Gawky (8 page)

Thus I had a respect for Beach Cleanup Lady because I could imagine her exchanging campy dialogue with Leslie Nielsen. She was in charge of us, and even though we were on the wrong side of the tracks, she was going to keep us safe. This was the part of town where I had heard teenagers went to do bad stuff. The tail end of the '80s, heading into the '90s, was the perfect time to be a rebellious teen in Central Jersey. This was the side of town I imagined teenage girls wearing lowcut tank tops and ripped jeans came to smoke cigarettes and funnel beer. I didn't quite know why anyone would go to the trouble of drinking beer through a funnel when the can or bottle is especially designed for drinking, but to each his own.

Beach Cleanup Lady told us in that screechy voice, “Children, please clean up the best you can. But if you find
anything,
and I mean
anything
that makes you feel unsafe, call for me immediately. Just yell ‘STOP!'”

With her shrill voice ringing in my ears, I began picking up the trash on the beach with tremendous effort, blowing past the short, slow-poke boys. I weaved in and out of sandy pieces of Hubba Bubba and bottle caps, looking for something dangerous so everyone would thank me for taking the offending object off our beach. Most likely the
Asbury Park Press
would run a front-page story on me: Hulking Heroine Shore to Please. No longer would Jon Bon Jovi be the pride and joy of our area. I would take over as being the most famous person ever to come from here. I would be revered for all eternity in the same fashion
Dr. Heimlich was. I too would be a lifesaver, and my name would be synonymous with making the world a safer place.

Then, suddenly, the bucktoothed problem child started screaming for help. I dropped my trash bag and ran awkwardly with the Beach Cleanup Lady to his aid.

“What's that?” I asked, staring down at a long glass pipe. It had a little bit of black soot around one part of it, giving it the look of some of my grandmother's glass Cartier collectables that she had placed too closely to her Manhattan windowsill. I always wanted to pick them up and give them a once-over with the bottom of my shirt, but I lived in constant fear of breaking anything. I had a knack for breaking only extremely valuable things, so I always felt it was best to simply leave the soot as-is on the Cartier lion sculpture.

Beach Cleanup Lady took a long, deep breath as a crowd gathered around. “Kids, I'm sorry to say, and I really hope it isn't, but this looks like something people use to smoke drugs. This is a crack pipe. It's what crackheads use to inhale their crack.”

I was terrified. I didn't know people were smoking crack in my town. I thought all the people at the scared-straight school assemblies had been outsourced. Since when did we have crackheads? Why hadn't any of them been hired to speak at our school assemblies? Why weren't we properly utilizing our local resources? This was Earth Day, for goodness' sake! Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen never sang about crack!

Then again . . . maybe my hometown wasn't so boring after all. Instead of remaining frozen in fear, I got excited. I approached the rest of the beach cleanup more like a drug bust/archaeological dig. If I found a crack pipe, maybe I could present it during the next school assembly in the same way those cops a few weeks ago had shown us evidence from their drug busts. I'd stand before all my classmates in the cafetorium with the crack pipe prominently displayed in an unbreakable Lucite container and also projected onto a large screen so everyone could see
what I had found. “You see, kids,” I'd say, “we can make a difference in our community. I am tired of taking a backseat to crime. Remember, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.” There would be a pause before uproarious applause, then a standing ovation, then a Q and A that would go into overtime and cut into everyone's recess. But no one would care, because they had the ear of the local hero. The person that just couldn't turn her back on local crime. I was no longer just the tallest girl in school. I was now the person who had made a difference. I would save our noble community from the dangers of hard drugs and litter all at once.

I searched the beach. I looked for something—anything—that people could possibly smoke crack out of. I found empty snack-size bags of Doritos, most likely discarded by some lucky kid whose mom let him eat that kind of stuff. I found used straws, Popsicle sticks, pennies, and even a few nickels. Then, after about a half hour of boring G-rated beachside findings, finally I landed on it! A plastic tube, about four inches long, was buried in the sand under a pile of fly-covered seaweed. It was caked with sand and sun-bleached, but it looked as if it was once a light shade of pink. It had a weird claw-like end to it on one side, and on the other it had some pretty ridges, apparently for traction. Jackpot.

“Stop! Everyone stop! I have found another crack pipe!”

The cleanup crew all froze in terror, as I stood up taller than ever, ready to be congratulated for saving the day. I couldn't wait to give a presentation on the dangers of beachside drug use at my school's next assembly. As our fearless leader walked over, I knew the damage I had caused to Paul the tiny bank teller and the Newly Hot Hair Girl I had nearly kissed would be washed away when I saved my town from the dangers of crack cocaine.

Beach Cleanup Lady held the plastic tube in her latex-gloved hand. She twisted and turned the tube, tapped the sand out of it, then held it up to the sunlight. It seemed she was verifying exactly what it was. Then
she got a look on her face as if to say,
Aha, I know exactly what this is
! She smirked a little to herself, and being that there were no other grown-ups there to share whatever grown-up conclusion she had just come to, she launched into a seemingly forced performance, faking her ignorance.

“Hmm . . . I'm not sure what this is,” she said. “I don't think it's for drugs. But I'm not sure, so I'll take it for now. To be safe.”

She inspected the tube one more time for safety. “This could be very dangerous, Margot. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.”

She put the thing in her plastic bag and everyone went back to cleaning up the beach. I knew she knew what it was. Why wasn't she telling us? Why did she let the bucktoothed kid get all the glory and leave me to the boring pennies and Doritos bags? I was devastated. I had wanted to be a hero, like the bucktoothed kid. He'd get to tell the story over and over of how he'd found the pipe. Was it so wrong to want attention for something noble, instead of my size? I didn't mind all eyes on me if it was to congratulate me for saving schoolchildren from the dangers of the white rock. Instead I felt like the girl who cried crack pipe.

