Madonna and Me (27 page)

She signaled and the group dutifully started their routine, not at all in sync with the music, half the girls unable to follow the intricate patterns without the cues of the beat.

After the judges issued a verdict (we lost), the girls huddled together, several crying. I stood against a wall, arms crossed, thinking of the scene in
Desperately Seeking Susan
when Madonna robs her sleeping date, tips her hat, and walks out of the hotel saying, “It’s been fun.”

Sabotage? Simple exhaustion? I don’t know now, and I didn’t care then. Whether choice or accident, it happened. Motives make no difference, and anyway, those girls were never going to play nice.

The fasting, medication, and tests that had made me too tired to watch the concert were leading up to an even more intense cancer treatment, scheduled for spring vacation to avoid interrupting my schooling. But then another unrelated anomaly was discovered, another surgery ordered. The doctors and my parents nodded and whispered and wondered: How to minimize the impact on my education? The experts wanted to perpetuate this idea of a normal education, normal adolescence, normal life. I was just about ready to accept the goal of remaining alive, maybe, because it seemed to mean so much to my parents. But normal, by then, was too much to ask.

Clutching the skimpy hospital gown tighter around my shivering body, the paper on the examination table crinkling and tearing as I shifted, I said, “I’m not going back. I will burn down the school if you make me.”

Fuck you, Seattle.

The music was never as important as the delivery. The image. The style. Madonna offered a primitive and powerful idea of liberation, like many artists before and since. But her music was popular; it travelled vast distances, penetrated the forest where I lived. And, critically, her music was joyous. During the years when I had many legitimate reasons to feel sad, Madonna made music with an uplifting message: You can dance.

I made some friends, made some enemies, dropped out of school in the eighth grade. Later I went back, and that was probably the point: Wear the costume, and when it stops working, choose another.

There would be other songs, movies, concerts. Madonna embodied the dichotomy: virgin and whore, dutiful and independent, promiscuous and pristine. She did not require a lifetime of devotion—she did not even sustain her own relationships or defined interests all that long. Take what you need, and keep moving.

My life might have been the same without that concert, but it would certainly have had an inferior soundtrack.

The kids I met in line for concert tickets? We all moved away to find the urban, messy lives we were hoping for. Our friendships have unfurled across decades: adolescence, high school, college, emerging adulthood, coming out, marriage, divorce, raising our own children, travels across countries and continents. But though they are the friends who have known me longest, they (like anyone) only see the versions of myself I share and promote.

When I met one of those boys, decades later, in Europe, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me I was gay?”

I replied, “It was none of my business.”

I asked if he knew I was in treatment for two different kinds of cancer in the ’80s. He was shocked. “No!”

The disease wasn’t what I wanted to show, and therefore, he didn’t see it.

Last year, I visited my hometown. I was sitting in a coffee shop talking to my mother about plans for the future. The question was where to move next: I was having trouble deciding. This was a conversation I’d had with dozens of friends and colleagues all over the world.

London, Paris, Berlin—which should I choose? I said the words, then started to laugh wildly at the perversity of having the discussion in that place. I was still laughing when I realized that someone at the next table was listening.

I turned to look. It was Nikki, with shorter but still-dyed-blonde hair, jogging clothes instead of the team uniform, and she was staring
at me with revulsion. Just like the day I caused the squad to lose at regionals.

I stared back for a sustained moment, and it was like we were once again wielding colored folders declaring our cultural affiliations.

Did Nikki recognize me, or was she just annoyed to have her morning interrupted by the loud chatter of an interloper, someone so obviously from out of town? I’ve lost my rural accent. My clothes, the things I carry with me, communicate that I do not live in the Northwest, or anywhere in the United States. I can’t help it—that is just true.

I’m still the raggedy girl in spectacles, the drill team manager who hits the wrong buttons, dreaming of elsewhere. Nikki is forever the carefully groomed captain, the boss of her small syncopated corner of the world. Maybe there were no possibilities after all: Maybe we were simply what we were, and would always remain.

And maybe that is okay.

Ada Scott

 

 

 

 

 

THERE WAS MADONNA on the cover of another magazine: spreadeagled against a ring post, in leopard shorts that were more panties than boxing trunks, a black sports bra, and a cross dangling between her breasts. It was 2008 and Madonna’s flair for self-promotion was as impressive as ever—she was looking mighty, and I hadn’t been feeling mighty at all lately. I grabbed a copy of the magazine (celebrity news rag
LaLate
), brought it home, ripped off the cover, and taped Madonna to my wall.

