Madonna and Me (16 page)

My tiny feet swam inside her size-9 ostrich heels, and I stumbled a bit as I shrugged the coat around my shoulders. I stood in front of my dresser mirror and stared at my tiny breasts. I touched the soft domes of skin and then hit rewind on my portable tape player. Inside was my secret weapon: a cracked cassette of
Like a Virgin
, its holographic spool twirling out my pre-pubescent dreams of escape, stardom, and
happily ever after. I was eight. It was a ritual, this: dressing up in my dead aunt’s clothes. It was the closest thing I had to glamour, and I would dance in the mirror, half nude, to “Dress You Up,” singing over Madonna’s whale-sized voice, our house quaking as I posed and pretended, my bedroom door locked behind me.

It was 1989. Madonna was busy promoting “Like a Prayer,” and everywhere I looked there she was—blonde and writhing in fishnets, black eyeliner, and makeshift Marilyn-mole; the next day brunette, muscular and bustier-clad, part dominatrix, part drug addict. I wasn’t sure which incarnation I liked best, only that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and everything I wanted to be.

I lived in North Carolina in a brick house with a maple tree in front and a white cement driveway. My father sold electrical equipment and my mother was an x-ray technician. Both were ex-hippies still grappling with their lives of responsibility and childrearing, and our upbringing was loose, strange, and embedded with music, the soundtrack of my parents’ glory days. When my mother cooked dinner she played Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan’s
Aja
; my father loved Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers Band. We were what most people might call dysfunctional—my parents loathed each other and my brother and I were heathens. We stole from nearby stores, snuck out at night, and took to drinking early, raiding the poorly hidden liquor cabinet during Saturday’s after-midnight extravaganza, when we had no bedtime and our parents slept.

My father was sick with Crohn’s disease and my mother was bitter about how her life had turned out. They were so busy sparring that my brother and I became lone renegades in a house with no government or structure. When my father did make a play for power, putting his foot down, we were often shocked and fearful of his demands. His maniacal moods and heavy drinking led to bizarre outbursts of Puritanism, nothing at all like how he ran his own life—like the night
at dinner when he informed me that my new idol, Madonna, worshipped the devil. I was eight.

“She worships the devil,” he said, forcefully chopping my steak into bite-size pieces. He was angry, looking at my mother for input on his wish to ban MTV from our household.

“The devil?” I asked.

“And little girls who worship Madonna worship the devil, too,” he said. “She’s a whore. And what you’re doing is idolatry.”

“What’s a whore?” I asked.

“Someone who has sex with a lot of people.”

This was a lot to process at the dinner table. “What’s idolatry?” I asked.

“When you love someone more than you love God,” my father answered.

We never went to church, never said grace before meals, and Christmas held no mention of Christ in our home. With his comments, my father had introduced the immense gulf between my terrestrial life and heaven, which could never be paved as long as I cherished Madonna.

I had seen the video for “Like a Prayer” at least a hundred times and though there was something about it that told me I shouldn’t be watching, I didn’t dare look away.

I had no idea at the time what the song or video meant—the tonguing with a black man (something I had been told was taboo, especially in the South) and the symbolism. So each time it aired, I studied it for clues: the stigmata, the inmate-turned-Jesus, Jesus sexualized, the crosses flaming as Madonna danced down a grassy knoll. These images floated in my mind like the huge question marks I had toward the world—especially at night, when my father’s words echoed and my shadowed room held me, and I feared the devil was closing in.

Madonna’s religious fixation and my father’s veiled comments and successful ban of MTV sparked something inside me that lasted for
years. During late 1989 and early 1990, I watched news segments about religious groups persecuting Madonna for cross burning, as well as some more farfetched reports that claimed she had AIDS.

One afternoon, I asked my father if Madonna did indeed have AIDS.

“Probably,” he answered, and tears welled in my eyes. This was my father speaking, and I took his word as gospel. How could I have known any better?

It was another assault against Madonna, but I couldn’t manage to un-love her. I was an idolater, and my love for her thrust my life into limbo with both my parents and a God I was now so acutely aware of. I believed I’d volunteered myself into the world’s relentless witch hunt against Madonna, and we were in it together.

When my father wasn’t around, I watched MTV as much as I could. Madonna was on every fifteen minutes and my clandestine viewing made me even more guilty and anxious.

I had asked my father what kind of name “Madonna” was. I had never heard it before and it seemed bewildering to me.

“That’s another name for the Virgin Mary,” he told me.

“The who?” I asked.

“The Virgin Mary—Jesus’s mother.”

Madonna exuded all things religious and yet she worshipped the devil,
I thought. I knew this was complex stuff. In my unkempt room at night I hardly slept. Instead, I propped my battery-powered tape player on my pillow, played
Like a Virgin,
and succumbed to deep bouts of prayer. I asked God to save Madonna, to save me, and for nearly two years I prayed fanatically—for freedom from the world, from the devil. I really did believe he was chasing me: that Madonna had been his entryway into my life, that he was gnawing at my soul, and only consistent prayer would rid me of him. On my worst days, I prayed tens of times in my bedroom. Sometimes during playtime with my brother or friends, I’d be overcome with worry and obsession and slink off to the bathroom for a meeting with God. I prayed for my
family, for Madonna, for the other girls out there obsessed with her and tormented by the devil—“Free us all!” I begged, my voice a muffled cry into my pillow.

