rm | LJ Idol, Topic 1: My 'Favorite' Childhood Memory -- The Cat-man & I

When I was growing up my father was an advertising executive. He worked for all the firms that were big names then, like J. Walter Thompson and Wunderman, and if you know anything about Madison Avenue, which was really the one and only way to refer to the ad business back then, you know that in many ways it was the last of New York to leave the 1950s.

In many ways my father’s job was my greatest pleasure. It was so performative and filled with so much gossip. There was his Hawaiian secretary who always wore a giant orchid behind her ear and the pastry cart that came through each day at three. There was the way he explained that all account executives were actually evil and how the fellows who wore the hounds tooth sports jackets were almost invariably gay – this said with some random euphemism of the 70s such that as the small thing I was, I had to work it out for myself.

There were trays of markers and women in pencil skirts and heels that clicked clicked clicked. And there was a time he did an award winning ad campaign for the krugerrand before South Africa was really on our national consciousness as evil. I remember his office never really figuring out what to do with those – they were beautiful ads and they’d won awards, but you couldn’t just leave them up in the 22nd floor lobby by the restrooms anymore, could you?

My father worked long hours then, was a rising star even though ultimately he was about as cut out for corporate life as myself, which is to say not at all. But he was made VP of this, that or the other and lord, there were a lot of VP types, junior this and senior that or assistant something or other. And he traveled on business, a thing which still seemed glamorous then in a world where only pretty women were flight attendants.

Like a lot of families, and this is peculiar to New York to a certain degree, we had a lot of money coming in, but we also had a lot of money going out. Rent was high, and my parents had opted to send me to private school for reasons we’ll surely get into in another post. They were saving for college for me, and things like vacation were just prohibitively expensive, and so it was decided that my mother and I would go with my father on one of his trips to Chicago.

Chicago, like New York, is a city of myth. Big shoulders and gangsters and you know it the second you set foot on the ground even if you’ve never heard the stories or the clichés. If steampunk had, in fact, happened, it is Chicago and not New York, surely, that that world would have evolved into - concrete and ornate with the inner workings of everything exposed.

Maltese family bright ideas have a habit of not quite working out as anticipated, and of course, this was summer in Chicago with a vicious heat wave. It was 105 on the ground – actual temperature, not this silly “feels like” crap to make it easier to whine these days. It seemed like the playgrounds were melting, and so while my father took meetings, my mother and I stayed in the hotel room, air conditioned and bored. Even if we could have stood going out, my father probably would have thrown a fit.

But we were on vacation and we had to do something, and in that moment in time it always seemed acceptable, or at least somehow my parents always got away with it, to take young children to bars. I suppose the drinking age was 18 then, and I suppose no one thought a child of 7 or 8 was going to try to sneak a whiskey sour. So off we went in the dark and slight cool to some Irish bar with live music.

I have always danced. And as I’ve mentioned before always loved Irish music. In fact, it was many years after all this that I finally found out we weren’t Irish at all. I had always assumed we were, I was, and to me it was a bit like being a goth chick with red hair -- the way to be the most special girl in the room -- I was disappointed to find out we weren’t Irish, as if I suddenly wasn't magic at all.

But that was years later, and for now I was out in the gauzy flower-girl dress with the pearl buttons my aunt had bought me to wear to my grandfather’s wedding a year earlier (my grandmother had died a few years before) and there were fiddles and drums and even pipes and a sound to turn my head to the side and jut my chin out over my shoulder to. I would be severe and beautiful, and I mimicked the jigs I had seen in a school production of Brigadoon.

At first, I just did this half shyly, tableside, waiting for the permission of my parents who thought me odd and quaint, but then a young man, probably I know now about 26, with black hair and narrow and slanting blue eyes and cheekbones that gave him a cat-like countenance came up to me and bowed.

I curtsied back automatically, because I’d learnt to do it in school, and coyly, because I’d seen movies, and then watched as he did a little jig, before holding his hands out to me, a gesture for me to try the same. I did and he nodded and backed us up, me following into the dance floor proper while this band played. And he put his arms up theatrically and started slowly a jig for me to imitate, to learn. And he took my hands and spun me around and showed me how to cross arms and lean back to spin faster, the sort of thing I should have learnt with playmates my own age had I ever had any or not been terrified of speed.

But this was different, because in a world of dark and fire, dressed in gauze and in front of the cat-man’s grin, I wasn’t ugly or lonely or a child. I was a striking, scary, pretty girl who could dance well and had a right to be there, too bad I was a child.

If my parents looked on dismayed or amused, I don’t remember, although they like to tell the story now. I just remember how he’d show me a dance, and then we’d do it, and then he’d try to pull me into another part of the dance floor and I didn’t understand why until I saw that the other adults, all young and Irish I like to think and laughing, weren’t just watching from the sides, a few of them clapping along with the music, but had formed up a huge circle around us – forty of them at least.

I danced with the grown up stranger until the bar damn closed, at which point with his bow and my curtsey he returned me to my parents' table and he and others complimented me on what a sharp little thing I was. And it was the first time, as we all left, I remember spilling out onto dark streets, covered in sweat and relieved for the solidity of concrete and regretful that the stories inside were not the stories outside.

“He was handsome, wasn’t he?” my mother asked.

And I knew to nod and not say that the magic interested me more or his wryness – I used words like that as a child, used them right and always got asked what they meant. My parents chuckled, as they do and did, and I walked back to the hotel with them, my left hand in my mother’s, and my right crushed into a little fist full of music and fury and the relief that someone had seen, someone had known.

My parents, it turned out, bought an album from the band in the bar that night so I could dance to it at home, but it was less exciting there, you might imagine, and it was only years and years later that I found out the other reason this story matters – the band was The Chieftains.