Fleetwood Mac, Madison Square Garden, 1977. I was a seventeen, Fleetwood Mac was the biggest band on the planet at the time, and friends had an uncle in Manhattan whose floor we could camp out on after the big show. Okay, I’m in. I’m an introvert, so I don’t love crowds, and – MSG was pretty overwhelming for a kid from the sticks, but then the whole experience was a lot: the bus, the subway, the streets of midtown and the Upper West Side, near Columbia U. I saw more people in an hour that day than I usually encountered over the course of a month or possibly two months living in upstate, small-town America.
The city in the seventies was gritty and colorful, chaotic to my eyes. Midtown was home to numerous X-rated movie houses and peep shows I gaped at, subtly (Anal Angel?!! All-Male Revue?!!!). Wide bell bottoms and button-up print shirts for men and women in psychedelic paisleys and other patterns were the rage. And everyone had so much hair, except me; I have never had a lot. I was there very much as a follower, a watcher, a lost lamb being led by more experienced types, our new friends who’d once lived in Riverdale (wasn’t that where Archie lived? I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, so I didn’t ask), in the Bronx (where was that, exactly? again, I didn’t ask). They had moved to the Catskills after their parents divorced. Riverdale was too expensive, it was inferred, or perhaps I overheard my parents say, for a divorcee with three kids to raise, even one whose ex was a kind of big-wig – it was also inferred – who worked at Yale. He’d married again, and supporting two families is expensive, even I knew that, could figure that out. They were the first kids I knew whose parents had split up. How was that for them, other than hard? Again, I never asked.
It was the divorcee’s brother whose apartment we camped in; we’d done something similar with a politically ambitious local Pastor several years before, but I can’t remember what we did in the city with that guy. He’d left after losing his bid for a seat in congress, intent on trying again in another rural district, this time in Pennsylvania. Never liked him, an intellectual and spiritual bully, but he did, slightly, expand my world, I guess.
The concert was great, if overwhelming for me; so much noise and so many people crammed together in that space, singing along. I still love that album, Rumors, but I wasn’t just an introvert who didn’t know it, I was a real tight-ass. I spent the lead-up to the main event (was Kenny Loggins the warm-up?) with my knickers in a serious twist because the entire place was lighting up doobies, including several members of my own party! Horror upon horror! You’re smoking pot?! But but but – pot is illegal! This is wrong! And smoking of any kind is bad for you, harmful and terrible! Yet other than refusing to participate, lil lamb over thissaways kept her mouth shut because objecting would have been seriously uncool – even tight-assed me knew that, although objecting would also have been honest, because I was so, so deeply uncool.
I had just graduated from high school, and was as terrified of the future as I had ever been. I so wanted to get away from my annihilating mother, my suffocating family of origin, and – I was frightened by what was ahead. I didn’t have my parents’ support for my chosen major and career – theatre; they’d also extracted a promise from me that if they ‘let me’ major in theatre I would never ask them for money, or financial assistance, ever. I agreed, even though I had received a full academic scholarship to the university I attended, even though no such promise was extracted from my older sister, who received zero dollars toward her college education as a painting major. Would I be able to cobble together some kind of career? Some kind of life? Would I be okay? Was I okay?
The future loomed before me like a giant blank screen, just nothing, just – whatever I made up, created. I might have been a tight ass where pot was concerned, but I was drinking a lot. Ten days after the concert – and after I turned eighteen – one of my high school teachers sexually assaulted me. Six weeks after that yet another former teacher did the same. My supposed best friend had told me ‘you deserved it’ when teacher number one went for it, went for me; things were shifting so quickly I was unable to keep up, but I certainly kept up the happy high school graduate facade. I put on at least twenty pounds, protection, I thought, against more predatory men. Fat chance of that, honey.
Life isn’t just what we choose, it’s what happens to us regardless of choice, or intent. I was and remain a bit naïve, and, at times, a bit rigid in my thinking. Pot, which I did eventually indulge in, didn’t remove what ailed me, but music has always helped. These days, as background to my days, I play meditation music, singing bowls, chanting. Maybe one day I’ll listen to Fleetwood Mac and reminisce about the good old days; I do still own the album, but – were they so good?
