Chanel Bonfire

Chapter One

Put Your Hands Up!

I opened my eyes at five in the morning to see the flashing red lights from a fleet of NYPD cars swirling and bobbing across the ceiling of my tiny Eighth Street bedroom.

Some twenty-year-olds on their own for the first time might have been alarmed, but I thought they gave the Spartan room a kind of festive whorehouse feel. They were a confirmation that I was no longer in Belmont, Massachusetts, under the same roof as my insane, increasingly violent mother—that I’d made my escape.

Then, a belligerent voice squawked over a megaphone, crackling and beeping below my window.

“This is the New York City Police Department! We have the building surrounded!”

Half awake, I wondered who was getting busted when someone’s beefy fist started pounding on the front door of our apartment. My sixth sense for disaster, honed over years of sailing the emotional tsunami that was my home life, told me to run for the fire escape. Unfortunately I was pinned to the bed by the heavy arms and legs of my sleeping boyfriend.

“Wake up, Michael,” I said, nudging him.

“Huh,” he muttered into the pillow.

“I think the police are here.”

“What?!” he said, bolting up.

“At the front door,” I said resignedly, rolling off the futon and slipping on a cotton nightgown. “Here.” I tossed him my Oriental-print robe.

My roommate, Beth, a Parsons student fresh from Ohio, met us in the living room. She cowered next to the counter of the kitchenette, clutching the collar of her plaid bathrobe closed over her Lanz nightgown, like the schoolmarm in a Spaghetti Western after the bad guys ride into town.

“Oh my God, what’s happening, Wendy?” she whimpered as the reflected red lights played across her frightened face.

“Open up! This is the police!” a gruff voice bellowed from the hall.

“The police are here, Beth,” I said calmly. She reminded me of the girls I’d gone to high school with in Boston— cherished princesses who had never had a big zit or a hair out of place or a cavity. I felt sorry for her. I’d had plenty of experience with the police but could tell this was her first time.

“It’s probably just a mistake,” I assured her, an expert at pretending nothing was wrong from the years I had gussied up the truth for my younger sister, Robin. “Some men came and took Mother away on a bed on wheels!” I’d explained after Mother had attempted suicide and was taken to Bellevue. “Heat wave!” I’d pronounced when we found the trousers of one of Mother’s boyfriends draped across the wicker chair in Robin’s bedroom.

“They probably have the wrong apartment, Beth,” I said soothingly, shrugging my shoulders. I was so good at this.

“Are you gonna open the door or are we gonna break it in?!” the voice from the hall shouted.

I headed for the door. Bright light from the hallway glowed at the bottom like when the aliens come for the little boy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I should be so lucky, I thought.

I peeked through the peep hole. A crusty-looking old guy in a crumpled fedora and a coffee-stained trench coat with a badge pinned to the lapel was standing in the hallway flanked by a couple of uniforms.

“Come on, you gonna open up or what?” the guy barked, eyeing me through the peephole—its fish-eye lens exaggerating his nicotine-yellow teeth and pasty nose with clogged, enlarged pores, making him look like a giant feral rabbit with a skin condition.

I recoiled from the view and looked at Michael, who nodded at me to go ahead.

“Certainly, Officer,” I chirped. Maybe because my last name is Lawless and my ancestors were sheep thieves, or because my mom had been arrested and liked to crank call the cops to falsely report my sister for stealing from her, I had a perpetual feeling of guilt by association and so tended to be overly officious and polite with the police. “I’d be happy to open the door right now,” I said.

But as soon as I turned the lock, they shoved it back— almost taking off my fingers—and barreled into the living room. In addition to Crusty Guy, there were four uniforms and two more plainclothesmen. Once they were in, they scattered, darting quickly serpentine style through the apartment, checking our bedrooms and bathrooms with their guns drawn like they expected to find a dozen naked Dominicans cutting cocaine with baby laxative. Unfortunately for them, there was just us: a terror-stricken princess, a bathrobe-wearing actor, and the recently liberated child of a crazy woman. I could hear drawers and closets being opened, light switches flicking on, the shower curtain screeching along its rod, and the top of the toilet tank being lifted up and down. Then, having found nothing, the cops regrouped in the center of the room, their SWAT team dance coming to an end. Stone-faced, they all holstered their weapons and gave the three of us the once-over.

“There’s nobody else here,” said one of the uniforms who had searched Beth’s bedroom.

“Are you Harvey Buchbinder?” the old cop asked Michael, eyeing the turquoise, flowered kimono that barely came down to his hairy thighs.

“No, I’m not. My name is Michael Pope,” Michael replied, somewhat righteously. Michael and I had been together for about six months. He was an actor, and I could tell from his overly dramatic delivery that he’d rehearsed the line in his head, going over various readings before finally settling on “indignant defiance,” as if he were auditioning for the role of perp on a police procedural show. The cop snorted, unimpressed.

Michael and I had met at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge where he was playing various small parts and I was working in wardrobe. Our first conversation had taken place in the dark, backstage during a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was playing one of the fairies and was wearing a celery-colored bodysuit that covered his face, making him look like a spring vegetable on steroids, so I didn’t know until later that he was nine years older than me.

“I’m gonna have to see some identification,” the cop said, unconvinced.

Michael retrieved his wallet from my bedroom and brandished his license at him.

“Are you Harvey?” he asked me.

Seriously? I thought. But, always the good girl, I answered sincerely, “No, Officer, I’m not.”

“Call me ‘detective,’ Detective Stanley. They’re officers, in the uniforms,” he barked. “What about you?” he said to Beth.

“I’m from Ohio,” she said, her voice quavering.

“No, she’s not Harvey, either,” I said before Beth had a heart attack. “Look, Harvey’s not here. He went out for a pack of cigarettes—”

“When?” the detective said, showing a bit of liveliness for the first time. He pulled a small memo pad from his coat pocket and a pen—preparing to take down the details.

“A week ago. We haven’t seen him since.” I looked at Beth for backup.

She nodded eagerly. “He rented us these rooms,” she said, with a squeaky-clean tone that seemed to express hope that the correct answer would end this hideous nightmare.

“There was an ad in The Village Voice,” I said.

“Figures,” Detective Stanley said sourly. “That’s where all the sickos are.”

