Only weeks later, I got a call from Divine, asking if he could come down and spend a weekend at my place in Venice with his boyfriend David Baker Jr., leading man in Vice Palace. David flaunted his rippling six-pack on stage and his ass that was modeled from Michelangelo’s David.
“Are you kidding? I squealed into the phone, “I can’t wait.” I wouldn’t have been more honored if it had been the queen of England calling. This was Divine, queen of all queens, and she wanted to come to my humble home.
My roommate Dorsey—the straightest gay man I ever lived with—had an expensive king-sized waterbed and other possessions he was protective of, and told me he was a bit squeamish about the renowned dogshit-eating performer coming to stay with us. My first impulse was to say, “Girl, get over yourself,” but to keep the peace, I assured Dorsey that I’d give Divine and David my room, and keep her largesse off his furniture, and then it was a go.
Divine arrived on a Friday night with an entourage: David Baker Jr., along with David’s friend Lorenzo Clover, a serious classical actor who I was not expecting, and Lorenzo’s dog, Little Brother, a scraggy mutt. I moved Viva and myself into our living room and put Divi, David and the two surprise guests in my small bedroom.
My bed was a tall loft built by my short-lived gay husband. Eric had recently moved out, but while he was still trying to make our marriage work I got him to build us a loft, but then kicked him out before he completed the ladder. To get into this loft you had to step up onto the windowsill and then jump from there. Each night the boys would have to hoist Divine up into bed, but no one minded because it was a communal love fest from the moment they hit town.
On the first night of their arrival, my hunch about Divine being family from another planet was confirmed. Within moments of walking through the door, Divi pulled out a thank-you joint and offered it to me and my roommates. Doran, my pot-dealing roommate, lit the joint and took a long deep inhale.
“Now be careful girls, this is no ordinary joint,” Divine said. “This shit’s been dipped in amyl nitrate.” Doran’s eyes rolled back in his head as he handed the joint off to me.
“I inhaled plenty of amyl fumes on the disco dance floor.” I told Divine.
“I’m just sayin’, hon; it’s very different when smoked than snorted.”
Throwing all caution to the wind, I took a hit. With a taste of rocket fuel on my tongue I was catapulted into the outer limits. Luckily the trip only lasted seconds because it was so intense that, had it gone on any longer, I may have never returned to earth. After that one little taste, my human DNA was seriously rearranged and the deal was sealed. Divine and I were bonded through all eternity.
Divine also fell in love with her cosmic grandchild, Viva, when she saw my two-year-old modeling a new bunny fur coat I had bought her.
“Give me that fur coat, Girl!” Divine said.
“No way, lady, it will never fit you,” Viva said.
Pot dealer Doran and drag-phobic Dorsey also fell for Divine’s charm, and she adored them as well, along with the beach and my authentic Italian lasagna. All three guests and the dog had come for the weekend and ended up staying for over a month.
In the ’70s, Venice was the Riviera for the Welfare Elite, and it offered the homosexual community a gay alternative to the cold foggy summers of San Francisco. Divine and David decided they needed a home in a warmer climate and began to search for a place of their own, while the party raged on at my place. I would cook pasta meals to feed an army, and Divine would bake individual pies for every single guest. Divine was the mother I always wished I had, all fun and games, and she kept her drama on the stage. She had the wit of Noël Coward, and was even funnier off stage than on.
Every day of that Indian summer, Divine in her velour Mumu and me in my hand-crocheted bikini would tote Viva down to the beach. He would keep the boys in stitches with dish about the Cockettes.
“Oh please, girl, that Sylvester, if it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t even have a career,” he would say. “She can’t sing. I have to stand behind the curtain for every show and when she needs to hit a high note, I’d have to stick her in the ass with my hat pin.”
Divine would challenge other homosexuals to have chicken fights in the crashing waves and like kids romping in a public pool, he would lift me up on his large shoulders and we played against our opponents. There were never any strong-enough fags to knock us over. I was having the childhood I never had, an endless summer, all fun, all day at the beach, and party all night at the house.
