LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, AUGUST 1976: I hadn’t heard of Ms. Panic, but when my students explained about the song, I thought it’d be interesting to go. She’s popular enough that I’m sure my students would have gone anyway, but at the club, most of them seemed just as interested in watching me. When I stepped outside for some air, I saw a woman sitting cross-legged on the hood of a car, picking at a scab on her knee like a girl half her age. I didn’t realize until I saw that same young woman growling into the microphone that it was Ms. Panic whose picture I’d taken. The song’s anger reminded me of you. In our East Seventh Street days, I didn’t know myself well enough to say it, but you were someone who knew how to get angry, which was something I both feared and was wild to learn.

I called the school, but Jane isn’t enrolled there anymore. There are no Los Angeles listings for Jane or Samantha Preston. Since she and I last spoke nineteen weeks ago, she’s called Mother twice. Mother feels guilty about this; I’m just thankful she’s still speaking to one of us. No matter what Mother asks, Jane only wants to talk about what birds Mother has seen out the kitchen window. Mother says Jane sounds cheerful enough, but thinks she isn’t sleeping well. Jane’s calls have come just as Mother was waking up, which means that in California, it was four a.m. It’s hard not to fill the spaces in between those lines with worry, but both times Jane called direct and not collect, so she must have a little money. Any small, fleeting glimpse of her is better than nothing at all.

One weekend I was passing around a joint and watching Saturday Night, still cracking up over something Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi had done before the last commercial break, when all of a sudden this skinny girl with spiked hair and black makeup across her eyes started singing “Mommy is sick, Mommy is sick,” in a voice like her head was on fire. I was watching the same way as everybody else until the guitarist took a solo and the girl put the microphone between her legs and yanked off her dress. Who’s that? I asked. I was feeling warm all over partly because I was stoned and partly because underneath her dress, the girl’s boobs were barred with black tape. That’s Franny Panic, someone said. The girl jerked the microphone back to her mouth and started singing “Mommy is sick,” wearing nothing but fishnets and a line of black tape across her chest, before the show cut quick to another commercial. When it came back, the girl was gone and Chevy Chase was making a joke about downtown New York fashions.