During these years, while I prayed and grew older, I led my double life of dancing that rattled the windowpanes at night as I leapt around my room and twisted in the mirror, lip-syncing into a hairbrush. I posed seductively in Aunt Gayle’s satin chemises and tripped in her four-inch heels as they pierced our dingy carpet. I was leading Madonna’s life, I told myself, a life of sexuality and expression. I was only a provocateur in my bedroom, alone, caressing my body the way I’d seen Madonna do, her hands sliding down her breasts and hips.

Sometimes I stared out my window facing the backyard and watched our neighbor Russ wash his car in the hazy evening as smoke from our grill wafted up through my room. I don’t know what drew me to Russ, but he became a short-lived figure of my veneration. I knew that in order to be more like Madonna, I needed a
boy toy
, and Russ fit the bill. He was late thirties, early forties, not particularly attractive, but in my fantasy world I was a performing diva and not a little girl. Outside of my fantasies, I was not in love with Russ; but inside them, we admired each other from afar, watching, waiting.

I could see Russ in his kitchen window some nights, washing dishes underneath a halo of light. When the sky was grey, I’d flick on a lamp and parade in front of my window, stark nude as the moon that streaked yellow beams through the lawn. I don’t know if Russ ever saw me there, but it was my first exercise in being a seductress, a woman of zero inhibition.

I spritzed myself with Love’s Baby Soft, the pink perfume my parents had bought me that Christmas, and sometimes sneaked a spray of my mother’s sultry Nina Ricci inside my cotton nightgown, the spicy scent burning my nose.

I lay down in my bed and touched my body, the soft hairless spot
between my legs that Madonna grabbed during performances, a move that prompted my mother to make noises of disgust.

“What? What is it?” I remember asking her.

“Look at her,” she said, shaking her head, “grabbing her crotch like that.”

I had a name for it—a crotch. Nothing particularly romantic about the harsh sounds it made leaving my mother’s mouth, but I knew Madonna was as close with her crotch as a girl could be and that I had catching up to do.

I touched my crotch and looked in the mirror and dreamed of bleaching my hair blonde and shaving my legs. I asked my mother if I could do both and she said I could not, that I was a kid, and there was plenty of time for that.

I felt stifled by time, unmoved by her suggestion that my life had just begun and there was a swath of endless highway ahead of me. Madonna was living my life, the life I wanted that was incubating inside of me, and I was trapped. I watched Madonna and begged my mother to move me to Los Angeles; I had become enamored with the idea of making it on
Star Search
. I practiced night after night in the mirror to all of Madonna’s songs; I knew the words by heart, every additional
ooh
and
ahh,
every backing harmony. I had no fear of dancing, of exposing myself to neighbors; I was ready to grow up, to be an outspoken woman and make my own decisions the way Madonna had, as though she had pioneered those two very things. The more Madonna accomplished, the more enthralled I was, and the more left behind I felt.

Before I was banned from watching MTV, I viewed the “Justify My Love” video during its brief airtime in 1990. It was late at night and everyone was asleep but me. I sat on our living room carpet, stunned and paralyzed by what I was witnessing. I had viewed the soft-core porn highlights of HBO after dark, but nothing like this. It was erotic and dangerous and real and so typically Madonna and I loved it. My crotch tingled like it never had before. Something was
happening, and I knew this was the reaction Madonna lived for. Madonna tingled nonstop.

From our local drug store I pilfered razors, hair dye, lipstick, mascara, magazines, tampons, and sultry summer paperbacks from the magazine aisle. I scrolled through the pages looking for standout words that would give me a tingle: breasts, thighs, desire, climax.

In the summer of 1991, my mother divorced my father. We stayed in the brick house and he moved into an apartment not far away. After he left, my mother reinstated MTV. I could watch all the music videos and Madonna I wanted.

“Mom,” I asked her one night. “Dad said Madonna has AIDS.”

She paused over a fry pan to look at me in horror. “He told you that?”

“And that she worships the devil, too.”

My mother heaved and sighed and, visibly angry, took this as evidence that divorcing my father had been the correct thing to do.

“Honey,” she said, turning once more to the stove. “Your father is crazy. Now go watch TV.”

And I did. My mother’s response signaled that my father had been untruthful all along, and I was vindicated and relieved. I could finally stop praying.

In the fall of 1992 I turned 10. My breasts were swelling, and in the eyes of the mirror I could envision the years ahead of me; I might’ve even seen my childhood evaporating.

During that time, Madonna’s book
Sex
was also released. I’d heard the press surrounding its publication and wondered where I might steal a look. It was promised to be some unholy tome, largely criticized, which made its secrets all the more compelling to me. I was ignorant and thirsty; I had to see the book somehow.

My mother’s foray into a sex talk was, simply, “You won’t do it until you’re married.” One command, and I knew nothing else for
years. Early on, I believed sex was sleeping part-to-part all night, a meticulously constructed act that resulted in a child being born sometime in the future.

A summer after
Sex
’s release, another of my aunts drove me to a bookstore and let me wander around alone. On a display table in the back of the store were sealed copies of the book. I sneaked one away and opened it on an empty aisle. The iconic photograph of a nude, hitchhiking Madonna resembling Marilyn Monroe was the first image that seared into my brain: Madonna cheekily smoking a cigarette with a thumb lifted to traffic. I slammed the book shut, the slick pages heavy and thudding, and began to cry. I felt suddenly blinded by self-awareness. My heart pounded, and all at once I knew that I was a child, would be a child for a while, and that becoming Madonna was impossible.