I didn’t like Detective Stanley but I had to admit he was right. I had lived in New York when I was a little girl in the late sixties and early seventies. It had been the New York of Holly Golightly and Eloise, a clean, well-lit place where the only homeless person I saw sold pencils with his little dog on the carpet in front of the Bloomingdale’s taxi stand. Nothing very bad could happen to you there. But now, in 1980, it seemed something bad could happen to you everywhere. It was very much the New York of Travis Bickle, Son of Sam, and Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine—a city where the Guardian Angels rode broken-down, graffiti-covered subways, when even the cops were intimidated and drunk homeless people assaulted you for change every ten feet. Now I carried mace in my purse and strode down the street with a “don’t fuck with me” attitude and my house key wedged between my thumb and forefinger in a fist in case I had to fight off a mugger—or worse. I never got into an elevator alone with a strange man.

I’d seen a lot my first week in town as I looked for this “dream” apartment, with its three flights of stairs, lack of closet space, cockroaches, and leaky faucets. The crusty radiator in my room blasted heat twenty-four/seven and emitted high-pitched screams like a troupe of teenage girls in a horror movie; I’d long since given up trying to open my window, which had been fused shut by coat after coat of slatheredon paint. I’d arrived, after a final fight with my mother, with one suitcase, an acceptance letter to NYU’s film school, and a couple of hundred dollars in cash. I'd stayed with Michael in his studio uptown while I looked for a place closer to school. I was wary of moving in with him—where I had once seen my boyfriend as my champion and defender, I now felt as if he had difficulty listening to me and seeing who I was. Maybe it was the age gap, but he tended to lecture me and tell me what to do. My frustration had led to some terrific arguments, and he’d pleaded with me a few times to give him another chance.

There wasn’t enough NYU housing even for freshman so most of us were just tossed into the streets with the classifieds. Because of the city’s bankruptcy, crime, and overall lack of services, a lot of people had fled to the suburbs, and it seemed like every other apartment building was filled with enormous rent-controlled apartments presided over by weird guys or lonely cat ladies who subsidized their “lifestyles” by renting out rooms. I must have looked at thirty shares or sublets. Some of the men were so creepy I worried that if I moved in, I’d wake up in a dog collar chained to the wall. The women were mostly loonies who’d been divorced and practiced chanting and incense burning or were aging actresses or dancers who were still waiting for their big break on Broadway and needed to be free for that last-minute audition.

Compared to them, Harvey Buchbinder seemed positively normal—a frizzy-haired aging hipster in his forties who wore low-rise, bell-bottomed jeans and an oversize belt buckle. There were no cats in the apartment and Beth, with her entire girlhood room from Ohio—including skis, hair dryer, popcorn popper, and Kenny Loggins poster—was already ensconced. Harvey only asked me two questions: Do you do drugs? And do you have a steady boyfriend? I had answered no to the first question and yes to the second. I got the feeling the answers didn’t matter, but he seemed nice and not likely to own a dog collar. So I gave him a deposit and moved in.

“Why are you looking for this guy?” Michael asked Detective Stanley.

“We believe he may be in danger. Do you know if he’s armed?”

Harvey? Armed? I thought. With what, soap on a rope? I imagined Harvey wielding his long-ago Hanukkah present from a Hai Karate gift set, swinging it nunchucks style over his head. I smothered an impulse to laugh.

Apparently Harvey had embezzled money from a company owned by the mafia and he and his girlfriend had disappeared. The cops wanted to talk to him while his head was still attached to his body. It was a question, the detective explained to us as if we were children, of who got there first—the NYPD or the Gambino crime family.

I hadn’t known Harvey long, but he had sort of grown on me. He always came home bearing gifts—like a middle-aged denim Santa with a Jewfro. One day he gave me the little, white egg-shaped TV I had in my bedroom, another, a new black vinyl Ciao! suitcase, and before he took off, a box of chocolate-covered cherries—perhaps, I thought now, as a farewell. It was only later that Robin revealed to me that during a visit she’d made to the apartment, Harvey had shown her his gun.

“What?! Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked her.

“I thought you knew, stupid.” My sister shrugged at me.

I suspected he was trying to impress her by showing her he had a dangerous side. She was always getting hit on because she had big boobs.

“I’m going to have my colleagues, Detectives Washington and Bernstein, move in with you for a few days in case he comes back or calls.” Detective Stanley waved his arm at the crowd of men, and two stepped forward.

Washington introduced himself as Stan. He was a dapper African-American guy with a pencil mustache, a natty suit, and a knit tie. “And that’s Lou,” Washington added helpfully as Bernstein nodded at us, shoved his hands in his pockets, and aggressively chewed his gum. He was short, on the chunky side, with red hair and glasses. He seemed a little angry. Dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, he reminded me of a trigger-happy version of Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Jaws.

Detective Stanley took the uniforms and left while Washington and Bernstein parked themselves on the sofa and played with their guns. Beth emitted a high-pitch squeal, ran to her room, and shut the door. I could hear the punched clacks and flat tones of the buttons on her baby blue Princess phone as she frantically dialed her parents as Michael and I straggled back to bed.

After a few more fitful hours of sleep, we got up and said good morning to Washington and Bernstein, who’d already sent out for doughnuts and coffee. Beth was still holed up in her room, even though I knew she had a morning class. At this point I wasn’t exactly sure what she was still upset about; in a crime-filled city, we were the only apartment besides the mayor’s with twenty-four-hour police protection. Michael left to go back to his apartment on the Upper West Side to prepare for a play audition, and I got ready for my Fellini/Antonioni class.

Starting with black tights, I dressed in the “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” look that I’d adopted while hanging out in music clubs in Boston and Cambridge. Always short of cash, I shopped in the secondhand places a few blocks away on Second and Third avenues, buying vintage dresses, men’s jackets, and sequined sweaters from the 1950s. On top of the tights, I pulled on my favorite mini tube skirt and a little scruffy red-and-white-checkerboard-patterned sweater I’d picked up at Andy’s Chee-Pees for three dollars. The East Village of 1980 may have been kind of a war zone, but I was thrilled to find a glut of cheap shoe stores on my street, where I had bought the cool pair of black ankle boots that completed any ensemble. I zipped myself into them, grabbed my book bag, and headed out the door.

