Colors Insulting to Nature

1. “Keshawn is so fine” (response: ferellfiner but he a dog)

2. “Diane think she so bad” (all flaring that booty in them stanky white jeans)

3. “What do you do if Michael Jackson came in your house?” (!!!! die????)

For the Normals, 1980 was a big year. Shortly before the June date that Peppy had arranged for them to go to the frontier-themed “Chapel-Chaparral” and get married, Johnny Budrone left. It was unannounced and unprovoked, according to Peppy, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he snooped into her bottom drawer and read her turquoise, pink, and lavender diaries and, thus informed, held her entire sex life previous to meeting him against her.

Dear Peppy

Sorry about everything not working out but theres many things a man shoud handel by himself and one thing is his “wife”. Also the back pain is to unbarable and I geuss I am just a Solitary Man by nature. No hard feelings & I hope the kids understand but I just can’t go threw with it. I’m truly sorry and I hope happiness comes your way for you do diserve it.

JB

The spittoon was devoid of black juice. Faded cowboy shirts hung like Mitchum-scented corpses in the closet. He took the burlap pillow with the owl on it, the Ranchero, Ned’s unused air gun, Peppy’s blondest wig. He left $1,600, in twenties, on the table with the note. Peppy was devastated. She made a lot of hysterical phone calls; sea lion orks of guttural despair came out from under the bedroom door.

She was unable to reconcile herself to life without the man with whom sex had been revelatory—a breakthrough connection with The Mysterious, on par with discussing God in sign language with a baboon. Possessing no internal emotional governor or reasonable boundaries, Peppy spun into an unchecked cyclone of outrage, prompting Sharon (the topless magician’s assistant and only witness to her first wedding) to pick up Ned and Liza and take them to Noreen’s house with a stack of Hungry-Man TV dinners. Peppy splintered glass ashtrays against the wall and railed against Johnny’s “chickenshit” emotional cowardice until her fellow tenants at the Snooty Fox had the police knock on her door. Fortunately, Sharon returned from Noreen’s at the right moment and was able to convince the cops she had “everything under control” by having them watch Peppy down two pheno-barbitals with a large glass of water. Peppy’s caterwauling rage finally sank beneath a toxic slumber, on the striped couch where there was still a concave imprint of Johnny.

The next day, awaking to the raw brain-wounds of the pill and grief hangover, Peppy took her Oldsmobile and drove for three and a half hours, deep into the Central Valley of California, near Chico, where she knew of a cliff in a town called Paradise where people went when they wanted to End Things. It was a beautiful valley; a miniature version of the Grand Canyon, writ green and Mediterranean. The whole surrounding area was flat and agricultural; a rich, honey-scented fiesta of almond orchards, rice paddies, and fast, cool tributaries of the Sacramento River, with small farms laid out in green patchwork under high small clouds. The valley came like a surprise: the ground ahead sank down abruptly, a mile-wide crack dipping deeply into the earth, where the trees looked sea blue and compact as broccoli. The place was now an infamous gawking landmark that the local government took no pains to put a guardrail around—the guardrail, they felt, would imply that they were somehow responsible for the ever-growing pile of mangled cars at the bottom of the gorge. Peppy knew about this popular suicide locale from her ex-boyfriend, the dirt-bike mechanic in nearby Williams. Most of the adults in the surrounding areas—Chico, Forest Hills—had considered this route, more than once in their lives. It was akin to the comfort of a handgun in the closet, or a bottle of Seconal in the medicine cabinet—you didn’t need to use it to be glad it was there.

Peppy spent a terrible, drunken half hour staring at the unsympathetically pretty landscape and considering the failures of her life. The children, she reasoned, would go to Hal and Lois or Hal and whatever dental assistant he was currently schtupping, or remain with Noreen, and would be better off. After that thought, she dispensed with thinking of her children and focused on her own woes, in the typically selfish way of the suicide. She opened, with some difficulty, the prescription bottle containing the last of Johnny’s muscle relaxants, and reverently dry-swallowed all five.

