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Atlantic City, 1978
Apr. 3rd, 2008 07:22 pmIn trying to figure out what makes Torchwood stick with me quite as much as it does, I keep coming back to my 1970s childhood and the world before it was wrapped in plastic.
Often, we would visit my aunt and uncle (great aunt and uncle, I later understood) in Atlantic City. Their children were grown and worked in casinos, although my cousin Steve still ostensibly lived at home. Most night's he stayed at a lover's house, a fact I knew only because of how assiduously it was avoided at the dinner table set with pea green plates and briskett always cut with an electric knife.
My relations' house on Ventner Avenue was ugly in the way you would expect from the era -- thick carpetting of dubious color, heavy drapes with peripherally African designs, leather furniture, and the world held together by macrame.
My mother, like everyone in my family, likes to gamble but for stakes small enough so as to be almost embarassing. When I was small my parents, before they would go out to the casinos, would go up into the attic at the house, folding down the stairs out of the ceiling (a thing I had never seen before being a city child and that I found quite terrifying), and get down Steve's old toys for me. I would play Battling Tops alone in the den all night, desperately trying not to break the aging strings that set them going, while I would watch Buck Rogers in the 25th Century or Battlestar Galactica and play with my Aunt's black cat, Morris. Morris liked to sleep on my head.
Even then, at six and seven and eight, I remember learning to be circumspect about why I loved my science fiction shows. They talked about sex and religion and were full of drama and costume, all sins for a child who stayed safe by being serious, even grim. But the shows made me smile and taught me cheerful sarcasm in the face of disaster -- my family was full of disaster, and it seemed a useful skill. Even as that small girl I wanted to be Starbuck, and it's a testament to what I am and am not, that now that Starbuck is a girl, I approve, but don't really care.
Sometimes, I slept in the den, but if we were sure Steve wasn't coming home, I would sleep in his bedroom. He kept a stack of Playboys neatly lined up on the bottom shelf of his night table. He hid them from no one and no one hid them from me. I looked, of course; any child would, and what I remember about them now is how certain you had to be that each of those women had a scent. There were more brunettes then and a hell of a lot of bush. Now porn is just like the apples in the supermarket, coated in wax and not even touchable even when you're touching. It's a strange thing.
Everything changed after the Tylenol murders of course, but when I was small TastyKakes Butterscotch Krimpets came in a cardboard carton with sets of two folded into wax paper; you had to chill them slightly to get the icing to come off clean. In that world I wore courderoy pants and drank lemondae made from powdered mix and fantasized about one day being old enough and pretty enough to wear Daisy Duke shorts.
By the time I turned eleven, that world had gone. The last of the strings had snapped on the Battling Tops, and while the shows I had loved were off the air, my parents still mocked me for them. The Playboys had been hidden in a rush of "you didn't ever look, did you?" and food wrappers became both tight and loud; there were no more four in the afternoon snacks with butterscotch licked off my fingers.
My mother would dress me up and put makeup on me and sneak me into the casino. If you want to know where I learnt resolve, it was there; people never questioned us. The grim child comes in handy; my eyes were always ruthless. I counted my mother's quarters for her and found her lucky machines.
I was bored most of the time we spent at the yellow house on Ventner Avenue, but I also knew keenly that this was as close to America as I was ever going to get as we drove through the pawnshop parts of town on the way to visit my great grandmother, Nana Sherman, we called her, at her nursing home. She would ask me if I was a Chinese princess. Or an Italian one. Or an Owl one. Everyone else took it for senility, but I didn't. She wasn't senile, just lost from her own lost world living out an antisceptic old age misery and giving me hankerchiefs and costume jewlery and stealing jello from the cafeteria.
When I think about the late '70s ad early '80s in Atlantic City, I think about the end of a gendered world that I was not made for. About men's men having conversations about men's things - cigars and alchol and Madison Avenue and faking it all if they didn't care because they had to care, and women sewing and worrying about my trousseau.
I remember thinking even then that world was beautiful and how I wished I could have the perfect wings in my hair and full breasts to be worthy of it. I remember thinking I wished a woman's back could be straighter; being Starbuck needed harder lines than even scrawny me would ever have; I grieved that. I sometimes still do.
I remember worrying a little if I were a lesbian and thinking that secretly that might be great, because I was sure it meant that there were worlds I would get to see that other women wouldn't, dark places and foreign countries kept from most of us. I dreamed, as my mother did my hair and put purple and brown eyeshadow on me, that everything else about me could be merely clothing too.
I've loved my share of television science fiction since those summers. Anyone remember Otherworld? Or, more likely, V? But I think Torchwood reminds me of the nasty exhuberance of those shows I loved in the '70s and also of those worlds of men and women I spied on in the grunge of Atlantic City, and of the rituals I started learning to perfect in those summers but will never own.
Do you remember what it was like to go into a supermarket and actually smell apples? Or to touch a woman with the expectation of feeling something other than the absence of texture?
That was the promise of my childhood in both fact and fiction and when I see pieces of it float by now, I grab what I can.
Torchwood is full of flashy, performed masculinity, and hot, real looking women, and takes an almost innocent joy in its utter trashiness. That's what Atlantic City was like, playing group games alone, sneaking looks at Playboy, letting my mother dress me as an adult, and imagining I could grow up to be Princess Ardala.
