Gene laughed, “Girl, chasing black pussy has never been my thing.”
Wanting to impress him, I spewed on. “By third grade, projects went up in my neighborhood and my class went from all white to half black. Overnight, my sister and I were yanked from PS #25 and transferred to Saint Anthony’s Catholic School. The only excuse for this radical move was that we needed to prepare for our first Holy Communion.”
Eugene raised in eyebrow. “So they didn’t want you mingling with “Blackie?”
From that moment on I spent all my free time hanging out with Eugene and his crew. That included his wife, Linda, when she wasn’t shaking her perfect silicon DD titties at the go-go bar. Leon, a heavyset, large Afro styling queen, and Scottie, a renegade Baptist gospel piano player, were at the core of the pack. Then there was Joanie, an ebony prostitute with a large baby bump, who brought the name Peaches to mind, a character from the Nina Simone song “Four Women”; and Tachki, a half Japanese, half black, pimped-out gangster/drug dealer with processed hair, who wore a doo rag. They were all part of the furniture at Eugene’s pad. These new instant friends were all ghetto fabulous decades before the term was en vogue.
As Eugene and I shopped the neighborhood markets for party foods, our intimacy grew. “Blackie, girl, get mama some lean ribs if you can find some,” he ordered.
In my skimpy, stretchy tube top, I’d lean over the meat counter in search of the best cuts to please him as I continued to entertain with stories from my past.
“Gene, did I ever tell you about the time I got my hair fried?” I asked. “My sister has natural curly hair and Mom use to take me for regular perms so that my hair would match my sister’s. She loved getting attention from strangers who thought Ginny and I were twins. The last time I let her do that I was eleven, when the hairdresser left the chemicals on too long. I was so awkward with my new overnight sprouting boobies—and then I had a fried head of frizz. I managed to pull it all up in a rubber band at the top of my head and created something that looked like an Afro Puff.”
“Girl, you were ahead of your time,” Eugene said laughing.
“Ever since I met you and the brothers, I have a whole new appreciation for my big-ass legs. All those years I spent drinking Metrical and slapping my thighs together a hundred times in hopes they’d grow smaller was a waste of my time.”
Eugene said, “Okay, Lady Chatterley, remind me to keep you away from the Bennies.” He was referring to his drug stash of mini-whites, the street name for Benzedrine, that we had taken before we’d gone shopping. This was my favorite high, which he generously shared.
Life with Eugene was a constant party. His wife didn’t seem to mind me hanging around; I don’t think she suspected that I was falling for her husband. I didn’t even know it myself. Linda and Gene treated me like a little sister. I went everywhere with Gene and his crew. We went to gospel concerts of the Clara Ward Singers, since Scottie was their piano player and would get us in for free. We had free passes to the Olympic Arena for the Roller Derby because Gene’s friends were on the home team. According to Gene, all the big stars of the L.A. T-Birds were queens, and when they weren’t in the ring tearing each other’s hair out, they were in bed with one another.
This was true for the girls, too, according to Joanie, a bisexual. She’d saunter over and squeeze her fat pregnant ass close to me on the couch and say, “The girl team is all Lesbos too. Just wait till you see those bitches go at it; they’re way more vicious than the boys.”
I felt sorry for Joanie and her unborn child because she was in love with the baby’s daddy. He was an older rich, married Jewish businessman who kept Joanie and their baby a secret from his other family. She let him, as long as he paid her rent and kept her in drug money. Joanie confused me. Whenever she got high, she’d go from sisterly to lecherous, with aggressive, relentless come-ons. It was those times when Peaches came out: “My skin is black, my hair is wooly. I’ll kill the first mother I see. My life has been rough.” I liked her, but when she got high she scared me. Her addictions to bad love and dope continued throughout the birth of her little girl and to a second child, a boy with the same father. I eventually pulled away from her since I could not bear to witness the neglect of these children and her demise.