Life had not turned out the way Peppy had anticipated. All she had wanted was a little show in a nice hotel lobby somewhere like Lake Tahoe, where she could wear a beaded champagne dress, hold a microphone, and ask people Where They Were From before singing “Alone Again (Naturally)” with a sadly ironic smile; then she would break into a little redemptive tap solo while the small horn-section played tight three-part harmonies, and shirtless, smitten dancing boys in cummerbunds and harem pants would lead her around the stage by the hand. She had wanted men to compete against each other for her backstage attentions, offering her turquoise jewelry and trips to Acapulco and leather trench coats, which she would or would not graciously refuse.

Nobody had ever given her the type of attention, or the amount of it, she believed she deserved. For Johnny Budrone to leave was the final insult heaped upon an unscalable shitload of insults, for despite the fact that she loved him with all of the depth, craziness, and thrilling impurity a dysfunctional, narcissistic, codependent, sex, alcohol, and pill-addicted woman could love, she secretly believed he was beneath her, and that he should have been grateful until his dying day that she had nobly condescended to love him.

Johnny’s pills took hold with a woozy surge of blankness, and with a final blast of “Nights in White Satin” on the eight-track, Peppy revved up the sizable engine, floored the gas pedal, and drove in a blast of shameful glory off the cliff, plummeting into the deep green forever of Paradise, CA.

The 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado was the first car on the market equipped with a driver’s-side air bag, an automotive phenomenon Peppy knew nothing about. After taking the nauseating plunge over the side and falling thirty-plus feet down with a sickening crunch onto the pile of other cars, Peppy assumed, as the pillowy plastic embraced her, that her guardian angels had manufactured the illusion of a painless death, and it was in deep and final relief that she nodded into a shock and barbiturate slumber, which was only disturbed forty-three minutes later when the paramedics interrupted her soft and deathful dreams by chainsawing her door open.

Peppy was taken to the hospital. Her stomach was pumped, and she was held for observation, but she was unscratched; her suicide had resulted in nothing more than a broken Lee Press-On nail. The air bag had cushioned her fall, the wig had absorbed the flying glass, the muscle relaxants had made her as pliable as an ink spot during impact. In short, while it had the best intentions of a real suicide and was clearly not a bid for attention, it was, in Peppy’s words, “an ass-out failure.” A legal hassle awaited her when she got out of the hospital; charges having to do with her willful destruction of the car and the potential endangerment of others (“Endangering who?” Peppy shrieked. “All the happy people picnicking in the mashed cars under my car? Shrub elves? Who?!”). After a weepy trip to the courthouse these charges were converted into a $500 fine, pending proof that Peppy was undergoing counseling.

The brush with eternity shook Peppy. For a few weeks she was a gibbering half-person who stared into middle distance and sprang into tears unprovoked. Her children worried about her. They were especially kind, and this was interpreted by Peppy as a confirmation that she was quite mentally ill. The inexpensive counselor Noreen had found in the Reno phone book was an Earth-shoe-and-gauzy-blouse-wearing Jungian-in-training named Gerald, who was sympathetic to Peppy’s weeping tirades but basically ineffectual, and offered her few tools with which to reassemble her psyche.

During the evenings, Noreen, sweet mother that she was, remembering Peppy’s childhood affection for the magical distractions of the big screen, would drive Peppy and the kids to movies, where the kids treated Peppy like a brain-damaged person, holding her hand and shielding her eyes from the violent parts. As a result of this concern, the children, who normally would have opted for nudity or gore when accompanied by an adult, increasingly stood in line for gentler, PG-rated films. Fame seemed appropriate, given Peppy’s emotional fragility.

The children sat on either side of their mother and enjoyed the movie, but were terrified by the fact that Peppy sobbed through the whole thing.

(Most people seem to have nothing but a subconscious idea that movies are as deep a primordial template for living as the original myths were to the Greeks when Zeus was Sky God. Bad movies full of recognizable clichés are particularly influential. They suggest intrinsic, universal laws and patterns of cause and effect; equations that seem mathematically true:

1 1. 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.