Shopkeepers were hosing down the sidewalks, creating a putrid mist of trash and dog shit that wafted through the air as I headed for St. Mark’s Place—a dilapidated hash of dive bars, hippie candle and incense joints, and record and book-shops, interspersed with edgy, leather- and spandex-filled clothing stores with names like Search and Destroy and Trash and Vaudeville. The block was presided over by the ghosts of rock ’n’ roll, living and dead, who haunted the now-boarded-up Electric Circus, a nightclub where the Grateful Dead, Nico, and the Velvet Underground had played in the sixties and seventies. On the other side of the street stood the St. Marks Baths, a gay all-hours playground for beautiful young men. The mysterious disease that would soon begin to kill many of them was then only just being whispered about and the baths were still going strong. The corner of St. Mark’s and Third Avenue seemed to belong to the Ramones—four hunched-over, pale guys dressed identically in white tees, jeans, leather jackets, and sneakers. They were there all the time that fall, their dark hair long over their eyes, which were hidden behind sunglasses like vampires shutting out the light of day.

I’d stopped at the Kiev, a grimy Ukrainian diner on Second Avenue, to pick up a bagel and a coffee to go for breakfast during the screening. I had already scoped out other inexpensive restaurants in the neighborhood. The Veselka, another Ukrainian place a few blocks away, had huge bowls of borscht or chicken noodle soup that came with big buttered pieces of challah bread that would easily fill you up for the whole day. The Dojo, which I walked by on my way to school on Eighth Street, had a brown rice and vegetable plate that came with a delicious salmon-colored tahini dressing for a couple of dollars. I was a girl on a budget, but quickly discovered I could eat well and cheaply on the Lower East Side. The simple food in heavy rotation became my version of a normal family’s weekly menu, but instead of Meatloaf Monday and Taco Tuesday, it was Tahini Thursday and Pickle Soup Sunday. The flavors and smells, chipped china and fat-fingered waitresses were the grandparents’ house and family dinners I’d never known growing up.

Crossing on Eighth Street over Lafayette and Broadway, I walked past the huge, black metal cube sculpture in Astor Place that groaned as you spun it around on its axis. In the morning, the cube was surrounded by backpacking traveling kids in their sleeping bags, with a few homeless people strewn about snoozing. This encampment was usually broken up by the police midmorning, only to return later at night after the drunk kids wandered home.

I cut down University Place. The theater where my class was held was on the far side of Washington Square Park. Passing the elegant townhouses with their gated stone staircases and shiny doors flanked by pristine window boxes of artfully arranged geraniums and ferns, I felt as if I were entering an Edith Wharton novel. But when I crossed the street and walked under the huge marble archway into the park, I left the genteel 1800s behind and entered a gritty, nefarious world straight out of Serpico. The lawns were bald and brown, trampled by stoned drug dealers and desperate addicts looking for a fix. Busking musicians, young couples making out, old man chess players, and groups of black kids beating on upside down white buckets for donations rounded out the park regulars. The rest of us—students, professors, and old Greenwich Village retirees—clutched our bags and moved swiftly across the sidewalks, trying not to stare. At night, we’d just walk around the park, not through it.

When I reached the south side of the square, I dashed up the stone steps to Vanderbilt Hall, where the movie theater was. I pushed the heavy swinging door open and felt an immediate sense of calm. The familiar hush of the auditorium seemed to stop time. I settled into a shabby red velvet seat in the back and waited for the lights to go down. It made me think of sitting in the audience with my sister when we were little, at Lincoln Center or the West End of London, or the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, squeezing hands until the moment darkness slowly fell and the show—The Nutcracker, or Mame, or a Shakespeare play our father was acting in—began.

“Keep your eyes peeled on the lights,” we’d tell each other as we waited for Daddy to come onstage as Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night or as Trinculo in The Tempest.

My parents had split up when I was seven. My father was an actor at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and my mother left him for one of the founders, a wealthy producer named Oliver Rea. We lived in the Dakota and on Park Avenue for the brief period of their marriage and its aftermath. Then, fleeing ghosts of boyfriends, husbands, and lovers past and present, my mother essentially kidnapped my sister and me and took us to London. I didn’t see my father or hear from or of him for ten years. We’d had a brief reunion just before my final fight with my mother, where I’d learned of her deception. And while I had a strong emotional connection with my father, I had only spent three days with him out of the last three thousand six hundred or so. His house and second family didn’t at this point qualify as “home.”

And so for me, a theater, any theater, had become over the years a stand-in for home—a kind of sanctuary where I could invoke happier times. I had wound up in this one at NYU by accident, in a way, after my original career choice— acting—hadn’t worked out.

I had wanted to go to theater school, but none of the schools I auditioned for would have me. Crushed and lacking any kind of guidance, I spent a miserable year and a half at Boston University, studying whatever, just trying to get to my classes while what was left of my home life imploded: My little sister Robin became a runaway, my mother was arrested after drunkenly crashing Robin’s high school graduation (literally, with her car), and I wrestled Mother into A.A. When my sister escaped to college far away in the Midwest, I dropped out of BU and moved back home to babysit my crazy mom. I took a job working at a newsstand in Harvard Square but, missing the theater desperately, I lucked into a position at the American Rep, where I met Michael. He was the one who encouraged me to start taking photographs— even bought me a used Olympic SRL. And it was those pictures that had gotten me into film school. The logic of it was loopy and half-assed but, amazingly, it ended up being my ticket out of town and my mother’s life.

I figured that if acting wasn’t going to work out, perhaps I could find a way to be a filmmaker. Movies appealed to me like the theater did—they were an escape, a journey to a different place where you could try on someone else’s life for a few hours. But they also spoke to me in a language all their own—a collage of images, cuts, and focuses that I had always understood. My childhood had been a long series of changing locations, casts of characters, and dramatically shifting emotional levels. Movies gave me a way to see my world in a way that made sense. When you grow up privy to conversations about infidelity, drugs, drinking, love, greed, and hatred in language you’re too young to understand, it’s the pictures that tell you the story. The packed suitcase in the foyer tells you all you need to know about the end of Mother’s most recent fight with your stepfather.