I was seeing life through a black subculture and a homosexual’s lens, and this lifestyle went beyond anything I read about in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Gene’s wife, Linda, was also different from any women I ever met before. She knew the score about her husband’s bisexuality and somehow accepted it. But Scottie and some of Gene’s other male friends were living on the down-low. A few of them had wives and children who would occasionally socialize with us for a backyard BBQ of chicken, ribs, and hot links. I never understood how these women could not see how gay their husbands really were. Perhaps they just did not want to see it. If you didn’t look too closely, in the daytime, the backyard party looked like an after-church social, but once the wives packed up the kids and the potato salad and went home, the party would take on a different tone.
Out came the camp and drag, and by nightfall, the Supremes’ “Love Is Like An Itchin In My Heart” would blow the roof off. Every tall, fine, black gay and outrageous queen from the ’hood would line dance wall-to-wall in Eugene’s living room. I’d stand in the midst of all these hues of glory and bounce my little heart out to the Supremes or Marvin Gay’s “I Heard It through the Grapevine” the whole night long.
Linda taught me a trick or two as well. It was under her tutelage that I became a topless dancer. I was having trouble coming up with an idea for my acting improv class when Linda said, “Girl, why don’t you do a skit about a topless dancer, shy and frightened on her first night on the job? Then you can end the skit pantomiming your pasties falling off. I’ll loan you a pair of mine.” I got an A on the improvisation.
I was on my way to manifesting my father’s greatest fears: I was becoming an actress. With the help of Linda, I found an agent who would book me at one-night topless gigs. On Monday nights I worked at the Classic Cat, Hollywood’s most famous topless club in the Sixties, located on the Sunset Strip across from the Whiskey a Go-Go. Not only did I get paid to dance, but I was hired for my acting skills as well. Monday was amateur night at the Classic Cat, and when the emcee asked if there were any girls in the house that wanted to try out for the amateur contest, I came up to the stage pretending to be a little Mexican housewife, accent and all, straight out of East L.A. To the patrons, I looked like the real thing. Back in Jersey I was Italian, but in Los Angeles, even the Mexicans took me for one of their own.
The emcee asked why a housewife like me was willing to take off her clothes in front of strangers.
“I’m here to get even with my husband, that pendejo! He spends all his spare time in these clubs and leaves me home with the kids. I’ll show him.”
The audience ate it up and cheered me on as I stripped out of my jeans and embroidered peasant blouse, down to my panties. I was pretty damn proud of my grand performance, and one night the regular club dancers took me along with them across the street to the Whiskey where the doorman let us all in for free. That night, Jim Morrison and the Doors were playing and we had VIP seating.
13. KILL BILL
By 1967 I was finally living the life of a real California Girl. I had moved into my own one-bedroom cottage on Lockwood Avenue, closer to L.A. City College. I found a steady part-time job go-go dancing while I continued my studies. The Cherry Patch, a blue-collar joint in Highland Park, is where I got to perfect the art of topless dancing. Mostly I tended bar, but for twenty minutes out of every hour I would leave the bar as a bikini-clad barmaid and take the stage. Off came the top that covered a pair of cat-eye fringed pasties. Pasties were mandatory nipple covers in those days and required eyelash glue to hold them over my large brown nipples. I soon became the favorite dancer since the Mexican clientele preferred a woman with a little meat on her bones over the scrawny blondes that were the usual fare in that dive
. The only problem with my popularity was that once I came down off stage, I could only respond to their come-ons with “Yo no habla Espanola.” The men would accuse me of being some uppity Chicana who was trying to pass herself off as a Gringa.
The Cherry Patch is where I met Bill #3. I hadn’t yet grasped the significance of patterns that were showing up in threes. I had lived with three German immigrants; and with three unwed mothers; and dated two Bills, both Gemini; and then Bill # 3, also a Gemini, showed up.
Bill Barkley was a welder and one of the few white guys to frequent the Cherry Patch. He came in every night after his swing shift let out. Bill really wasn’t my type, but there was something about him that made me buy his rap about being an artist and convinced me to go out with him. Perhaps it was just that he was one of the few guys in the joint who could speak English, or maybe I was just bored. I recalled that Allan Ginsberg had been a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before he became a famous poet, so I gave Bill #3 the benefit of the doubt.