When I am reminded of it I miss it more than almost anything in the whole world.
Often, we would visit my aunt and uncle (great aunt and uncle, I later understood) in Atlantic City. Their children were grown and worked in casinos, although my cousin Steve still ostensibly lived at home. Most night's he stayed at a lover's house, a fact I knew only because of how assiduously it was avoided at the dinner table set with pea green plates and briskett always cut with an electric knife.
My relations' house on Ventner Avenue was ugly in the way you would expect from the era -- thick carpetting of dubious color, heavy drapes with peripherally African designs, leather furniture, and the world held together by macrame.
My mother, like everyone in my family, likes to gamble but for stakes small enough so as to be almost embarassing. When I was small my parents, before they would go out to the casinos, would go up into the attic at the house, folding down the stairs out of the ceiling (a thing I had never seen before being a city child and that I found quite terrifying), and get down Steve's old toys for me. I would play Battling Tops alone in the den all night, desperately trying not to break the aging strings that set them going, while I would watch Buck Rogers in the 25th Century or Battlestar Galactica and play with my Aunt's black cat, Morris. Morris liked to sleep on my head.
Even then, at six and seven and eight, I remember learning to be circumspect about why I loved my science fiction shows. They talked about sex and religion and were full of drama and costume, all sins for a child who stayed safe by being serious, even grim. But the shows made me smile and taught me cheerful sarcasm in the face of disaster -- my family was full of disaster, and it seemed a useful skill. Even as that small girl I wanted to be Starbuck, and it's a testament to what I am and am not, that now that Starbuck is a girl, I approve, but don't really care.
Sometimes, I slept in the den, but if we were sure Steve wasn't coming home, I would sleep in his bedroom. He kept a stack of Playboys neatly lined up on the bottom shelf of his night table. He hid them from no one and no one hid them from me. I looked, of course; any child would, and what I remember about them now is how certain you had to be that each of those women had a scent. There were more brunettes then and a hell of a lot of bush. Now porn is just like the apples in the supermarket, coated in wax and not even touchable even when you're touching. It's a strange thing.
Everything changed after the Tylenol murders of course, but when I was small TastyKakes Butterscotch Krimpets came in a cardboard carton with sets of two folded into wax paper; you had to chill them slightly to get the icing to come off clean. In that world I wore courderoy pants and drank lemondae made from powdered mix and fantasized about one day being old enough and pretty enough to wear Daisy Duke shorts.
By the time I turned eleven, that world had gone. The last of the strings had snapped on the Battling Tops, and while the shows I had loved were off the air, my parents still mocked me for them. The Playboys had been hidden in a rush of "you didn't ever look, did you?" and food wrappers became both tight and loud; there were no more four in the afternoon snacks with butterscotch licked off my fingers.
My mother would dress me up and put makeup on me and sneak me into the casino. If you want to know where I learnt resolve, it was there; people never questioned us. The grim child comes in handy; my eyes were always ruthless. I counted my mother's quarters for her and found her lucky machines.
I was bored most of the time we spent at the yellow house on Ventner Avenue, but I also knew keenly that this was as close to America as I was ever going to get as we drove through the pawnshop parts of town on the way to visit my great grandmother, Nana Sherman, we called her, at her nursing home. She would ask me if I was a Chinese princess. Or an Italian one. Or an Owl one. Everyone else took it for senility, but I didn't. She wasn't senile, just lost from her own lost world living out an antisceptic old age misery and giving me hankerchiefs and costume jewlery and stealing jello from the cafeteria.
When I think about the late '70s ad early '80s in Atlantic City, I think about the end of a gendered world that I was not made for. About men's men having conversations about men's things - cigars and alchol and Madison Avenue and faking it all if they didn't care because they had to care, and women sewing and worrying about my trousseau.
I remember thinking even then that world was beautiful and how I wished I could have the perfect wings in my hair and full breasts to be worthy of it. I remember thinking I wished a woman's back could be straighter; being Starbuck needed harder lines than even scrawny me would ever have; I grieved that. I sometimes still do.
I remember worrying a little if I were a lesbian and thinking that secretly that might be great, because I was sure it meant that there were worlds I would get to see that other women wouldn't, dark places and foreign countries kept from most of us. I dreamed, as my mother did my hair and put purple and brown eyeshadow on me, that everything else about me could be merely clothing too.
I've loved my share of television science fiction since those summers. Anyone remember Otherworld? Or, more likely, V? But I think Torchwood reminds me of the nasty exhuberance of those shows I loved in the '70s and also of those worlds of men and women I spied on in the grunge of Atlantic City, and of the rituals I started learning to perfect in those summers but will never own.
Do you remember what it was like to go into a supermarket and actually smell apples? Or to touch a woman with the expectation of feeling something other than the absence of texture?
That was the promise of my childhood in both fact and fiction and when I see pieces of it float by now, I grab what I can.
Torchwood is full of flashy, performed masculinity, and hot, real looking women, and takes an almost innocent joy in its utter trashiness. That's what Atlantic City was like, playing group games alone, sneaking looks at Playboy, letting my mother dress me as an adult, and imagining I could grow up to be Princess Ardala.
When I am reminded of it I miss it more than almost anything in the whole world.