On cold or cloudy days when Viva was at pre-school, I’d accompany Divine on visits to friends from Baltimore who now lived in Venice. One of his friends was the major Angel Dust dealer for the entire beachfront, ironically named Marty Sober. In the middle of the day after one or two puffs of this PCP, I’d find myself dancing like a rubber chicken with Divine in the dealer’s dark basement apartment off of Ocean Avenue.
On one of these dust trips I recall having a three-way with David Baker and another friend named Rodney, while Divi sat on the floor next to us eating potato chips and watching us and television. My memories of that night were of Divine’s laughter and the soft silky texture of David’s skin. During these sexual experimentations, I was like a kid exploring the playground and felt no guilt or shame, and Divine never seemed jealous of my love for her David. Like a good mother, she loved us both unconditionally.
During that month, when Viva’s dad took her for a weekend, David loaded his VW van with our Divine family and we headed south for a quick trip to Tijuana with a stopover in Laguna Beach. David’s ex-boyfriend, Bart, now lived in Laguna with a new lover. The two men had corporate jobs and owned a lush hillside red-tiled, Spanish-style home overlooking the ocean. Bart had left a key for David under the mat in case he arrived before Bart got home from work. Bart was only expecting David, and David never told us that we hadn’t been invited. Mid afternoon, just as we pulled into town, it started to rain, so instead of hitting the beach as planned, we went to the market and stocked up on groceries to make dinner for ourselves and our hosts.
Like social terrorists in a John Waters movie, we settled into our new temporary digs. Divine and I took ownership of the ultra-modern showroom kitchen. He began by taking down every one of their gleaming cooper pots that were hanging from hooks on the ceiling. We commenced to make culinary magic and a grand mess in the house that looked barely lived in. We felt completely at home, drinking cocktails as we cooked. We baked our signature dishes, lasagna and southern fried chicken. As mama Divi and I ruled the kitchen, the boys were playing all their great showtune albums on their fabulous sound system at top volume. It was grey and rainy outside, but inside the sun was shining. With flour flying and grease splattering all over the granite counter tops, Divine kept repeating, “Girl, these are some clean queens,” and we laughed.
A little after five in the afternoon when the clean queens got home, they found that aliens had taken over their home. David introduced us. With strained horror the two men, buttoned up in corporate suits and ties, excused themselves to their bedroom to argue. When they came out, they announced they had previous plans for dinner. Divine graciously offered to save them some dessert. “Do you like pie? I baked a few.”
Bart’s lover Barry looked Divine up and down, “Don’t bother, we are on diets.” He stormed out with Bart fast on his heels. Neither one of them said that we had to leave, so we were left to enjoy their home for the rest of the evening.
After stuffing ourselves and having more cocktails and joints we all relaxed in the lovely living room. Lorenzo made a fire and he and his dog, Little Brother, cozied up in front of the fireplace while Divine and David sat at the large picture window on the couch. I sat in an antique rocker for hours crocheting a hat. As we watched the crashing waves on the stormy Laguna night, we sang show tunes until we got tired, and then we moved to the den to crash. Divine, David and I took the large guest waterbed. Before Bart and Barry left the house, they told Lorenzo to keep his
dog tied up outside for the night, so Lorenzo put Little Brother on a long leash on the deck and slept out on the couch in the living room.
We were sound asleep when the homeowners came back, but were abruptly awakened at 6 a.m. when Barry got up and went out on the deck to get his soggy newspaper and saw the results of Little Brother’s freakout overnight, tied up in the rain. The dog knocked over a few of the potted plants that lined the long stairway along the cliff to the beach. Barry’s repressed emotions exploded in a rage against poor Little Brother and he kicked the dog down the steps. We woke up to cursing and Little Brother howling. Divine turned to me in bed and said, “Hon, I think it’s time to leave.” With that we grabbed our wounded dog and left the scene. Since it continued to rain, we changed our travel plans and headed north. Once back in Venice, the sun came out again and we resumed our endless summer on the beach well into the winter.
