My Life, a Four Letter Word

by Dolores DeLuce

  With a thunderous noise and ungodly shaking, all my dishes flew out of the cabinets. I jolted out of bed and ran to swoop up Viva and carried her outside into open space in the alley behind the house. My rattled nerves calmed when I noticed the sun had just risen and felt the magnificent warm, sunny, Santa Ana kind of day. Afraid to go back indoors, I buckled Viva in the baby seat on the back of my bicycle and off we rode along the Venice Boardwalk under an open sky. The clouds were tinged with soft pinks and the sky and ocean glimmered in its peachy glow. I passed neighbors I had yet to meet, all out discussing the shaker, but I just kept riding along. This was the same beach and boardwalk where I had plunged recklessly into deep dark waters less than five years prior and luckily came out alive. On that day, despite the disruption in nature, the glory of creation was evident; the mountains surrounding the L.A. basin were a vivid 3-D, and only peace and hope lived within me. These glimpses of a peace that surpassed human understanding made me fearless in the face of the unknown and the unsettling earth that rumbled with aftershocks.

  I felt only gratitude that Viva and I were both alive, and that I had a joyful baby who sang at the top of her lungs, “la-la-la-la-la,” from the back of my bicycle as I watched for signs of a tsunami in the calm waters of the Santa Monica Bay. “Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today” was my theme song, too, and Venice beach, the bohemian capital of southern California, suited me well.

  Within months I began to earn my reputation as the hostess to the homos, and my little house was open to every hippy, commie, and queer on the west side of Los Angeles. There was always more than one person sharing my floor, couch or bed. I didn’t know the meaning of the word anxiety and lived in the moment, grateful to be a member of the Welfare Elite. I had little ambition, and spent my nine-to-five on the water’s edge with Viva and friends. It was a productive day if the laundry got done.

  At this new juncture, even though I still saw Reg most weekends, many new men appeared to fill the role of baby daddy. A dear sweet boy named Bob Shomus moved in as a roommate but it wasn’t long before he moved from the couch into my bed. Bob was a friend of Mary’s from my valley days, and after his discharge from the Army and a recent divorce, he thought Venice was the perfect place to experiment with his new found bi-sexuality. He was also a good fit for me, not a hot and heavy lover but safe and cozy. We were instantly like couples who had been together for a very long time. The best part was that Bob was a natural parent and adored my baby girl. He would rise at the crack of dawn with Viva and take her out so that I could sleep in most mornings. Bob was slim and muscular and had a white boys’ blonde Afro. He particularly fancied one of my stripper costumes, an orange suede loin cloth; he wore as his sun bathing suit for the beach. He’d would slather baby oil all over himself and slip on my loin cloth and then lift Viva up on his shoulders. Viva would hang onto his big Afro and he’d schlepped her down to the water. Somehow in that outfit, with a baby on his back, he imagined himself a man trap. Bob lived with us up until he met his dream, Wayne Masserellie.

  With hindsight I know that this was the beginning of a trend I started for my love life. Bob was just the first of many self proclaimed bi-sexuals who made the leap to full blown homoville after sleeping with me. I was becoming the last stop at the station before leaving the closet for good. I wasn’t jealous of Wayne but I did miss the intimacy I had with Bob over those few shorts months we lived together. Once Bob moved out and I stopped breastfeeding Viva, my self-destructive behaviors started to creep back in.

  It had been like every other day under the sunny skies in 1972 when I carried Viva over the hot sand and set up camp in the secluded alcove under the twin piers of Pacific Ocean Park. This was an impromptu nude beach where the gay community congregated. On this particular day, I felt a tremor on the shore when I noticed a young man rise out of the sea like a God. I was transfixed by his statuesque, toned, tanned muscles as they pulsated under the setting sun. In slow motion, like a model in a sexy soap commercial, he shook the golden drops of salty ocean off his glistening smooth, hairless flesh, and I sensed he was about to rock my world.

  There were early warnings that this could be another natural disaster, but on the Richter Scale, Eric Smutz was a ten. I quickly learned that he was a Pisces, and a grand illusionist. From that very first encounter he began to spin a romantic fantasy—the one I had been longing for. Viva had just celebrated her second birthday and I had grown weary of the unrequited love affair I continued on and off with her father, who still had easy access to both Viva and my bed, though I made no demands for commitment or support.