The lights went down, and the musty-looking black curtains slowly creaked back, revealing the screen. In the dark, I heard the other students coughing, make hissing shush noises, and opening binder notebooks. The clacking whir of the projector started up in the booth. I popped the lid off my coffee and opened the wax paper wrapped around my still-warm bagel. The film was Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, the story of a bad-boy fashion photographer in London who discovers he has inadvertently taken pictures of a murder while strolling through a park. I liked the film’s self-conscious beauty and expected it to be a murder mystery, but then it evolved into a treatise on perception and reality. The hero, played by David Hemmings, has no concern or understanding for the world that surrounds him. Because he lives in a world of surfaces, where sex, love, and death are meaningless, he has difficulty discerning what’s real and what isn’t. It also had an amazing sound track by Herbie Hancock.

After school I walked home thinking about how lost all the characters in the film were. They were numb with boredom and unhappiness, but at least they got to do it in Swinging Sixties London. It had been fun to see the city where I’d lived for five years, having teenage fun with my sister and our pack of friends while Mother partied and serial dated, spending her divorce settlement. For years after we moved back to the States, I would draw diagrams of our flats so I would remember the places and times I missed so much. It had been a way to map my recent past, to remember where I had been.

I turned the key in the lock, and opened my apartment door to find Washington in full shooting stance, his gun pointed right at me.

“Shit!” I raised my book bag like a shield. Bernstein jumped out from behind the door. I was surrounded.

“You should have knocked,” Washington replied matter-of-factly.

“But I live here!” I sputtered.

Bernstein shook his head and headed for the sofa, uncocking his weapon. He seemed pissed off that he hadn’t been able to use me for target practice. I looked around for Beth, but she was barricaded in her room.

“We have some forms we need you to sign. You’ll most likely be subpoenaed after the suspect is apprehended and taken to trial.” Washington motioned with his gun to a pile of papers on the dining table, while I wondered how close they’d come to blowing my head off. He holstered his weapon, took a pen out of his breast pocket and clicked it, handing it to me with a flourish. “Here.” He pointed a thin, elegant finger to where he wanted me to sign my name. “And here.” His nails were perfect.

I went to my room and put my bag down on a red-painted wooden chair that I had picked up on the street one day. White flight, rotating students, musicians, and artists had made the downtown sidewalks into a kind of pop-up Salvation Army or Goodwill. I had put a filmy piece of pale green patterned fabric over my one window. My futon was covered by an Indian print tablecloth that I had bought at Pier 1. I had decorated the bare white walls with a few postcards, photos, and some pictures I’d cut out of magazines. It was pretty sparse, but I hadn’t been able to get much from my mother’s house before I left. My last conversation with her had not gone well after I’d informed her that I was no longer planning to turn over my fifty-thousand-dollar college fund to her when I turned twenty-one. That money had been left to me by my grandfather, her father, who had obviously known there wouldn’t be anything left to pay for college if she had access to it. And so my records, clothes, winter coat, and all my other belongings were at her house, if she hadn’t yet set fire to them in a fit of rage.

After doing some French homework and studying for a history of film test, I jotted down some notes about Blow-Up to prepare for the paper I’d be writing. Michael was busy that evening, seeing a play he had an audition for to replace one of the actors. And I didn’t feel like spending the evening with Washington and Bernstein, so I decided to go to the movies. The Man Who Fell to Earth was playing at Cinema Village on East Twelfth Street, and as a big David Bowie fan, I didn’t want to miss it. I’d always loved all the glitter rock guys; Marc Bolan from T. Rex, Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music, and, of course, Bowie. Robin and I had even gone to his house in London one day after school and rang the doorbell, but ran away when the prospect of meeting our idol was too much for us to handle.

The movie theater was already dark when I slid into a seat with my dinner of fifty-cent popcorn. There were only a few other people in the audience. Bowie plays an alien who has traveled to Earth to find water for his planet, where everyone is dying. He loses his way and becomes addicted to television and alcohol. Everyone on his planet, including his wife and children, perishes while he rides around drunk in a limo. The movie was trippy, with eerily haunting images, and Bowie looked both ethereal and fantastic in tailored suits with a soft brown fedora angled over his flame-orange hair. When the lights came up, I enjoyed the afterglow; those moments after a movie is over but you’re still in its world.

“Are you by any chance wearing Givenchy Gentleman?” a man’s voice asked from behind me. Still a bit dazed, I turned to see a skinny, young guy with hazel eyes and a dark blond punky haircut. He was wearing a mustard-colored jacket flecked with purple and a black skinny tie with a red gingham shirt. He looked like a super-cute TinTin.

“Yes, I am.” I had bought a small bottle of Givenchy Gentleman at the drugstore, after falling in love with its woodsy rose and leather scent. I smiled at him, and he smiled back.

“Me too,” he said. “Did you like the movie?”

“Oh, I love David Bowie, so yeah.”

“Do you wanna go get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure,” I answered.

We walked down the street to the nearest diner and sat at the counter, drank coffee, and traded life stories. His name was Ben, he was twenty-two, and he’d just graduated from college. He had moved to New York from middle-of-nowhere Texas and was working in an office downtown as a proofreader until he figured out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He lived in a tiny, first-floor apartment with bars over the windows in Alphabet City, six blocks away.

I had this rushing, excited feeling as we talked, finishing each other’s sentences and proclaiming a shared love for Blondie, Dashiell Hammett, French and Italian movies, and vintage clothing. I felt immediate kinship, an instant closeness that almost seemed as if we had met somewhere before, even though we hadn’t.

My relationship with Michael was different, more straightforward and sexual. I looked up to him because he was older and wiser, and he’d opened up a world to me, buying me a camera and encouraging me to start my own life away from my mother. But because I had grown up without a father, and my mother was not just promiscuous but rapacious, going through lovers like a Chanel-clad, sex-crazed shark, I was somewhat unsure about the nature of relationships. Like David Hemmings’s character in Blow-Up, my experiences of life were filtered. But instead of a camera lens, it was my mother who distorted my perception. What was love? Compatibility? Good sex? The ability to stay up all night talking? Or to be able to be together and not say a word? I wasn’t sure.

“Have you ever been to the opera?” Ben asked. We were eating French fries and gravy that he had ordered. I confessed to him that I had not.