Toward the end of summer Divine and David found their own home—and a grand home it was, a palace off of Main Street behind the Bobi Leonard Interior Design shop. This shop was the only upscale establishment on Main Street at that time. The apartment’s owner was an animal hoarder and kept over twenty dogs living there and let them shit all over the place. Before the owner agreed to rent Divine and David the apartment, they had to promise to keep her dogs. Somehow Divine convinced the loony landlady that she would take care of her dogs, and that’s how they got the place. As soon as the ink was dry on the lease, one by one, the dogs started to disappear. It took Divine and David weeks to clean and sterilize the two-story place and paint it all white from floor to ceiling. When it was all done, it was truly a Vice Palace where the party never ended.
During that year, Goldie Glitters, another Cockette also living in Venice, started to make plans for her comeback in San Francisco. Goldie found Gary Bates, an L.A. choreographer and dance teacher at UCLA. He signed up for the challenge of directing a drag version of Cinderella, with Goldie in the lead, supported by the Cockettes. During the show meetings, always held on the beach, Divine suggested to Goldie and the director that they put me in the show because I was funny. If it had not been for Divine, I would not have become the clumsy Pumpkin that put me on the map to wonderland.
23. STAR NAME
Since no one in my family ever grew much taller than five feet, I had good cause to change my family name. Grosso, the Italian word for big, to me could have only one meaning, FAT. I had even tried on the name of my heartbreak husband, Eric Smutz, until I learned that Smutz, in German, meant dirty. So big and dirty Dee had been recreated as Dolores De Luxe, and this stripper name followed me through my film debut in Woman to Woman and to my first appearance on the San Francisco stage at the Palace. That October in 1973, Viva was three and a half, and we temporarily moved to San Francisco for a month of rehearsals previous to the Halloween weekend performances of Cinderella at the Palace.
Unknown to me, before I arrived in San Francisco, my stage name had been appearing on a sign outside a small bodega on the corner of 22nd and Dolores streets, not far from Mission Dolores and lush, palm-dotted Dolores Park in the sunny Mission District. The DOLORES DE LUXE Market was shining in large, neon, deco letters, and I took it as a welcome sign.
We crashed with David Pitch, formerly a beach neighbor, who now had a great apartment on Castro near 18th Street and was going by his new name, David Venice. David, a fellow Capricorn, had good Midwestern looks, a constant supply of drugs and an endless stream of young boys passing through the living room where Viva and I slept on his couch and matching love seat. We were barely there except to sleep. Most days were spent at rehearsals in a storefront on Valencia Street where Scrumbly lived with his piano and half a dozen roommates.
Scrumbly, the musical director for Cinderella, also played the coachman who pulled me from the pumpkin patch when I made my début that season. Besides Goldie Glitters and Scrumbly, I was getting to know Sweet Pam, Scrumbly’s ex-wife, who was playing Cinderella’s stepmother along with Pristine Condition and John Flowers, the ugly stepsisters, and Cockette Reggie and Joe Morocco, who were the dancing mice duo.
Being a single mom of a three year old didn’t always fit comfortably with this scene, but at Scrumbly’s, Viva and I were always welcomed, and we benefited from Scrumbly’s paternal qualities. Scrumbly had experience with children, since he had a son with Sweet Pam that they called Cactus, and this made him sympathetic to my circumstances. He went out of his way to pay special attention to Viva, who didn’t have it easy getting her needs met when she had to compete with so many adult children for attention. I recall that Scrumbly gave Viva a really cute cloth doll, and Viva named her Ms. Motherfucker. I guess that was one way of getting attention.
With the excitement building up to the Halloween show, San Francisco’s brisk fall air was intoxicating on those days I spent in long rehearsals or shopping at Cliff’s Hardware Store right down the block from Harvey Milk’s Castro Camera shop. Cliff’s was more like a one-stop Five and Dime store where, along with tools, nuts and bolts, you could purchase the makings for fantasy costumes and accessories. In the fall, the windows were decorated with alluring items: bolts of fabric, boas and glitter, enough to make anyone gay. My new theatre friends also brought me to the Purple Heart Thrift Store in the Mission where you could find vintage drag in mint condition: furs, velvet and satin ’30s and ’40s dresses, and shoes for a steal.