  I was twenty-six, and Eric was only twenty-one, and yet he quickly took charge of my heart. He never hid the fact that he was a bisexual, and that he worked as a nude go-go boy at David and Goliath’s, a Boys Bar in West Hollywood. I chose to ignore the signs that a union with Eric most likely would be a match made in Go-Go Hell. I myself had recently gone back to part time nude go-go dancing to supplement my welfare check. Eric told me that he had spent his childhood growing up in the high desert near Palmdale, California, where he began frying his brains on drugs at the tender age of twelve. The only other woman he had ever loved was his mama. These facts alone should have sent me running for shelter, but I couldn’t see the landmines hiding all around me, and I just skipped right over them.

  On our first date, Eric invited me to watch him dance naked in front of his adoring fans at David and Goliath’s. It just happened to be amateur night and with a little encouragement from Eric I entered the contest. After all I was a pro, and since I was the only girl in the club, I could give the boys a taste of something that wasn’t often on the menu. On stage, I began my striptease by removing the thick leather belt I wore around my hips and I used the belt as a whip. As I cracked the whip repeatedly at the edge of the stage, the boys went wild. I didn’t know it yet, but I was building my future fan base. That night I took home the first prize of fifty bucks in cash.

  A few days later when we were both high on acid, Eric proposed marriage, and on the way home from our date we picked up a hitchhiker and ended up in a three-way with him. For the next few weeks I stayed in a drug-induced trance, living in the midst of my carnival. Six months before I met Eric I had moved to a two-bedroom apartment on Horizon Ave. a few blocks south of Navy Street and two blocks from the beach front. I had two gay roommates and a nice backyard for Viva to play in. By the time I started to plan my wedding to Eric, we had eleven crashers and only my two roommates and I were paying rent.

  My wedding was a perfect blend of Ghetto/California Hippy, with the ceremony taking place on a private strip of Malibu Beach Colony in front of the home of the parents of the young hitchhiker we had had the three-way with only a few weeks earlier. It was his wedding gift to us. My wedding gown was a long, white linen Indian import with lavender embroidered flowers down the front. My groom wore a matching see-through Indian shirt. We both wore flowers in our hair. Our rings were simple Santa Fe silver bands with inlayed turquoise stones, and our ceremony was facilitated by a minister with a certificate from the Universal Church of Life. I even catered my own reception, spending days cooking up vats of homemade lasagna for the affair, which was held back at my apartment in Venice. No one from the Grosso family ever R.S.V.P.d to my invitation, or acknowledged this marriage. This was no surprise, as I knew better then to expect gifts for this union.

  The ceremony was captured on a Super 8 mm film given to me as a wedding gift by my friend Butch and his wife Marie, who were the most normal people at the gathered affair. Marie was my sister’s good friend from New Jersey who had married Butch, who was attending school in California. Once married, they moved to Long Beach and we became friends. Most of the wedding guests looked like inmates from a mental asylum on a field trip to the beach. The guest list included my two roommates, Doran, a young radical faerie pot dealer, and Dorsey, a gay waiter; two nude dancers, Laura and Pam, from where I worked at Papa’s Speakeasy; Eric’s best man, Frank, the manager of David and
Goliath’s; Eugene, Leon and a few assorted queens from my old neighborhood; the unwed mother trilogy, Joni from the ’hood and Mary and Trudy from Van Nuys with their assorted children; my current Venice friends and a few students from L.A.C.C.; the groom’s mother, a heavy set Puerto Rican woman; and Eric’s two teenage sisters.

  Reg also came along to babysit Viva during the ceremony, and he kept her over the weekend while Eric and I took a short honeymoon in Palm Springs. To his credit, Reg could see that another one of his babies’ mamas was out of control, and he felt the need to provide some protection for his daughter. I knew that once I married Eric, I was saying goodbye to Reg for good.