“Then you’ll go with me, as my guest.” He beamed at me over the glistening pile of potatoes.

“Really?” The opera made me think of powdered wigs and lorgnettes.

He told me that he had box seats for Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Met in two weeks. He said that the opera was such a pure expression of beauty and truth that I had to experience it. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 4 a.m.

“Will you come?”

“Um.” My mind suddenly turned to Michael, who probably wouldn’t want me going to the opera with another man. Still, I felt drawn to Ben in an almost friendish, innocent way. “Can I call you?” I asked.

“No.” He wrote down the date and time of when I was to meet him at Lincoln Center on a napkin and handed it to me. “Here. If you don’t want to come, don’t show up.” He looked me in the eye.

He explained to me that he didn’t have a phone, so we’d either meet in two weeks at the Met—or not.

“Okay,” I nodded. It was kind of like a game, and it made me like him even more.

The sun was just peeking up behind the buildings when Ben walked me home. The garbage trucks had hit the street, loudly whining and grinding up the trash as the men hurled it into the back.

“Good night,” he said at my building. He kissed my hand and walked back toward Alphabet City.

I took my key out and walked up the three flights to my front door. I was about to put the key in the lock, when I stopped. “Washington, Bernstein, don’t draw your guns, it’s me, Wendy,” I called out.

I let myself in and found them camped out on the couch.

“Where the hell have you been?” Washington asked. “We were worried about you, girl.”

“I went to a movie, then out for coffee.”

“Coffee?! Till dawn?!” Washington looked incredulous. “With that boyfriend of yours?”

“No, just with someone I met at the movies.”

“There’s just no one looking out for you, is there?” Bernstein chimed in, shaking his head.

“You are,” I said, smiling.

“Well, we have good news and bad news,” said Washington, getting up, stretching, and adjusting his cufflinks.

The good news was that Harvey had been spotted in Florida at a gas station while he was filling up his rental car. The bad news was that today while the police were questioning the landlord, it came out that he didn’t know Harvey had rented out rooms in the apartment. He told the cops that Beth and I were illegal tenants, and we had to be out in twenty-four hours. I asked if Beth knew, and they said she did.

Now what? Clearly, I wouldn’t be getting my deposit back from a man who was on the lam from the mob. My school tuition was covered by the money my grandfather had left me—just enough for a degree as long as I didn’t switch schools again. My bank account had about two hundred dollars in it.

To cover my deposit for Harvey, I had already sold the monogrammed Louis Vuitton overnight bag my mother had bought me. I had taken it to a swanky leather shop on the Upper East Side, but the owner had sniffed at me and said he wasn’t interested. Luckily, a man from Texas who’d just broken loose from an executive retreat at the Waldorf had overheard our conversation and followed me out of the store.

“The little lady is going to love this!” Tex chuckled as his piggy fingers peeled off five twenties from a huge wad of cash.

The bag had my initials on it, and I wanted to ask what his wife’s name was. Wanda? Wilhelmina? I wasn’t sad to see it go. It matched my sister’s and was very much the sort of thing Mother thought we should have. A status symbol suitcase for those weekends in Paris. Those days were long over—along with the limo rides, the Broadway shows, the fancy hotels, and the posh addresses of my once-privileged girlhood.

Since it now looked as if I would be needing more money, I went back out to look for a place to sell a few items from my modest jewelry collection. I had considered calling the bank in Kansas City to ask for some cash from my college fund, but decided that my trust officer, the dour and disapproving Mr. Charno, would think that my story about the NYPD coming through my front door searching for a roommate running from the mafia would sound too much like one of my mother’s zany fabrications designed to suck the account dry.

“We buy gold!” the sign promised as I entered the grimy little vestibule of the pawn shop a few blocks from my apartment on Lower Broadway. The greasy carpeting and smeary bulletproof glass created the ambiance of an impending crime. I placed a gold chain and a gold bracelet with a little French flag charm in the sliding tray in the wall to be tested and weighed by the sullen, doughy-faced man on the other side of the window. Both pieces had been gifts from my exstepdad. The necklace had been presented to me at Sardi’s on my sixteenth birthday, and my ex-stepdad had purchased the bracelet at Cartier during a trip to Paris when I was twelve. My ex-stepdad, or “Pop” as my sister and I called him, was living comfortably somewhere on the Upper East Side, but after years of paying our private school tuition and bailing my mother out of various jams long after they’d divorced, he had tired of her gold-digging shenanigans and had finally cut her off completely. He was just another in a long line of bridges Mother had burned. Ultimately, all her relationships turned toxic, and I thought that through guilt by association, Pop wouldn’t be happy to receive a plea for financial help from me.

The pawnshop man snatched up my jewelry. “You sure you want to sell these?” His dead eyes stared at me from behind the glass. I smiled and nodded, thinking that if I appeared cheerful and not desperate, he’d give me a better price. He just shrugged.

When I was younger and we needed money, my mother had often resorted to selling something—an emerald ring, the grand piano, or the Rodin sculpture she’d gotten in her divorce settlement from Pop. This way she wouldn’t have to—heaven forbid—go out and get a job. She’d even once talked one of her boyfriends into buying us a new washing machine, though I never saw her do a load of laundry. She wasn’t the domestic type.

“I’ll give you seventy-five bucks,” the man said.

“Each?” I was hoping that was what he’d meant.

“No, for both.”

Deflated, I nodded and took the money. This and the two hundred in my bank account could get me a new room and maybe a month to find some kind of part-time job. I was sad to part with these fond little trinkets from my girlhood, but it seemed, in a way, like Pop was still helping me.



That evening I was meeting Michael at McHale’s, an actors’ hangout on Eighth Avenue in the Theater District. I emerged from the Times Square subway station, breathing the familiar stench of a thousand uncleaned urinals. Trash whirled through the air like dirty confetti. All the taxis seemed to be honking in unison while the hookers, autograph hounds, three-card monte hustlers, break dancers, and the rest of the rabble competed for their share of the sidewalk. I walked up Eighth Avenue, past peep shows, the shoeshine guy, bodegas, and stores selling sex toys and X-rated videos. A balding man with glasses in a shiny cheap suit and scuffed Florsheim wing tips careened into me as he slipped out of a dirty movie theater, clutching his briefcase and a giant pack of diapers, clearly in a hurry to get to Port Authority and the express bus back to New Jersey and his family.