Toward opening night, Divine came up from Venice to hang with us for the last week of show rehearsals and was constantly at my side. I’d often accompany him on daily visits to Hunga Dunga, a large commune on 18th Street, where Bobby Star, another Cockette, lived with a dozen other friends and fans of the Cockettes. Hunga Dunga had the best pot for sale in the city, and Divine used her celebrity to get plenty. She was welcomed everywhere, and since Viva and I went along with her, we met many members of the extended community.
On the day of tech rehearsal, Divine came to the theatre looking for me. The tech rehearsal had been going very slowly and in my boredom I ducked out for a break and ran into Mr. Chew, the Palace Theatre owner. For some reason I let Mr. Chew lure me upstairs into his office with a $10 bill. Next to the mimeograph machine that printed the first advertisements for the early Cockette shows stored in his office, I gave him a quick hand job. It was the only pay I received for my performance at that theatre. When I confessed my delinquency to Mama Divine, she let out a loud cackle.
“Girl, you’re not the first to give that old chink a freebee. How do you think the rent gets paid on this theatre?
When the show closed after the Halloween weekend, I returned to my life in Venice. After that month in San Francisco, life on the beach no longer held the allure it once did. My attraction to show business pulled my compass north. Venice seemed dull by comparison to my San Francisco experience. Although Viva’s Dad had offered no support, he was still spending most weekends with us, and when I told him I was considering a move, he voiced no objection. In some way I think he felt that by my moving away, he’d be off the hook. So just after my twenty-eighth birthday, and when Viva was almost four, we made a permanent move to San Francisco.
My new friends lived in communes between the Haight and the Castro, and each commune had a name and a distinct personality. Rancho Del Ruby, the Hula Palace, Hunga Dunga, Mukluk Manor, Kaliflower, and the Angels of Light were but a few. As usual I had made no plans, and when I arrived in the city, I found out that there was no room at the inn for me and my child. Each household was filled to capacity, so I found myself dependent on the kindness of strangers.
A friend of a friend of a friend was kind enough to give my daughter and me his bedroom, complete with a large waterbed, while I searched for a place of my own in the Haight Ashbury. Being temporarily homeless with a child in the cold, “wet city” was unsettling, but despite the heavy fog tamping my optimism, I knew I had made the right move. After all, my name was still flashing in neon on the sunny corner of 22nd and Dolores.
24. SHOW HOME
It couldn’t have happened any faster or better if my Fairy Godmother had shown up and waved her magic wand. In less than two weeks, I found a four-bedroom railroad flat close to the top of the hill at Frederick on Clayton Street in the Haight Ashbury district. It was two blocks from Haight Street and four from Golden Gate Park. My flat was the middle apartment in a three-story Victorian, with the Robinsons, my landlords, below, and a few black jazz musicians who silently came and went above.
Mr. and Mrs. Robinson and their two daughters were a working-class African American family who had a great tolerance for the crazy kids who multiplied like cockroaches over their heads. Easygoing Mr. Robinson spent his days drinking Ripple wine and hanging on the stoop, while Mrs. Robinson, a respectable church lady, ran the show in style, coming and going in her fancy red Pontiac convertible with her name and astrological sign, Dorothy Sagittarius, painted in gold lettering on the side door. Her youngest daughter, Lisa, was the same age as Viva, and Dorothy Sag and her teenage daughter, Vanessa, served as convenient babysitters.
When I put out an invitation to my Venice neighbor, Jimmy Evans, to join me up north, he gave up his apartment on Pacific Avenue next to the original Gold’s Gym. Jimmy, a slight, short blonde with long hair, had grown weary of being called “Little Man” or “Lady” by his larger-than-life neighbors from Gold’s (the gorillas in the sand, as we called them) who came and went from the gym to the beach.
It was during this same year that the homosexuals of Venice were experiencing an escalation in police brutality. The LAPD was doing their part to sweep the beach clean of undesirables to make way for the city planner’s new gentrified Venice of today. My friend, Rob Weiss, had been beaten by the cops as he walked home alone, minding his own business after leaving the Pink Elephant, a gay bar on Main Street. The Pink Elephant and The Rooster Fish, the other gay bar in Venice had reported similar events. This harassment prompted a mass migration of gays to San Francisco.
My Life, a Four Letter Word Page 10
