Existential Crisis #472, inspired by Cyndi Lauper

I’ve been thinking about the pop icons I grew up with, the music, the culture, and there’s all kinds of stuff there. I was thinking about Madonna, because she is the biggest, most obvious female icon of the era, but she didn’t really do much for me until I got much older. I started paying attention to her in college, really. I was aware of her when I was a kid—“Like a Virgin” was a song I remember my friends' parents banning; censorship was never part of the rules in my household. I remember the “Material Girl” video and learning from my mother that Madonna was ripping off Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” a film I didn’t see until I was in middle school, a film which now I know by heart. I can sing all its songs and recite all the dialogue verbatim.

The first Christmas I spent with my dad after my parents divorced, it was just the two of us in his little apartment overlooking a golf course. He gave me a stereo, among all kinds of other trinkets. It had a cassette player, a turntable and two speakers, all of which could be tucked up to form a kind of suitcase. A transportable thing, the first of many gifts that I could take with me wherever I went. With the stereo, he gave me the Madonna record, “You Can Dance.” It’s the one with the red sleeve, and she’s dressed in black, posed as if she's about to spin around. In addition to the happy title song, “Holiday” is on the album, and it remains the most joyous song I’ve ever heard. It unfailingly inspires me to dance with abandon every time I hear it. But Madonna’s more of an afterthought in the culture of my coming of age.

If I think of the pop icons that I really connected with in the early ‘80’s, I come up with Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Boy George and Wham. Gay boys and tough broads. All carving their own way and celebrated for it. I loved performing for my parents and their friends, and my favorite role was Tina. I’d tease out my hair, put on some sunglasses and a shiny, hot pink unitard, grab a bottle or anything as a microphone, stand up on the piano bench and sing “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” My mother had seen Tina play clubs in San Francisco and loved her. They both had those gorgeous legs.

But Cyndi Lauper felt closer to me. If my mother had allowed it, I would have colored my hair red and yellow. My punk style was more Cyndi than it was Madonna. For my 7th birthday party, I invited kids over to the house, but they had to come dressed punk. Most of them misunderstood the costume requirement, so it was a bunch of first graders in polo shirts and khaki shorts and me with my hair as big as I could get it wearing evening gloves with the fingers cut off, pink leggings under a short, poufy skirt and a short, lacy blazer over a ripped t-shirt. I distinctly remember having a huge, rhinestone pin that spelled out PARIS pinned to my lapel. “She’s So Unusual” was my favorite record, and I played it nonstop. My mother took me to see her perform at the Bronco Bowl in Ft. Worth when I was 8 or 9. I remember weeping at the sight of Cyndi in the flesh—overwhelmed by that feeling that she was singing to me and me alone, that somehow I was plugging in to her. I couldn’t speak after the performance and I don’t think I ever articulated how powerful the event had been for me.

In fact, I forgot about Cyndi Lauper, like the rest of the world, until last week when I read in the New York Times that she is performing on Broadway in Three Penny Opera. She’s 52 now, married and a mom. But she’s ballsy as ever, pushing her own boundaries, doing what she loves whether or not she receives the recognition or the credit for what she’s doing. (Some say Madonna ripped off Cyndi’s vocal, dance and fashion style and gave her no credit).

But I decided to revisit Cyndi Lauper. I found a CD of hers at the grocery store of all places, on sale for $7.99. After I loaded up my car with the salmon, eggs and green beans I bought, I popped in the disc. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” took me back 20 years in a flash, and tears streamed down my cheeks beneath my sunglasses. In the song, the girl’s parents are nagging her about what she’s going to do with her life and she pleads with them: she just wants to have fun. But the subtext is she never really does. And here I am, 20 years later, still wondering what I’m going to do with my life, wondering when I’m going to have fun.

What is thought of as such a light, joyous pop song made me tap into my own deep melancholia, something I rarely do these days, certainly not publicly. I thought of something my dad used to say to me. “Kid, you’re born into this world alone, and you die alone.” I always thought he was being melodramatic, but he’s right. But he didn’t take it far enough. What he didn’t say was you fucking live this life alone, too. And that’s where I am. Fucking 29 years old, alone, after escaping death, on a wild goose chase after life . . . I got nothing. What in the hell do I think I’m doing, anyway? Distracting myself from my own melancholia by attempting to beat the time with my own memory?

People rarely see my deep sadness because my mother has taught me by example how to hide it and my father has always demanded that I “fake it until you make it.” Make it where? And how? I suspect the quest is itself the destination, but right now that’s simply not enough. There’s too much grief for it to make sense. And what’s the fucking point of it? If I were truly Catholic, I’d say it’s the suffering, the suffering and subsequent compassion that is the point. But I’ve done that and so what? I’m in it, living it, and so what? A real Catholic believes in the resurrection, believes in everlasting life in the Kingdom of Heaven, but I joined the Church for the ritual and I never bought into any of that shit. I see no prize awaiting me. I don’t live according to some reward system.

Most of the time I take great pleasure in small things: the way the soft light of spring illuminates a budding daffodil; a great guitar riff, played too loudly; the tender touch or kind word of a dear friend. But when I am not in the immediate presence of those things, when I feel I’ll break from the absence, I can no longer muster the false hope, the optimism that comes so naturally to me.

And I wonder, what the fuck do I think I’m doing? What does it matter? Who am I to be so arrogant to think I have something to say? Do I have something to say? Or does the world have something to say to me? Journalism is so much safer—its importance is implicit. But what is the purpose of revisiting my own darkness? To what end . . . ?

I fear there is no end—that this book project is insurmountable, that I’m fooling myself, spinning my wheels, that there isn’t even an ending because it hasn’t yet played out. So why write it down? The answer can’t be my own therapy, because who gives a shit? If I do it, if I don’t do it, if I finish, if I never finish . . . I’m still alone, an only child, alone with a darker, deeper streak of melancholia that cannot be shaken.