I spent the rest of the cleanup dragging my feet and hanging out with the practically-out-of-the-closet-musical-theatre-loving kid. I don't think he was truly all that interested in making me his #1 BFF after all, but at least he was polite. I found a few Rolling Rock bottles, but I had seen my parents drink those at their wild New Year's Eve parties each year; they were nothing to get excited about.

The rest of the afternoon was just as uneventful, and I went home disappointed.

The next few times I hung out with Amanda, I refused to watch
Airplane
! and insisted we work on our homoerotic dance routines instead. Amanda liked
Airplane
! because her mom had it on VHS and it had real boobs. But I couldn't handle it anymore; the horrible letdown of the beach cleanup had made watching
Airplane
! with its Beach Cleanup Lady-esque female lead nothing but misery.

A few months went by. Then, one day in school, I felt an unusual pain in my stomach. It was almost the end of the day, and I didn't want to go to the nurse's office because she always took my height and weight even if I just needed a Band-Aid. With stomach cramps like this, the last thing I needed was to learn that I had grown even one-quarter of an inch more since I had been there last week for a much-needed ice pack after hitting my head on the classroom bookshelf. I toughed it out until the end of the day and slowly walked home. When my mom came home about an hour after I did, she quickly deduced that I had gotten my period for the first time.

“You're lucky you didn't bleed all over your peach pants,” my mom said. “I know this is difficult for you, Margot. Probably none of the other girls in your class have their periods yet, but I think you're more mature. Aren't you lucky to be tall?”

My mother, at five foot nine, was always reminding me how lucky I was to be tall. All her reasons were equally sucky—
You'll always look older than you are. You can wear men's pants! Shop in Big N Tall stores! No need for a stepladder
! But none were as sucky as pretending that it was a gift to get your period before your classmates. I sat in the wicker chair unable to hide my pout. My mom looked at me and said with compassion, “Well, sweetie, what do you want me to say?”

I suddenly realized that my mother, who had spent a lifetime crying over nonsense like season 6, episode 113 of
Laverne & Shirley
, didn't quite have the perfect recipe to make me feel better when something upset me. While I could quell my mom's tears by telling her that Laverne and Shirley would always be best friends at heart even though their lives were going in a new direction, my mom did not have quite the same knack for succinct, calming words of wisdom. Instead she kept trying her best, saying, “It's fine. You'll be fine, sweetie.” She put the kettle on, as she always did at 4:00
PM
, her all-American New Jersey version of high tea. Contrary to what various Maggie Smith characters had told her throughout the
years, tea did not solve everything. My father had now been reduced to an all-hot-chocolate hot-drink diet in a protest against my mother's tea addiction. He was a little old to fake being allergic to tea, but I could tell he wished he could. When my dad's mother passed away, I had never seen so many used tea bags lying around the kitchen sink. My mother downed the tea like an Irishman downing whiskey at a wake.

The teakettle whistled, as she slowly and methodically prepared the black tea in her sterling silver Cartier teapot engraved with someone else's initials, another of the free castoffs we got from my grandmother's job. She looked over at me, her too-tall daughter sulking in peach pants at the kitchen table. “Well, is there anything I can do for you?”

I looked up, trying to discern whether she was being genuine. She seemed desperate to make me happy and I knew it. This was my window. What did I want? Ice cream? A Kaboodle? New pants? Then it hit me: I had seen ads on TV for 1-900 numbers and desperately wanted to call. After what happened with Paul and the phone-dating hotline, I had grown fearful of getting in too deep on the telephone. What if I called the New Kids on the Block 1-900 number and inadvertently seduced one of them using my Octopussy voice? The prospect was both thrilling and terrifying.

At the time, 1-900 numbers were the latest invention, and definitely one of the most high-tech. For only $4.95 a minute, you could call anyone from He-Man to Grandpa Munster, from Paula Abdul to hunky hair metal band Warrant. I wasn't sure how exactly they worked. Was Grandpa Munster just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring in full stage makeup and costume at all times? Were all five members of Warrant constantly together in case of a call, or was there some sort of high-tech hookup that could conference them all in? And how did He-Man speak directly to anyone, considering he was a cartoon? Thinking too much made my head want to explode. Calling and talking to a drawing seemed like a total rip-off, but calling and
talking to a live band of hot guys seemed like a good investment of my mother's side money from her jewelry-making business. I had never been allowed to call one of these numbers before because of the price. And I could never sneak and call one because the tan clunky telephone was in my parents' bedroom, where my mother was often rearranging her stringed pearl collection.

But this was my chance; very rarely did I have my mother in a position where she actually felt sorry for me. She thought because I was tall like her that I truly had it all. But right now, in this moment, I had her in the palm of my hand.

“Well,” I began in a soft, purposefully childlike voice, “I have always wanted to call the NKOTB hotline.”

I was a fan of New Kids on the Block but not a superfan. There were girls in my class that had NKOTB curtains up in their bedrooms. That was taking it too far. I had ugly curtains with dainty old-fashioned ladies on them that my mother had sewn herself. As much as I hated those curtains, I thought they tied the room together a lot more than cloth patterned with images of Donnie Wahlberg. But I had been to one New Kids concert, where I was positive Joey McIntyre waved directly at me from the stage (probably because he could see my towering head over the crowd of normal-size girls), and I had also slipped a copy of Amanda and my Jersey Girls demo to a security guard to pass along to the New Kids' manager. If anything, a chance to chat on the 1-900 number would be a good networking opportunity and a way to follow up regarding our big-time music career that was just waiting to get off its feet.