With its frilly tartan curtains, old wooden bar, and naugahyde booths, McHale’s had a certain sad, crappy charm. You could imagine some poor bastard really crying into his beer here. It was always packed with up-and- coming actors, stage stars, has-beens, union set and prop guys, and local drunks. The food was middling but inexpensive, and the drinks were big and cheap. Michael was sitting at a table in the back, talking to a couple of other guys—actors, I guessed.

Before I met him at the theater in Cambridge, Michael had been in a successful Broadway play for three years, but times had been lean since then. He’d been working putting up drywall and had bought an apartment on the Upper West Side, fixing it up as an investment. His career had stalled, and he had been relying more on the construction work, which frustrated him.

I approached the table and sat down, but they were busy talking shop: who was being seen for the new Arthur Miller play, how hard it was to get in to see a certain hot casting director, who was getting their teeth capped or a nose job, and what a prick Hal Prince was. I ordered a cheeseburger and waited for my turn to talk. I often felt, when out with Michael’s friends, that I was invisible. Everyone else talked a lot, but I was afraid to open my mouth, in case it made me look stupid, so usually I didn’t. Maybe because I was the youngest person by far at the party, or the bar, or the restaurant when we went out together, I lacked the courage and the confidence to join in the fray. I thought of Manhattan, a movie I’d seen in Boston the year before on a date because I was the exact opposite of Mariel Hemingway’s character, Tracy. Although Tracy is dramatically younger than her boyfriend, played by Woody Allen, and his crowd, she is enormously self-possessed and articulate, comfortable wherever she is. I wished I could be more like her, but lacking her assuredness and brio, I preferred to be a wallflower, hoping that I wouldn’t be noticed or called upon.

After about fifteen minutes, his actor pals patted Michael on the back and drifted away toward the bar. He told me how his auditions had gone and jokingly asked how Washington and Bernstein were. I filled him in about Harvey, the eviction, and my imminent homelessness. He didn’t say anything, just nodded and stirred his scotch on the rocks with a little red plastic straw. I thought about telling him about Ben but realized just in time that he would only be needlessly jealous. So I just told him about the movie, which he said sounded like a snooze. He didn’t really like David Bowie anyway.

Afterwards, we strolled down Restaurant Row toward Times Square to look at the lights and do some people watching—something most actors love to do. Jazz music drifted out from the saloon doors along the street, scrawny trees rasped their branches together, and waiters on their breaks, dressed in black pants and white shirts, smoked cigarettes on the stoops. We turned the corner and, a few blocks down, ducked into Playland, so Michael could play Space Invaders.

The arcade was jammed with people, mostly young males, leather-clad street types with greased-back hair or disco-suited preeners in high-heeled boots with their shirts open to expose all their cheap gold chains. They were showing off to their drinking buddies or to their scantily clad, big-haired girlfriends. Pressed shoulder to shoulder and hunched over the game cabinets, they jerked and flipped the buttons on the control panels, the screens throwing a ghoulish green glow over their faces. Loud beeping, buzzers, and bells all wailed simultaneously, and overhead speakers blared “Ladies’ Night” by Kool & the Gang. There were whoops of victory, or fist-pumping when someone made a big score or blew the most heads off. It smelled like old fry pit oil and BO and made me feel dirty just standing there.

“I think you should move in with me!” Michael suddenly shouted toward me over the din, his hand smacking the firing button about a hundred times a minute as he killed electronic aliens.

“What?!” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

“You should move in with me!”

“Maybe!” I yelled back. The truth was I didn’t want to move in with him. Having just escaped my mother’s house, I wanted to be independent. But I was stuck and had less than a day to find another place to go.

“But I don’t want you to feel like you have to ask me! I could probably crash on a couch somewhere until I figure something else out!” I only had two friends living in the city—women I’d met at BU—both of whom had transferred here: Jenny was a native New Yorker who lived with her boyfriend, Pete Homer, and two roommates, and Julie, a vegetarian meatpacking heiress who was now studying painting at the School of Visual Arts.

He looked up at me from the popping, crablike images moving across the screen. “I want you to move in! I love you!” he practically screamed in my face.

“You do?!” I yelled back over the general cacophony. Suddenly I felt like my throat was closing up. I cared about Michael but wasn’t sure I loved him—or even what that meant.

Michael leaned over, kissed me, and smiled. “Of course I do! Now cheer up and play some Space Invaders!” He shoved more coins into the slot.

“I’m terrible at stuff like this!” I said apologetically. The noise in the arcade was ear-piercing, and I was starting to feel claustrophobic from all the bodies and the din. I just wanted to leave. I started to try to play the game, but I was awful. I couldn’t hit anything. “See?! I can’t do it!” I looked at Michael and threw up my hands.

“Try again!”

“Really?!” I replied weakly, trying to think of a way to end this. I could pretend to faint, or vomit maybe.

“Wendy.” He shook his head at me, frowning slightly. “If you can’t play a video game—how do you expect to play the game of life?!” I couldn’t believe he was serious, and my mouth dropped open a little.

“It’s just a stupid game, Michael! Can’t we go?!”

I could tell he was irritated, but he took my hand and we left. I felt embarrassed at my clumsiness, but at the same time I wondered why he was treating me like a naughty little kid. Maybe because I was acting like one.

We walked out onto the smelly crowded street on our way to the subway, past the transvestites, the break dancers, and the Jesus freaks who wore REPENT signs—all the humanity lit up by the marquees of myriad porno theaters. He was going uptown, I was going downtown. After we went through the turnstile, I reached out and touched his arm.

“I’m sorry about the game.” It seemed easier to apologize for myself and my failings at Atari games than to call him on his bullshit.

“Forget it.” He gave me a peck on the cheek. “See you tomorrow. I’ll get a key made for you.” He smiled, then turned to descend to the uptown train platform. Watching him go down the steps, past a poster for Don Giovanni at the Met, I realized I hadn’t told him that I loved him back.