As an eighteen-year-old in 1984, I could have been an extra in
Desperately Seeking Susan.
By day I was attending classes at Brooklyn College, and by night I roamed Manhattan’s clubs, from Danceteria to Pyramid to the Peppermint Lounge. I didn’t plan it this way, but in 1985, soon after Madonna married Sean Penn, I got married. When she divorced Penn in 1989, I divorced too. I guess we were both, well, too young to sustain young love.

Later, when Madonna adopted her daughter Mercy, I was a single
mom taking care of my daughter by another man. I didn’t travel across continents for my child, but just as Madonna went to Malawi to adopt, turning hopelessness into hope, I used my meager resources to create a good life for my daughter Chava.

Chava is no longer a child. She’s old enough to take the bus home from school, old enough to hang out with her teen friends and, when it comes to music, she’s old enough to choose what she listens to (and deliver opinions about what I listen to). With my daughter often out of the house desperately seeking her own Susans, I found myself with the kind of freedom I’d never had when I became a mother.

So I had time on my hands when I first saw that image of Madonna, looking fighting-fit and staring at me from the magazine rack. I’d wanted to get back in shape for a long time, so long that the desire was more about habit and less about truth. But when I saw Madonna, still looking young and strong in her fifties, still scowling for the camera, I thought,
why not?
Why not let this woman, whose music I danced to, whose gossip I ate up, whose films brought me to the theaters, why not let her push me in a new, selfish way to work my own body? Madonna’s “Give it 2 Me” had just hit the air, and the song’s lyrics spoke to me:

I was old enough to know the importance of
carping
the
diem
, so I said again, this time out loud, “Why not?”

I knew a little about boxing. Some of my earliest memories were sitting in the living room with my mother and father on Friday nights watching the fights. While they drank cans of Schlitz and cheered their favorites, I played with my kid brother, holding open my palms so he could hit them with his small fists—my kid brother ended up winning the Golden Gloves. I was never an avid fan—I argued with
my parents about the brutality of boxing—but when a match started and two men were fighting for their lives and for glory, I couldn’t help but admire their spirit.

Two subway stops from my apartment, tucked under the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge, is Gleason’s Gym, one of the most famous boxing gyms in the world. Gleason’s is home to many former and current champions, but the gym also offers white-collar boxing classes to nonfighters who want to get in shape and learn the rudiments of boxing. Though I grew up blue-collar (the fights on my streets were about violence, not fitness), I figured a white-collar class would be a safer introduction to the sweet science. Even from outside, standing on Front Street on a Saturday morning, I could hear the grunts of men and women working hard. When I walked up the stairs to the gym, which fills the second story of a former warehouse, I could smell the sweat.

Posted at the gym’s entrance was a plaque with the poet Virgil’s words (I must have had Madonna on my mind that morning because I read the sign as “Virgin,” not “Virgil”).

Just as Madonna kept reinventing herself, I was ready to change: to update my body, to upgrade my mind, and to find something that heightened what I readily admitted was mundane—the life of another (somewhat disgruntled) single mom in the big city.

I moved my eyes away from Virgil’s words and took in the boxing gym: three boxing rings; a dozen heavy bags hanging like thick pillars to develop power; a row of speed bags shaped like inflated
teardrops to develop coordination; the whipping sound of leather ropes slapping the cement floor; the deeper sounds of men and women grunting; and the beauty of people in motion with physiques that were more dancer than Hollywood thug. I imagined Madonna walking into Gleason’s. I saw her surveying the scene with her signature bravado, cocky confidence in her eyes, daring the world to question her blonde ambition just before striking a pose or jumping into a frenzied dance step. Madonna in my head, I steeled myself, collected my spirit, and walked in.

I changed in back and my shorts felt too long, my tank top too scant, and my sneakers too clean. When the trainer taught me the basic two-step of boxing, I felt awkward and foolish, especially when I saw the graceful movements of professionals dancing in the ring. And when I started to hit the bag, I felt weak. It was truly heavy, and my punches hardly moved the red pillar with the word Everlast printed down the side. There was nothing Hollywood about my first days in the gym, no soundtracks of power and victory. But I kept going back.

It’s now been two years since I started working out at Gleason’s Gym. I have worked with veteran trainers on my jabs and hooks and uppercuts. I have thrown thousands of punches at the heavy bags. I have learned to create my own music on the speed bag, the rat-tat-tat triple rhythm that fills every boxing gym. I have even sparred with some of my fellow white-collar fighters. My nose has been bloodied. My ribs have been bruised. And my muscles have lengthened and tightened. There are days when I leave the gym so exhausted I can hardly get down the subway steps to catch the A train back to my apartment, but by the time I do get home and dry out my hand wraps and shower off the sweat from the day’s work, I feel young again—almost like a virgin, when the possibilities of life seemed possible.