Perhaps because school was a closed door to me, I found beautiful places inside myself. I dwelled on things most people didn’t even see. I kept myself intact and part of everything around me by daydreaming.
Someday, I promised myself, I would be a beautiful lady on television accepting an award of my own. An Oscar! Miss America! I would be so beautiful, and all those kids who drew cootie lines around me would wish they could be my friend. I would create a whole wide world from my own imagination. I would teach it how to find magic. Maybe I would find others like myself.
Those long daydreams often ended up on my report card. “Rickie daydreams all day long”—as if that were a bad thing. I had a highly active imagination with nowhere to grow. This year there would be no daydreaming, not in Mr. Carter’s class.
“When they know you’re not watching they talk behind your back”
My fifth grade teacher was a small, square-shaped bully with a crew cut and a bad temper. He once manhandled me by my collar because I told my classmates, “Drop your pencils at four o’clock.” With my stunt, I finally made it onto their social radar screen. Listen: everyone was dropping their pencils because of me! They liked me!
Uh-oh. Outside the classroom, Mr. Carter picked me up by the collar and held me against the wall. He was threatening me with a fury that almost made me pee.
“Please Mr. Carter, don’t hit me,” I pleaded. The door to the classroom next to mine was open so the entire fourth grade heard me reduced to begging. It was humiliating. I was a fifth grader that even the fourth graders looked down upon. Mr. Carter didn’t care about a ten-year-old girl trying to get a little social footing. There is something fundamentally wrong in an adult man’s physical retribution when his feeble sense of authority has been challenged by falling pencils.
I wished I would die rather than have to stay at that school. I could not figure out what was wrong with me.
There was a ray of hope when I met my very first schoolyard friend, Susan Carl. She was a sassy girl with long brown wavy hair and a sweet face. She and her mother were from Las Vegas. Her mom wore too much makeup and ratted her hair up high. Susan and I bonded over being the first girls to get brassieres, which meant we were the first young girls of our class to be recognized as little women.
The first bra ritual was a big deal. For once in my life I did not feel like the outcast new kid. My nemesis, Jo Ellen Hassle, was no longer a threat. None of them were. Womanhood trumped any playground game as far as I was concerned. A maturing body was something far more substantial than winning a tetherball game. My little bra, along with Susan’s friendship, restored a modicum of dignity, just enough to get through the rest of the year.
Friends are passengers on the short flights from one place to another, and few of them manage the transition of families moving. When the sixth grade came, Susan and her mother moved back to Las Vegas. We promised to write and visit forever but we didn’t.
The Beatles
I first saw the Beatles in February 1964. My cousins and I gathered around the black-and-white television in Aunt Linda’s living room. The Rice-A-Roni was cooking on the stove and fried chicken was in the pan.
The Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show. With the rest of America we had waded through his usual muddy dis-entertainment of puppets and chorus girls, and now we finally got to see what this Beatles fuss was about.
What was that they were doing with their hair? Why was their hair so long?
Girls were screaming back there in New York City. A wave ran through the audience and out of our television screen. By the second bridge—“Well my heart went boom”—we were captured, defeated, and the world was remade in their image. We were not who we had been three minutes before. The entire country had the air knocked out of it. Nothing that has happened in entertainment since can compare.
The violin I was once so eager to learn suddenly seemed unnecessary. Square. Ever since Mr. Ellis put me in the second chair of the orchestra where I faked my way through performances, I knew I was never going to make it, not reading music as well as the other kids.
On the other hand, I learned every note of every Beatles song I heard. I understood this music instinctually and thoroughly. I sang harmony and matched every nuance of their recordings. I imitated, I improvised, I learned.
By summer, I had a Beatle haircut, Beatle boots, and Ringo rings. I collected Beatle trading cards that came with sheets of bubble gum, baseball cards for Beatle fans. If I could not have Paul, I would be Paul. In a life as unpredictable as mine, the Beatles gave me something I could depend on. In a world where my family might move any day, John and Paul gave me harmony that I could be part of.
Unlike other girls my age, I didn’t want to be a girl singer or the Beatles’ girlfriend. I wanted to be a Beatle. I was not afraid to be “the boy” if that’s what it took to find a little glory. I would find a way to learn guitar. When I first had access to one a year later, in 1965, I played it left-handed like Paul. Then I understood that the strings were backwards, so I reluctantly turned the guitar right side up. That certainly helped me with the chords, oh yeah.
Now I discovered the jukebox, the one that had always been there, and grubbed a dime or a quarter to play “Louie Louie,” mythic in its reputation as the most forbidden song, indecipherable in its pronunciation.
Or “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” the song of 1965. As my cousins and I snapped our fingers and shoved up our feet, American rock stepped close behind. We were “Dancing in the Street” . . . from Chicago to L.A. “Hang on Sloopy” still makes my toes curl up. Fronted by Rick Derringer, the McCoys jettisoned little girls out of the cold wet Liverpool cavern and right smack in the back seat of a ’57 Chevy.
It was nasty American rock ’n’ roll. If you wanted to see how vulnerable our teen boys were, listen no further than “Rag Doll” on the East Coast and “Don’t Worry Baby” on the West Coast. Teen emotion was exploding like acne upon the surface of American culture, and there I was, right in the epicenter. Wherever there was a jukebox, there was a connection to the larger world. The songs never got old—we were building rock ’n’ roll.
It would be easy to dismiss the laments of surfers and their cars except that Brian Wilson’s melodies insisted, carefully, that we take notice. This was every kid’s lament—“I guess I should’ve kept my mouth shut”—but it was incongruous with the gentle melody it was nailed to. We felt it. The Beach Boys made it alright to do a little James Dean as you hung five and then “hahahahaaaa, wipe out.” Our American identity asserted and defined itself in the musical conversation taking place with the world. Or at least with Britain. Every song gave birth to another direction.
I was undergoing a social and spiritual metamorphosis. Rock music was my bible. Mine would be the first generation to make rock ’n’ roll both a lifestyle and a political movement.
My parents continued to strive for their American dream. That summer I had become an AAU swimmer. Mom and Dad told me that I had to take swimming seriously if I wanted to be the best. I committed, I was going to make it to the Olympics. They committed too. By August, I was fast at butterfly, I could easily glide up and over the water. I would press forward when others tired and I would win long-distance races. I loved to win and here I didn’t need others in order to feel good about myself; I alone was creating approval and accomplishments.
Mother woke me up at five in the morning to practice and after school I swam laps until dinnertime. My coach, Moonie, was an old Filipino who’d been to the Olympics for his country. He was rough and inspiring, tapping me in the water with a pole if my stroke faltered and stepping on my hands if I grabbed the side of the pool instead of flipping. “Ricarda! What are you doing?”