The next morning, I bade farewell to the frazzled Beth, whose baleful-looking parents were packing up her bedroom set, her bike, and area rugs to be shipped back to the Heartland. Her experiment in Sodom was over. She’d decided to leave Parsons and find an art school closer to Cleveland.

No one was coming to pick me up and take me home. Luckily, I didn’t have much to pack. Traveling light was my métier—a skill from a childhood spent on the move. I shoved my clothes into the now ironically named Ciao! suitcase Harvey had given me and put everything else—my clock radio, a few books, and my toothbrush—in a Lamston’s bag I’d found under the sink. I rolled up my futon and tied it with a pair of panty hose. Hoisting it all up on my shoulders, Sherpa style, I walked down the stairs and out onto Eighth Street to hail a cab to Michael’s apartment uptown.

Standing on the curb with my hand up in the air, I tried not to drop the futon on the filthy sidewalk. My first perch as a film student hadn’t worked out. I had come to New York to escape my mother and to find a life for myself, but now I was moving in with my boyfriend. I couldn’t help but feel that I had failed somehow, and that, like my mom, I was being saved by a man.

This reading group guide for Chanel Bonfire includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Wendy Lawless. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.


Introduction

In this strikingly honest memoir, actress Wendy Lawless shares the often-heartbreaking story of her childhood with an alcoholic and suicidal mother—equal parts Holly Golightly and Mommie Dearest—and the extraordinary resilience that allowed her to rise above it all.  

Topics & Questions for Discussion 

1. Why do you suppose Wendy Lawless chose to open Chanel Bonfire with her mother’s first suicide attempt? What does this scene reveal about Georgann, as well as about nine-year-old Wendy and her younger sister, Robin?
 
2. When Wendy and Robin were children, Georgann told them about her abusive upbringing in the form of a bedtime story. Did knowing about her traumatic past make you more sympathetic? Why or why not? Do you think Georgann had any redeeming qualities as a mother? How do you think Wendy and Robin would answer this question?
 
3. Why did Wendy decide to contact her father after not seeing him for a decade? Given the circumstances, do you think James Lawless gave up too easily on trying to be involved in his daughters’ lives? Why or why not?
 
4. Refusing to speak to her daughters for extended periods of time was Georgann’s “most effective tactic.” (pg. 68) Why was this form of punishment even more devastating for Wendy than being spanked with a hairbrush or sent to bed without supper?
 
5. In what ways is role-playing a theme in Chanel Bonfire? What motivated Georgann to frequently reinvent herself? Why did her transformations typically coincide with a move to a new town or city?
 
6. Discuss Wendy and Robin’s relationship and how it changed in their teen years. “Robin had fully evolved into the defiant one” (pg. 138), says Wendy. What role did Wendy play in their sibling dynamic? Did their relationship remind you of any of your own personal relationships?
 
7. “I loved just being at the theater, the way it smelled, looked, and made me feel” (pg. 262), says Wendy. What did the theater and performing represent to Wendy? How much of her desire to act had to do with her father?
 
8. In hindsight, Wendy had misgivings about leaving Robin alone in the “Snake Pit” with their mother when she moved into the college dorm. Was she right or wrong to leave her sister alone with Georgann? Why did Wendy later decide to move back in with her mother? How did being in the house with Georgann affect her?
 
9. Dr. Keylor gave Wendy a list of symptoms for a clinical diagnosis called “Cluster B,” which the therapist believed applied to Georgann. Why did having this information give Wendy a sense of relief and make her feel as if she has made an “amazing discovery” (pg.166)?
 
10. Re-read the scene on page 273 where Michael offered advice to Wendy using salt and peppershakers as props. How did he make her see her relationship with her mother in a different way?
 
11. Wendy’s high school drama teacher, Mr. Valentine, suggested she audition for university acting programs. Who else offered encouragement to her throughout the years? Why did Pop continue to provide some financial and emotional support to Wendy and Robin even after his divorce from Georgann?
 
12. Wendy’s college roommate, Julie, once asked if she had “ever tried just talking” to her mother. Before reading Chanel Bonfire, would you have been inclined to offer similar advice to someone in a situation like Wendy’s? How about after reading this book?
 
13. What is your opinion of Wendy as a narrator and how she tells her story? Why do you think she was able to stay grounded in the midst of such a chaotic and frightening upbringing?
 
14. Why did you choose Chanel Bonfire for your book club discussion? What are your overall thoughts about the book? How does it compare to other memoirs your group has read?

Enhance Your Book Club

  1. Wendy enjoys the camaraderie while she’s working at Joyce Chen. Host your book club discussion at a Chinese restaurant, order takeout, or whip up your own Chinese food feast.   
 
2. Put together a Chanel Bonfire soundtrack and play it as background music during your book club gathering. Songs mentioned in the memoir include “Allison” by Elvis Costello, “In My Life” by The Beatles, “That’s the Way of the World” by Earth, Wind & Fire, and “Sweet and Innocent” by Donny Osmond. Be sure to include something by Elton John, who Wendy once tripped accidentally outside a concert venue.   
 
3. If you enjoyed Chanel Bonfire, consider adding another memoir about trying childhoods to your discussion line-up, such as The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Love Child by Allegra Huston, or Daughter of the Ganges by Asha Miro.   
 
4. Test your memory. Have each member bring a childhood photograph to the meeting. Discuss how much or how little you remember about the time it was taken.   
 

A Conversation with Wendy Lawless 

1.Why did you decide to write a book about your childhood experiences? Was there a “light bulb moment” when you knew you wanted to share your story?  

I had been telling the story anecdotally for years—to make people laugh, or to shock or entertain, or to somehow pay them back for the expensive meal they were buying me! And often, people would urge me to write it down, write a book, a memoir. But I was afraid. I knew the story was so much sadder and uglier than the jokes I had told about it. And honestly, there were parts of it I wasn’t eager to relive. It’s one thing to be glib and toss out a line like “My mother tried to run me over with the car.” It’s something else to remember it in detail and the circumstances and the emotions and feelings from the actual event. So I didn’t. I was acting full time on the stage in New York and married and then had a baby. My life was busy and full and I didn’t feel the need to go back.  