On our first date, we went straight from the bar to my place after my shift ended. Before we started to make out, the sensitive artist/welder confessed to having spent the last ten of his thirty-two years in a Florida state penitentiary—one-third of his entire life in a maximum security institution. He never told me the whole story, and I was afraid to ask. I suppose I was trying to be cool, so I accepted his half-assed explanation of having been framed for an armed robbery.
Although Bill’s past was a shocker, it wasn’t nearly as frightening as the sight of his naked body. His lily-white flesh was covered from head to toe with tattoos. I had seen the ones peeking out from his shirtsleeves—the crudely carved prison inks of love and hate on each finger—but I wasn’t quite prepared for the rest. These tattoos were not what you’d expect to see on a sensitive artist. They were crude and garish and depicted sexual acts, a total turnoff, but I closed my eyes and surrendered.
As Bill made love to me, I thought about the tattoo-covered Rod Steiger in the title role of The Illustrated Man, a film vision of doom and danger I had seen where Steiger’s frightening character was covered in skin illustrations that came alive and told the stories of his past. I should have read the ink on Bill #3, but I was afraid to look too deeply.
By our second date, Bill asked me to move in with him. Less than a month before I met Bill, Eugene had left Linda and was sharing my one bedroom, and my attraction for my platonic gay friend was escalating into a full-blown unrequited love affair that was killing me. I could never refuse Eugene anything, and along with him came his temporarily homeless friend, Leon, followed by Leon’s cousin, Beverly, a butch dyke. With Gene, Leon and Beverly combing their Afros with my forks and taking over my tiny space, Bill was just one more added attraction to the three-ring circus. So when Bill invited me to live like a grownup in a relationship at a new location, I said yes. It seemed like a logical solution. I realized the impossibility of ever having Eugene all to myself, and this pushed me from the fast track on Soul Train to a furnished one bedroom near Paramount Studios off Gower Street. I was moving quicker than the Freeway Flyer had taken me from Van Nuys to downtown L.A.
Yippee, I was living in Hollywood! Bill got the place rent-free because the landlord wanted a married couple on the premises to manage and collect the rents. Our new honeymoon flat was one of twenty units in a rundown building on Gregory Street, and the tenants were an assortment of fruits and canned nuts: potheads, pill poppers, speed freaks, junkies and alcoholics. I, the fake Mrs. Bill Barkley, would be their new landlady. Bill Barkley, my artist, was revealing himself to be an artist of the con.
Our flat on the ground floor, like all the others, had originally been a large single, but a fake knotty-pine wall divider had been added to create a tiny bedroom barely large enough for a double bed. It was furnished with a fake knotty-pine dresser and end tables, and the windows were covered with pink plastic shower curtains in lieu of real blinds or drapes. On the day we moved in, Bill dropped me at the curb with all my possessions and then went back to his place to pick up his belongings. Upon his return I learned that not only was I to be the manageress, but I was also to be the mother of Maurice, his gigantic Weimaraner. I had never lived with a dog so, at first, Maurice frightened me. Bill hung his one and only piece of artwork over our bed: a watercolor portrait of Joan Baez that he had done while in prison. And on the dresser he displayed another surprise: his rare collection of Nazi daggers.
On that first day in our new place, Bill went to work and left me alone with the dog. I stayed up on the bed the rest of the afternoon to keep Maurice from jumping on me. On the stereo Dylan sang, “Lay Lady Lay, Lay upon your big brass bed” while I tried to get comfortable on the lumpy mattress. I eventually fell asleep and a while later was awakened from a scary dream in which a dark shadowy monster was looming over me in bed. With my heart racing, I slowly came to fully realize it was Maurice, the giant pooch standing bedside, waiting to go out for his evening walk. At first I interpreted this monster in my dream as my fear of the dog, but somewhere deep in the recesses of my subconscious, I knew who the monster really was—but pushed the thought aside.
