to see what another human does in his or her private time, before they are fully aware of societal rules that eventually force them to censor their behaviors when in the presence of others.
Though, I hope my parents didn’t come and watch me during those times. I hope that they just let me learn to be by myself, learn to do the things I would do by myself, without peeking in to observe. I love to think about myself at that age, before I knew what I should and shouldn’t be humiliated by. That freedom disappears quickly, as I learned. Later, I began to sneak packages of fruit snacks to my room to eat in private, my own little secret snack, because I had learned that eating more than one needed was shameful. When my father moved my stationary bed during a rearranging, he and I discovered hundreds of wrappers from those fruit snacks stuffed beneath the frame of the bed. I had forgotten about them by this time, but I was quickly reminded of all the shame-eating I did in private as soon as I saw them.
The thousands of times I listened to Joni Mitchell, I was unaware of any personality traits I might have been revealing about myself. I didn’t know yet that letting people know who you are is a dangerous risk. I was just alone, doing what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was sing along to the same five songs that made me smile while dancing in my mirror.
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