Then, by the time my second child had come along, we were living in Los Angeles and I’d fallen out of love with acting so I decided to stop, except for an occasional commercial, and be at home with the kids full time. And while I didn’t miss the business of acting I did miss having a creative outlet, so I started to write. People always say you should write what you know, so I looked around the playgrounds where I spent a lot of my time, mostly alone because all the other kids seemed to be there with their nannies, and I wrote about that. They were all just short pieces, essays, about my kids, and being a mom in Hollywood, and being a mom who was raised by a mom who was nuts.  

And after writing and thinking about these things for a while, I realized I couldn’t ignore the fact that everything I was doing, with my life and my kids, was to not be like my mother. I had thought that I’d completely severed that part of my life from this, the past from the present, but now I couldn’t ignore the fact that it still had a profound effect on me. It was an epiphany of sorts, and it came to me while sitting at a stop sign, and I started writing Chanel Bonfire that day, in the car.

2. What would you like people who have not yet read Chanel Bonfire to know about the book?  

That it’s a horrible and horribly funny story of two girls, sisters, who survive the shipwreck of their childhood, without a road map or a how-to-manual. And that it has a happy ending.  

I don’t think it ruins things to know that. The story is scary enough and perhaps, for some people, close to home, that I don’t worry that knowing things turn out for some of us will hurt their reading experience. I hope that reading the book may help some people come to terms with their own childhoods or recognize that their survival is a triumph they can cherish. And for younger people who may be struggling in similar situations that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that they can make it. And someday even laugh about it.

3. Did you read other memoirs while you were writing your own? If so, which ones did you find particularly inspiring or memorable?  

I re-read Running With Scissors, I love his bravery and honesty. He really puts himself out there, and you feel guilty laughing but the book is so funny and dark at the same time. I found The Glass Castle deeply moving. The opening image of that book, where the author drives in a limo past her own mother dressed in rags, rummaging through a dumpster, punched me in the stomach right away. That was always how I thought my mother would end up, on the streets.

4. Your sister is featured prominently in the book. What was her reaction to being portrayed in print?  

At first, before I was finished, she was upset, and didn’t understand why I was writing the book. But she did send me pictures and some of her memories which were helpful because our mother destroyed almost all the pictures of our childhood and adolescence and actually cut us out of the ones she did keep.  

When she did start reading the full manuscript, she emailed me along the way at the very beginning and told me how much she was liking it. But it was uncomfortable for her when she reached the scenes of big emotional events and had to view them from someone else’s point of view. Everything wasn’t exactly the way she had remembered it. In some cases I was able to make scenes better with details she provided. But it was still strange and disorienting for her to read about her own life through my eyes—to be in a character in someone else’s book. That’s understandable, I think.  

In the end, she told me she was glad I had written our story.

5. One of the most compelling aspects of the book is your honesty. Were you ever tempted to hold back on revealing certain details that were painful to dredge up or that you thought might portray you or your sister in a less-than-flattering light?  

I actually did leave out some of the more gruesome details from my mother’s childhood. There are certain things she told me (When I was way too young to hear them, of course!) that will probably haunt me forever. I omitted them because I didn’t want the book to be too dark, or miserable. Other than that, no, I didn’t leave anything out. I really believe that the truth can’t hurt you, because it’s the truth.

6. Why did you decide on Chanel Bonfire as the title? How does it reflect the book? Were any other titles ever considered?  

The title was originally just a chapter heading in the London section of the book, where the wild, teenage, backyard bonfire party scene was. My husband (the screenwriter David Kidd) and I were brainstorming titles in the kitchen one night, and he landed on this one. It sounded catchy, or so we thought. I wanted to, needed to pull people in right away, while I was trying to find an agent, and then sell the book. It worked; people responded to it.  

What I hadn’t really thought about at the time I chose it was how much it resonates. Now I realize that it captures the idea of the dual nature of and danger of the beautiful façade my mother tried so hard to create: something that looks elegant but underneath is quite frightening and unstable. There are also the obvious parallels between our relationships and the complex nature of fire itself—comforting, destructive, explosive and short-lived. And of course the clothes which are pervasive in the story and which meant so much to my mother as a sign of her achievement and a disguise for who she felt she had been. And they were so beautiful, too.

7. You’ve appeared on television, in regional theater, and on Broadway. Can you identify one role you’ve played that has stayed with you over the years?  

It would most likely be Frankie in The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. She is a lonely, imaginative, girl who wants desperately to belong to something. She just aches all over. I always identified with Frankie’s search for her identity, and her deep desire to grow. Coincidentally, my stepfather, Oliver Rea, produced the original Broadway production in 1950, with Ethel Waters and Julie Harris as Frankie.

8. One of your teachers in London, Mr. Jesse, advises, “Life is short, and one musn’t squander one’s talents, don’t you agree?” (pg. 76) What would you say to Mr. Jesse today if you crossed paths with him?  

I would thank him for his encouragement, for teaching me to love words, and for showing me so many beautiful and useful things. And that I have tried to live up to his expectations for life.

9. What can you tell us about the process of writing Chanel Bonfire? Did you look through photo albums or use other methods to refresh your memory?  

I did look at photos, of course, the ones that I have. Unfortunately, most of the ones of my teen years were destroyed by my mother. And I listened to music from the time period I was working in. During the first section of the book, 1960s in Manhattan, it was Astrud Gilberto and Frank Sinatra. Then, in early ‘70s London, it was T. Rex, David Bowie, and Elton John. Late ‘70s Boston was Cheap Trick, Tom Petty, Human Sexual Response, and Madness, of course. Music can really trigger memories for me.  

I think I got this method from when I was acting; I’d pick a song or an album that I felt was the soundtrack to the character I was playing.

10. What are you working on now? Will there be a follow-up to Chanel Bonfire?  

I am working on the sequel to Chanel Bonfire. The girl without a roadmap for life finds herself in the gritty, dangerous, exciting nadir of downtown New York City. As in Chanel, it’s darkly funny and terribly misguided—an eighties party girl looking for love in all the wrong places, with a thrift store wardrobe, punk rockers, buzz cuts, drug parties, cross-dressing, birth control issues, and run-ins with the FBI. It’s the story of a young actress in New York in the early 1980s, not only searching for Mr. Right, but also for an identity, a job, and maybe a free meal. Oh, and she has a crazy mother.