Now that I was officially Bill’s old lady, he insisted I quit topless dancing. He said he would pay the bills and all I had to do was attend my classes at L.A.C.C. and spend the rest of my time performing landlady duties and keeping him and the dog well fed. Maurice would pull me around the block on his twice-daily walks, and I spent the rest of my free time babysitting the tenants, particularly Myra, a thirty- something Jewish woman who was disabled by MS and had a prescription pain pill habit. On more than one occasion she almost burned down the entire building by taking too many meds and smoking in bed. Myra was just one of twenty stories that lived behind the closed doors at the Gregory Manor.
The worst of the lot were the speed freaks that lived on the top floor. Once, in the middle of the night, with Bill not home yet, I had to go up to their apartment and confront them for making too much noise. With rock music blaring from inside, I practically bloodied my knuckles banging on the door until it opened. When it finally did, a double barrel shotgun in the hands of the tweaked out tenant was aimed at my face. I just stood there in the face of danger and told the tenant that if he didn’t turn down the noise, I would call the police, and then I turned my back and walked away.
Even these moments weren’t enough of a reality check to wake me up. While all this drama was seeping through the cracks of the thin walls and through smoke filled hallways, my own little tragedy began to smolder. One Saturday afternoon, Bill left the apartment for a pack of cigs and didn’t return. By Sunday I started to panic, imagining that something horrible must have happened to him. I decided to call the police and report him missing. When Bill nonchalantly strolled into our apartment on Monday without an explanation, I tried to explain how concerned I had been about his absence and how I had made a police report.
Bill said, “You stupid bitch, don’t you ever call the police about me again or ask me where I go. It’s none of your fucking business. You understand?”
Then our lovemaking got weird. After work, Bill would come home drunk and high on speed, and then keep me up all night trying to achieve his orgasm way past the point of any pleasure on my side. On other nights he would bring his welder buddies home to party and expect me, the little woman, to rise from the bed after 2 a.m. to serve them beers and listen to their less-than-witty drunken banter.
On one such night, during my school finals, I made the mistake of not being congenial enough, and the next thing I knew, his fist knocked me up against the knotty-pine wall. I slid to the floor, bleeding from a broken lip. His buddies tried to calm his rage as I lifted myself off the floor trembling and got the beers out of the fridge. For the next half hour I sat there silently listening to his abusive babble about other women in the building he intended to fuck, until he passed out and his buddies stumbled off.
The morning after, I got up quietly as to not wake him and hurried to catch
the bus to school. On the ride along the east end of Hollywood’s Santa Monica Blvd. to the campus, I was preoccupied with the tasks of my day ahead. It was finals week, and I had two that day, first physics and then acting. I had prepared the role of Blanche in A Street Car Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, for my final scene. I was playing Blanche, but looking more like her roughed-up sister, Stella, after Stanley Kowalski knocked her around. I used my pain to play the poor deranged Blanche to the hilt. At the end of the long school day, I took a few red devils I had stashed. These were heavy narcotics that I never took more than one at a time. That day, I took enough to numb the pain of all abused women in fiction or reality. I was so high on the ride home that, when I got off the bus and started to walk the three long blocks back to my apartment, I had to lie down on someone’s lawn. I passed out and slept for over an hour.
When I finally made it back to the apartment, Bill was waiting with great remorse and promises. I was still pretty fucked up when he sat me down on his lap and started kissing me gently on the bruises he had made. He brushed my hair aside and said, “Baby I’m so sorry. I don’t know what got into me last night and I swear to you that it will never ever happen again.”
I wanted to believe him, but I kept hearing the words of my mother in my head, “Don’t ever let a man hit you.” I knew something had to change, but I wasn’t sure how to make it happen. With the semester over, I got an invitation from Mary, my ex, short-lived roommate from Van Nuys. She had friends who owned a dude ranch in the High Sierras who had invited her and her little son to come up and ride horses for a long weekend. She asked if I would join her and babysit for part of the time, and she’d pay all our expenses. I really wanted to go since I had never seen that part of the state and thought it would be fun. I told Bill about the invitation and, since he was feeling guilty for hitting me, the timing was perfect. Bill encouraged me to take the much-needed break.
My Life, a Four Letter Word Page 5