  Eric was a mirage from the get-go, so a trip to the desert canyon outside of Palm Springs was a perfect honeymoon location. Once there, Eric began to show disturbing signs of immaturity. Like Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid, Eric became smitten with someone else on our honeymoon. In the movie, Grodin, a newlywed groom, is checking into a honeymoon hotel with his new bride when he spots Cybil Shepherd in the lobby and becomes obsessed with her. He leaves his wife alone in their room to pursue Cybil.

  On our honeymoon, just minutes after we settled into campsite, Eric spotted a hunky straight camper. But my Heartbreak Kid, Eric, shared his obsession openly and with lurid detail. Aware of the two-year-old waiting for me at home, I immediately realized I wasn’t prepared to raise another child, especially one with special needs, so just twenty-four hours after the ceremony, in the middle of the desert, the mirage faded.

  19. LEWD NUDE

  Viva was still at her dad’s when I got home a day early from the honeymoon from hell, so I went to the beach alone to contemplate how to deal with my new spouse. At low tide, in the alcove of sand between the twin piers of Pacific Ocean Park, a mini nude beach was well hidden from the public, except for the occasional jogger who whizzed by. In all my wild worldliness, I still maintained a certain naiveté about some of the practices of gay males. I hadn’t a clue that under those dark dank piers, boys were cavorting.

  Rubin, one of my many good friends of these early Venice days, emerged from under the piers and joined me where I lay tanning in my birthday suit. Rubin was barely legal, a Mexican boy with long dark hair, smooth and hairless, and had chiseled features prettier than any señorita. As a young boy, Rubin had been abandoned by his mother and learned to fend for himself in boarding schools between the U.S. and Tijuana while his mother became a real-estate mogul in Tijuana. He maintained a slight Mexican accent, and interjected the occasional Spanish word into his conversation. In exchange for my attention, Rubin was often at my side helping to lug Viva wherever we went. Less than a decade later, Rubin transitioned into Ruby, an outrageous transsexual who modeled her new full bosoms after my very own. But that day at the nude beach, Rubin was still flat chested. Rubin listened while I bitched about Eric.

  “Girl, I thought I could handle an open marriage, but I didn’t think I would have to hear about his tricks. It was like he deliberately wanted to hurt me,” I said.

  Rubin dropped the bib of his denim overalls and smeared my Coppertone all over his chest, “Oh Miha, I knew he was a Puerto Rican whore the first time I laid eyes on him. Just say the word and I’ll help you mama. I got magic potions that can douche him out.”

  Suddenly from out of nowhere, two L.A.P.D. officers were standing over us. One cop barked at me, “Lady put your clothes on, you are under arrest”.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” his cop buddy added.

  “What?” I asked. I was in a daze.

  I knew there were no laws on the books outlawing nude sunbathing.

  “What have I done officer?” I asked.

  “You are being charged with lewd and lascivious conduct.”

  As soon as I slipped my dress on, he slipped a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. Off I went into a paddy wagon, joining five lesbians I knew from the beach community. Minutes before my arrest, they had been swept up for topless sunbathing on Chi-Chi Beach, the official Gay Beach a half a mile down from the P.O.P. beach. The ride to the jailhouse was a hoot, with all us girls swapping stories about our arrest. At the arraignment, the judge recognized the absurdity of the trumped-up charges of prostitution. The arresting officers’ report was an imaginative script that read like dialogue from a porno flick. The courtroom scene reminded me of old-time movies with bordello raids—but with a twist. With the exception of me, the rest of the bad girls were lesbian separatists. They would never even get near a cock.

  “Do you actually expect me to believe that all these women were on the beach soliciting sex?” the judge asked. “There will be consequences if any other trumped-up reports come to my court in the future.”

  With the officers publicly reprimanded, we were vindicated and released.

  I was arrested again only a week later, on my way home from seeing the Joe Cocker concert movie at the Culver City drive-in. I was with my roommate, Dorsey, and we had Viva with us. Still flying high from the music, at first I didn’t see the all-too-familiar revolving red lights of a patrol car in my rearview mirror. The cop pulled me over for a broken taillight and after running a check, out came the handcuffs. It turned out I had several unpaid parking tickets along with a warrant for a moving violation for which I had failed to appear. Dorsey took Viva home, and I went to Cybil Brand, the woman’s county jail in downtown Los Angeles. As I lay in a cell beneath the bunk of a woman who was in for attempted murder, I felt dread. I cried for the first time in ages; another chink in my tough-girl armor came undone.

  Eric, along with other unwanted roommates, was still living in my home, pretending that we were happy newlyweds. Even though I felt uneasy in his presence, I had yet to find the courage to throw him out. With him working nights, and me dancing a few day shifts a week, we passed each other like ships in the night. When Eric wasn’t out turning tricks after his work shifts, he’d come home and climb into my bed. He even brought home a new lover he was convinced was his other soulmate, and talked me into sleeping with the both of them. That’s how unconscious I was, that I allowed this to happen.

  I was back on stage dancing extra shifts to pay back the bail money Dorsey had loaned me. Papa’s Speak Easy, the dive where I worked, was in Wilmington near the L.A. harbor. It was a grand watering hole, with Day-Glo murals all along the walls, depicting women in degrading positions. I danced my heart out with a continuous porno loop on a screen behind me, wearing nothing but my high-heel pumps and large hoop earrings, while at the bar, the hungry, horny dogs stared up at my pussy as they lapped up their burgers and fries. When my act ended, I put on a sexy pajama top and hit the floor to make nice with the customers and take their drink orders.

  My day job at Papa’s was so seedy that on most days I required medication to get through my seven-hour shift. On the days I worked, Viva was taken care of by an older neighbor, Ida, who ran a small daycare down the block. A week before my arrest, I almost got fired for taking acid at work. I was peaking and spinning on the dance floor when I caught a glimpse of the action on the porno loop behind me. On the screen, two girls and a guy were going at it with a vibrating dildo. I was so tweaked from the speed-laced acid that the stark close-up of the vibrator going into the woman’s vagina brought to mind a horror scene of a dentist drilling very bad gums. It was so graphic that I started to laugh hard and couldn’t stop. Twenty minutes later, caught in an acid loop, I was still cackling at the top of my lungs back stage. The boss gave me a warning and sent me home because my laughter was turning off the customers.

  A few days later I was dancing to an empty club. At high noon, a scrawny redneck trucker entered the bar. So it was just me smiling down at the jerk, while he sat there scarfing down his gentleman’s lunch and staring up at my crotch. Once I was off stage, the guy started to proposition me. “You sure are one classy lady and you can dance too. I’d like to take you out dancing sometime, what-a-ya say?”

  I gave him the standard reply, “I’m so sorry, but we’re not allo
wed to date the customers.”

  Even though he looked harmless enough, I sensed trouble. He smelled like an ashtray doused in cheap cologne, but I did my job and served his beers and listened to his rap about how much he wanted me and how much he was willing to pay. With each beer, I turned down his offer.

  “You know, little girl, I could really show you a good time, I’ve got plenty of cash,” and he pulled out a wad of bills and waved them in my face. “And there’s a lot more where this came from back in my truck.”

  Without any mother’s helpers to pick me up, the day dragged on and on, and every time I had to bring him another beer, he kept upping his offer. It had been a slow shift with few tippers, and with what he was offering I could easily pay Dorsey all the bail money I owed him. By 7 p.m., when my shift was over, the trucker was still at the bar, and he was wasted. I knew Viva was safe with Ida the sitter, and I figured it would take me no more than a few minutes to earn that extra cash I needed. I’d be home by eight. Allowing my need for cash to override my original intuition, I decided to accept his offer. While still thinking my keen self-preservation instincts were intact, I insisted we drive to his truck, where he stashed his wad in my car since he was too drunk to drive.

  Less than ten minutes away from Papa’s, he directed me to drive down a long desolate dirt road into a parking lot that looked like a graveyard for trucks. There were no signs of life, just rows of large hauling trucks. When I came to a full stop, the trucker grabbed my arm and started twisting it behind my back and with his free hand; he turned off the engine and took my keys.

  “Shut up, bitch and do what I tell you,” he said.

  Dazed and terrified, I wondered how a meek, drunk Dr. Jekyll could turn before my eyes into Mr. Hyde, a raging psycho. “You whores are all the same. I saw you give the high sign to that fag back at the bar.” He twisted my arm even harder. “You’re going to regret telling your pimp to follow me.”